The mindset matters

This organization decentralized its IT support for valid reasons - to respond quickly to acquisitions and other forms of growth, and presumably for better cost-justification and containment of IT spending as well as to align IT resources with business unit needs.

However, its decentralized approach has had costly long-term results. Lack of standards, availability problems, and security and compliance challenges have led to decreased productivity, increased risk of business interruption, and - in all likelihood - unnecessary spending.

The first challenge in cases such as this is not choosing the right technology, but finding a more effective IT management mindset. As Einstein is reported to have said, "a problem cannot be solved by the thinking that created it." Corporate IT groups can suffer as easily as siloed groups from an "incrementalist" mindset, especially when confronted with the enticements of emerging technologies.

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This organization decentralized its IT support for valid reasons - to respond quickly to acquisitions and other forms of growth, and presumably for better cost-justification and containment of IT spending as well as to align IT resources with business unit needs.

However, its decentralized approach has had costly long-term results. Lack of standards, availability problems, and security and compliance challenges have led to decreased productivity, increased risk of business interruption, and - in all likelihood - unnecessary spending.

The first challenge in cases such as this is not choosing the right technology, but finding a more effective IT management mindset. As Einstein is reported to have said, "a problem cannot be solved by the thinking that created it." Corporate IT groups can suffer as easily as siloed groups from an "incrementalist" mindset, especially when confronted with the enticements of emerging technologies.

Grouping the problems

The first step toward adopting a more effective mindset, and thus reducing cost and risk, is to examine how problems relate to one another, and what integrated set of solutions best addresses each group of issues. Based on many conversations with organizations like this fictitious manufacturer, we have found a range of IT issues that fall within six basic solution set areas.

1. IT portfolio management: The ability to tackle standardization issues of the sort described in the example requires knowing what you have. Inventory auditing and asset tracking provide that information. For any organization, but especially one with older, less reliable equipment, streamlined maintenance contract management can help minimize business interruption by assuring that equipment failures will be repaired within required timeframes. Together, these services - along with software license management - constitute overall IT portfolio management. The information they provide facilitates easier short- and long-term management, as well as better ROI measurement. This enables more strategic investments. Given the challenges facing this organization, one would have to ask: Do the IT executives really know what they have? Do they really know how individual technology assets support specific business functions?

2. Server optimization: Technology and platform fashions aside, server, storage and network concerns come down to performance, availability, interoperability, manageability and budget. Recent proliferation, concerns about aging equipment and a "mish-mash" of technologies can be red flags that the time has come to assess the IT environment. However, effective server optimization methodology requires stepping back to ask questions such as: How do we ensure that we meet our service-level agreements to our customers? Can we find a solution that is better, faster, less expensive and more secure?

3. Storage optimization: The same is true for storage and networks. In examining the need for storage optimization, deciding whether virtual storage (or a storage-area network) is the appropriate technology solution is secondary to determining if and how the current state of storage is affecting business performance, recoverability and compliance-readiness. Critical questions include: Are our backups done properly? Can we really recover? Do we treat all data the same even though some data is far more valuable than other data? Do we know what data we have and where it is?