Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail company. You have many accomplishments that the business leadership team (and Board of Directors) has recognized: a streamlined supply-chain management system...

It’s 2005 Imagine you’re Sara, the CIO of your retail company with 10,000 employees. You have 500 employees within IT reporting to you. Your manager, Fred, the CFO, calls you into your office and asks: “Sara, how many applications does IT support?” My...

A fundamental part of the work we do on our team is to measure things: the costs of deploying desktops, the business value of an application lifecycle management solution, the costs of managing a virtualized server environment, etc. In doing this, we...

As the cloud environment moves from its conceptual state to a real living breathing reality, it brings with it a deep dependency to an area of IT that I predict will become central to how effectively the capability of the cloud is utilized. This same...

Greetings everyone, and happy-almost-spring. Lately I’ve been focusing on understanding the costs (in all its forms) of delivering and managing Tier 1 applications. For the sake of discussion, let’s define a “Tier 1” app in terms of reliability or “quality...

For years, IT industry consultancies as well as hardware and software vendors have talked about people, process, and technology as the three corners of the success triangle within an IT shop. And yet the various maturity models that exist haven’t yet...

In the world of IT as in most industries, the term “Best Practice” is often used to describe a set of activities that a business would consider as representing the most effective set of activities for achieving a particular goal. But what about all those...

I recently completed a study of over 500 US-based customers in which I wanted to understand: what types of applications are being delivered and managed generally, how much does it cost to deliver and manage those applications how are web services...

I’m currently conducting a study that looks at understanding how enterprise businesses build, deploy, and manage their line-of-business applications. As part of the study, I interchange the notion of an “Application” with a “Service”. The two are not...

In a recent study of enterprise customers, I found that most reported an increase in the adoption of web services in the coming year. While that may not be a big surprise, what I found surprising was the lack of a commensurate focus on management practices...

In my last post I referred to a study my team was conducting around SOA and web services management patterns. The high-level purpose of the study was to gain insight around: whether service-orientation practices were being used for building web...

I’m in the process of studying what web services (now just called ‘services’) management costs IT organizations. Specifically, I’m looking at what the various cost factors are considering both an environment with a service-orientation mindset (SOA, ESB...

There seems to be a steady stream of books published on the role of Information Technology within the business it supports. The role of IT is constantly evolving and has changed significantly from the days when the IT organization was often referred to...

Further to my on-going threads re virtualization – make sure that you have checked out the latest update on Virtualization and its benefits that has just been released in the new Microsoft Virtualization site. The link is http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization...

Hello to everyone, and our thanks for stopping by our blog. My name is Elliott Morris, and I have the privilege of managing the War on Cost team and working with Brett, Bruce and Erik. Before I start adding posts to our blog, let me tell you a little...

Greetings everyone. I'm Erik Svenson , a biz value strategist in the System Center team at Microsoft and I focus on application platform management costs. I posted a couple weeks ago about the different types of apps out there (web, RIA, rich client,...

Hi my name is Brett Williams – I’m the focus owner for datacenter and virtualization on the War on Cost team and like my colleagues will be a regular contributor to this Itbizval blog. Currently I’m on a search for Automation, Consolidation, and Integration...

For years, organizations have been chasing the holy grail of “ROI on IT investments”. The typical approach has been focused on the TCO ("Total Cost of Ownership") methodology, wherein one measures the current annualized cost of the IT environment, the...

In general, there are six different types (archetypes) of line of business (LOB) applications prevalent in modern corporations today: Rich Client Applications – Applications of this type are usually developed as stand-alone applications with a graphical...

Successful adoption of Service Oriented Architecture has been a topic of discussion pretty much since the beginning of its introduction to enterprise businesses five or six years ago. As companies have worked to adopt this approach to building more reliable...

Happy New Year and Welcome to the IT Business Value Blog. Like others within program management at Microsoft, our team of strategic program managers (PM), including Elliott Morris, Bruce Gary, Brett Williams, and I, work within the Windows Server &...