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July 23, 2001

Leveraging Your IT Resources — The $mart Way

Save money without sacrificing your trusted IT infrastructure

By Robb Dongoski

Continued from Page 1

BUSINESS VALUE CONSEQUENCES

People undertaking these projects are usually looking for a significant payback within 12 to 18 months. This approach, which targets the highest value areas first, tries to satisfy this need for immediate results in order to ensure executive sponsorship and the success of future projects.

The three most significant areas in which executives who are experienced with ESM see immediate and long-term value are in managing IT assets (hardware and software life cycle management from procurement through disposal); improving IT customer service management (including problem and change management and optimizing the help desk); and automating user and security administration.

LOOKING FOR THE SIGNS

Table 1:
Symptoms of a larger problem.

Symptom: Unused Software Applications
Possible Underlying Issue: Previously purchased management software has failed to deliver as promised and some pieces are unused. Initial goals were never met.

Symptom: Undefined, Fragmented Processes
Possible Underlying Issue: Management disciplines have been addressed in pockets, rather than on an enterprisewide basis. Some improvement efforts exist, but are decentralized and essentially unrelated.

Symptom: Absence of Significant Process Reengineering
Possible Underlying Issue: In hopes of lowering costs and improving efficiency, large investments were made in automating cumbersome processes, but without analyzing or reengineering them.

Symptom: Not Organized for Success
Possible Underlying Issue: Users haven't been sufficiently trained and responsibilities haven't been aligned properly. Buy-in at the senior management level is lacking. No one is pushing infrastructure management or measuring its progress.

Symptom: No Provisions for Measurability
Possible Underlying Issue: Performance metrics aren't readily available or, worse, may not exist.

In order to effectively identify potential areas of improvement, you should look for organizational or process symptoms that may suggest a correction is needed. Although these problems may not always be appropriate as indicators, they are good signs of broken processes, lack of an organized strategy, or remnants of failed IT infrastructure improvement. Table 1 (right) shows some of these issues.

Generally speaking, at the start of a project, you should determine where your organization is in the life cycle of IT infrastructure management. The continuum of events, or stages, in the life cycle can be boiled down to envisioning the correct solution, analyzing the current processes, designing updated processes, implementing the enhanced solution, and measuring to ensure agreed-upon ROI.

Most companies don't need to start building a trusted IT infrastructure from scratch. Rather, they need to concentrate on reenergizing their efforts on high-value areas. The infrastructure management solution you pursue should be flexible and scalable, so you won't have to reinvent solutions within different parts of your organization later and can concentrate on building a foundation for sound business growth in the future.

These pressures, combined with the demands of the changing e-commerce environment, the influx of large numbers of PDA-type devices, and the imminent explosion of the wireless device market, create an ever-changing environment in which trusted IT infrastructures must continue to grow and address the business needs they were built to support.

The organizations that successfully create the IT infrastructure that meets their needs are seeing returns of 50 to 200 percent on their original investments. Creating the correct IT strategy is no longer a luxury and a sizable opportunity to save - it's more and more an essential part of staying ahead of the competition and delivering trust and value to your stakeholders.

ROBB DONGOSKI [robert.dongoski@ey.com] is the technology management and infrastructure leader for Ernst & Young LLP, based in the firm's Boston office. He works with CIOs and other executives of Fortune 500 and midsized companies.