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Bridging the Business Drivers to IT
Infrastructure Optimization
How can your IT Organization drive greater business value? How can you help your IT organization become a business growth enabler instead of a business cost center? Why is your IT organization under constant pressure to lower costs? Asking the right questions and getting the right answers is imperative to aligning Business Initiatives with IT Priorities. With Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization, we ask the right questions and you get the right answers to enable the business value realization from your IT investments. According to Gartners 2010 CIO Survey: A Time of Great IT Transition, IT organizations must add value with a minimal amount of additional funding. To stay ahead of the increasing business demands, a methodical approach to aligning business imperatives with a minimal amount of IT investments must be taken. Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization (IO) offers CIOs a robust and systematic process for assessing their IT infrastructure capabilities and delivering a well-defined, easy to implement IT roadmap. This transformative and iterative process shifts IT from simply a cost center to an innovative business growth supporter and enabler.
Optimizing IT for the Enterprise
Optimization is a structured, systematic process of assessing infrastructure maturity across IT capabilities, then prioritizing projects to progress towards a Dynamic state. The process begins with a starting point, where your IT infrastructure and platform is today, and ends with a destination, where you want it to be. Optimization focuses on aligning the utilization of an organizations IT people, process, and technology to advance the business towards its desired destination. As a result, IT becomes a more strategic partner to the business. During the past six years, Microsoft has developed and refined the IO models that outline a progression through four stages of optimizing an organizations IT infrastructure.
Basic Uncoordinated, manual infrastructure Standardized Managed IT infrastructure with limited automation Rationalized Managed and consolidated IT infrastructure with maximum automation Dynamic Fully automated management, business-linked SLAs, dynamic resource usage
Just the Facts
Lower IT Labor Costs Per Server/Yr
Increased Servers Managed by FTEs
Microsoft has segmented IO into two key models: Business Productivity Infrastructure (BPIO) and Core Infrastructure (Core IO).* These integrated models illustrate the strategic value and business benefits of moving from a basic stage of optimization, where the infrastructure and platform is generally considered a cost center, toward a dynamic infrastructure, where the business value of the infrastructure is clearly understood and utilized. Within each of the IO models, there are key capabilities and workloads that enable IT organizations to map business drivers and priorities to technology solutions that are integrated across platform capabilities.
Basic Standardized Rationalized Dynamic
Collaboration Unified Communication Enterprise Content Management Enterprise Search Reporting & Analysis Content Creation Datacenter Services Client Services Identity & Security Services IT Process and Compliance
Average results of the 2010 Microsoft Spotlight on Cost Study.
Per PC Costs Drop
Core IO
BPIO
Forrester Research, Inc., The Total Economic Impact of Windows 7, January 2010
*Microsoft has also developed an Application Platform that helps customers get better value from their application portfolio.
Companies that manage their IT investments most successfully generate returns that are as much as 40% higher than those of their competitors.
Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldnt Make, Harvard Business Review
Customers Find Success
HSBC Mexico increased its time to market by 97% with Optimization.
Read the case study.
Bridging the Business Drivers with IT
By focusing on the business drivers through optimization, IT organizations can bridge the gap between business and IT. Based on the IO model and enterprise customer engagements over the last six years, Microsoft has developed proven process that enables an IT organization to develop an actionable roadmap that prioritizes and drives implementation of solutions that support the business drivers and strategies. There key six steps in the process. They range from information gathering, IT and business assessments and analysis, developing a roadmap, and architecting the solutions for delivery. 1. Understand Business Drivers, Needs, and Challenges The initial step to getting started is to understand where you are at. In terms of bridging the gap, understanding the current business drivers and challenges will improve the quality of the remaining steps and probability of overall success. 2. Define the Desired Business Capabilities to Deliver By focusing on the business capabilities that need to be delivered, IT is able to drive a roadmap and architecture toward a destination the business aspires to. 3. Assess Current Capabilities Microsoft has worked with industry analysts like IDC and Gartner to fine tune compelling assessments that drill down on the current capabilities and the levels of maturity. 4. Perform a Gap Analysis of Current versus Desired Delivery Because you know where you are at (Assess Current Capabilities) and where you want to go (Desired Business Capabilities), you now have a way of identifying the gaps and determining where emphasis needs to be focused in order to make it to your destination. 5. Roadmap the Short-term and Long-term Capabilities and Delivery Developing a roadmap that provides explicit, actionable short-term and long-term solutions and projects allows the organization to not only convey the plan and get decision-makers on board, but also establishes the baseline for reporting progress. 6. Build the Architecture for Specific Solutions The architecture for a solution is the overwhelming key to success in the enterprise optimization engagements that Microsoft has been involved in. When a solution is correctly architected based on the desired business drivers, capabilities, and IT infrastructure, the outcome is knownotherwise the solution is simply a variable with very little predictability.
TV NORD Group experienced a 37% lower TCO with Optimization.
Read the case study.
Bombardier Aerospace enhances security and reduces costs by US$10/PC with OS upgrade.
Read the case study.
Florence School District saves US$924,000 in licensing costs over six years with Enterprise Solution.
Read the case study.
Virtualization solution helps BMW Group simplify application deployment and save more than US$180,000 annually.
Read the case study.
Partners Healthcare expects an 80% decrease in desktop image management efforts.
Read the case study.
What You Get
1. Insight into current IT maturity, based on a multi-level maturity model. 2. Desired level of IT maturity, mapped to specific business priorities, based on a three-phased approach. 3. In-depth gap analysis between current IT capabilities and the desired delivery, 4. Capability-level roadmap for short-term and long-term solutions. 5. TCO & ROI guidance and estimates. 6. Architectural guides and project scoping to coordinate the adoption of technologies and process to drive the short- and long-term business goals.
Where to Get It
Meet with your Microsoft or partner representative to learn more about how Infrastructure Optimization can deliver a robust and systematic process for assessing your IT infrastructure capabilities and delivering a well-defined and actionable IT roadmap. This transformative and iterative process can shift the impact of your IT organization from a cost center to an innovative business growth supporter and enabler.
