* A process that IT organizations should follow in order to focus on a handful of key applications
The last newsletter highlighted the fact that the dialogue at Network World’s recent IT Roadmap conference in Denver emphasized how the challenging economic environment puts pressure on IT organizations to focus even more than they do in normal economic times. With that in mind, this newsletter will begin to outline a process that IT organizations should follow in order to focus on a handful of key applications.
As is well known, the typical enterprise WAN supports hundreds, if not thousands of applications. The bad news is that from both a planning and an ongoing management perspective, it is not possible for IT organizations to focus on this many applications. The good news is that they don’t have to. The reality is that even if a company has hundreds of applications, there typically are at most a dozen or so applications that are absolutely critical to running the business. This usually includes applications such as SAP, Oracle and SharePoint, as well as one or more homegrown applications.
IT organizations need to identify the handful of applications that are critical to supporting their company’s key business processes. This task is typically relatively easy to accomplish. A more difficult task is to establish a service-level agreement (SLA) for each of these applications. As recently as a year ago, it was very unusual for us to come across IT organizations that offered SLAs to their internal users. Now, while it is not exactly common to come across IT organizations that offer internal SLAs, it is less unusual than it was even a year ago. We believe that all IT organizations offer internal SLAs and that the only question is, “Are those SLAs explicit on implicit and which is better for the IT organization?”
We further believe that IT organizations will be more successful if the SLAs are explicit and if they are crafted along lines that the IT organization feels comfortable it can meet. With that in mind, we recommend IT organizations get started crafting those SLAs but that they do not discuss this activity outside of the IT organization until they have implemented the infrastructure changes, management tools and processes they need in order to be able to successfully meet the metrics contained in the SLAs.
The next newsletter will continue to discuss a process that IT organizations should follow in order to effectively focus on the handful of applications that a company uses to run its business. In the meantime, more information on the functions that IT organizations should focus on in 2009 can be found here.
Also, the next IT Roadmap conference will be held in Chicago on April the 2nd. If you are in the area, try to attend as we will continue the discussion of how IT organizations can best cope with the current economic challenges.
