IT Business Value

Welcome to the IT Business Value Blog. Our team, known internally at Microsoft as the "War on Cost" team, explores a variety of cost and value factors that our customers care about around virtualization, datacenter management, and application por

The Service-Oriented Business: Part 2

Fast forward four years. It’s 2009. Remember that you’re Sara, the CIO of a mid-to-large retail...

Author: War on Cost Team Date: 03/28/2011

The Service-Oriented Business: Part 1

It’s 2005 Imagine you’re Sara, the CIO of your retail company with 10,000 employees. You have 500...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/16/2011

Using metrics to, you know, actually measure stuff?…that’s crazy talk!

A fundamental part of the work we do on our team is to measure things: the costs of deploying...

Author: wocteam Date: 09/27/2010

Information Management - what do the real costs look like ?

As the cloud environment moves from its conceptual state to a real living breathing reality, it...

Author: wocteam Date: 05/25/2010

“Tier 1” Apps are Special…But At What Cost?

Greetings everyone, and happy-almost-spring. Lately I’ve been focusing on understanding the costs...

Author: wocteam Date: 03/05/2010

IT Maturity Is More Than Process Improvement

For years, IT industry consultancies as well as hardware and software vendors have talked about...

Author: wocteam Date: 01/04/2010

Practices vs. Processes

In the world of IT as in most industries, the term “Best Practice” is often used to describe a set...

Author: wocteam Date: 12/11/2009

Application Criticality

I recently completed a study of over 500 US-based customers in which I wanted to understand: what...

Author: wocteam Date: 09/01/2009

Managing Services, not Apps

I’m currently conducting a study that looks at understanding how enterprise businesses build,...

Author: wocteam Date: 06/24/2009

Web Services Adoption Increases – Management Focus Does Not

In a recent study of enterprise customers, I found that most reported an increase in the adoption of...

Author: wocteam Date: 06/15/2009

soa Not SOA Is The Ticket

In my last post I referred to a study my team was conducting around SOA and web services management...

Author: wocteam Date: 05/05/2009

[Web] Services are at the tip of the app management spear…maybe

I’m in the process of studying what web services (now just called ‘services’) management costs IT...

Author: wocteam Date: 03/26/2009

The Role of Information Technology in Today’s Economy

There seems to be a steady stream of books published on the role of Information Technology within...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/27/2009

New Virtualization site released

Further to my on-going threads re virtualization – make sure that you have checked out the latest...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/25/2009

Microsoft and the War on Cost

Hello to everyone, and our thanks for stopping by our blog. My name is Elliott Morris, and I have...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/25/2009

IT Managers: What do you expect when developers aren't incented to build manageable applications?

Greetings everyone. I'm Erik Svenson, a biz value strategist in the System Center team at Microsoft...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/20/2009

Finding the Pillars of Virtualization

Hi my name is Brett Williams – I’m the focus owner for datacenter and virtualization on the War on...

Author: wocteam Date: 02/09/2009

ROI is Dead - Long Live ROI!

For years, organizations have been chasing the holy grail of “ROI on IT investments”. The typical...

Author: wocteam Date: 01/26/2009

Application Archetypes and Management

In general, there are six different types (archetypes) of line of business (LOB) applications...

Author: wocteam Date: 01/20/2009

SOA Adoption Blockers: Service Management is Key

Successful adoption of Service Oriented Architecture has been a topic of discussion pretty much...

Author: wocteam Date: 01/14/2009

Welcome to the IT Business Value Blog

Happy New Year and Welcome to the IT Business Value Blog. Like others within program management at...

Author: wocteam Date: 01/06/2009