IT Management in the New Economy

New IT Training Option in a "Snack" Size!

Training and maintaining up-to-date Subject-Matter Expertise is an ongoing battle in IT Organizations across the world.  How do you keep your IT staff knowledgeable without taking up too much of their time with training and losing their productivity or input on your overall IT goals and strategies?

 

I received this today and wanted to share with you for distribution among your fellow IT Managers, Supervisors, Directors, Analysts, and Architects.  While Microsoft continues to offer full-length hour-long webcasts on all of its technologies, including the TechNet online labs and other productivity training materials, the information on this site is “snack” sized – designed to deliver maximum knowledge in a very short amount of time.

 

The service is currently in beta and allows Microsoft MVPs and other customers to upload and share content and best practices.  Microsoft also uploads content to this site and we believe it will be a huge success within the IT community by combining easily-consumed bits of knowledge in short “snacks” that won’t take up a lot of time with a social networking type of format specifically for IT professionals.  You can easily discern which content is Microsoft-created and which is Community-created.

 

http://beta.snackbox.microsoft.com/Pages/snackhomepage.aspx

 

Please take a few moments to look at the site and share it with your colleagues and direct reports that would benefit from this information.

Looking Inward at People and Process

According to a Gartner Study (Gartner Security Conference presentation "Operation Zero Downtime," D. Scott, May 2002), which Gartner will assure you is still valid today, People and Process make up 80% of Operational Problems, with Technology representing a mere 20%.  Within Microsoft Premier Services (http://www.microsoft.com/premier), we’ve added many services from which enterprises of all sizes can gain value.  The Consulting for IT Operations practice within Microsoft Premier Services, for example, focuses primarily on helping businesses revise their operational processes in order to become more efficient at delivering value to their organizations.

Some of the services provided include:

• Service Management Assessments
• Service Level Management
• Operations Risk and Health Assessments
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
• and several Process and Technology-related services like Desired Configuration Monitoring and Microsoft-specific Risk and Health Assessments.

Many of these services help organizations look beyond the technology problems that seem to plague them and ask them to look deeper inside at the processes and people behind the IT organization in order to help them eliminate inefficiencies, get advanced training where necessary, and streamline IT operations to allow IT Managers to focus on delivering value rather than merely “keeping the lights on”.

If you’d like to know more about the Proactive and other Premier Services offerings available to you or your company, please reach out to your account representative or visit http://www.microsoft.com/services or http://www.microsoft.com/premier for more information.

Cutting Costs Without Sacrificing Services

It has been an interesting month since I last posted an entry.  Microsoft and many of its customers have been slashing costs wherever possible, including jobs, budgets, projects, etc.  I’m very thankful to still be in a position to write to you today from within Microsoft, though disappointed to have seen several colleagues at Microsoft and other companies move on to find their next career role.

Cutting costs is a common and necessary action that many organizations are taking to weather the economic storm.  This is true at home as well as at the office, but it doesn’t always mean we have to sacrifice our quality of life at home or the quality of services that are delivered at the office.  Largely thanks to tax season, I recently went through all of our monthly bills at home to find out what each service (capability) cost my family.  I was able to cut some of our expenditures by up to 35% by changing service plans or by investing in some energy saving devices that will help us control utility costs.  In the case of our Internet service, I canceled the Business Internet plan through my local provider and chose a residential plan instead that provides higher bandwidth (increased capability) at a lower monthly cost.  This slightly increased our risk of outage now that we don’t have the business-class 24x7 uptime support, but was an acceptable risk we can mitigate in exchange for the annual savings.

At the office, we have similar choices when looking to cut costs.  Below are a couple of examples.

• Application Rationalization is one area where most organizations can optimize spending, lower support costs, and increase worker productivity.  Depending on your industry and company size, you likely have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of applications in your IT environment.  How many of those unique applications or unique application versions overlap in the capabilities they provide to your end users?  How many could be removed from your environment entirely in order to lower overall operational and support costs?  Microsoft and its Certified Partners have many tools, best practices, and services available to help lower your total application footprint and reap the benefits.  Check out this paper from Microsoft or search Microsoft.com for “Application Rationalization” or “Platform Rationalization” for more information.
• Power Management is a low-risk, high-reward method to lowering operational costs.  Both Windows Vista and Windows XP have great power-saving features built in, but few organizations take advantage of these capabilities.  Windows Server 2008 introduced great new power savings in the data center as well. Turning these features on is straightforward through Group Policy Management and the savings starts to add up immediately.
• Look here for Power Savings features in Windows Server 2008.
• Look here here for Power Savings features in Windows Vista.

There are many more ways to cut costs that don’t involve cutting services that I’m happy to share in future posts. Feel free to leave comments or reach out to your Microsoft account team or Microsoft Technical Account Manager for more information.

Virtualization Saves Microsoft Customers Nearly a Half-Million Dollars Per Year

Virtualization Saves Microsoft Customers Nearly a Half-Million Dollars Per Year

Businesses gain value via server consolidation, integrated management tools and application management.

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 9, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that some business customers around the world have saved on average $470,000 (U.S.) per year through IT projects using Microsoft virtualization software. Microsoft’s business customers have been able to use virtualization to help reduce operations and capital expenses via reduced electrical power consumption and cooling within datacenters, reduced hardware acquisition costs, automation of desktop and server management, and centralized application deployment.

The cost of running IT systems has increased as electrical power, cooling and physical space has become constrained. In his 2008 refereed journal article, “Worldwide electricity used in data centers,” Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University concluded that total datacenter power was about 1.5 percent of all U.S. electricity use in 2005, with 80 percent of that amount going toward powering and cooling servers. 

A separate report, by Gartner Inc., stated that “the effective use of virtualization can reduce server energy consumption by up to 82 percent and floor space by 85 percent” (Gartner: “Energy Savings via Virtualization: Green IT on a Budget”; Nov. 12, 2008).

“Businesses are looking to reduce and manage computing costs in datacenters and across server and client computing devices,” said David Greschler, director of integrated virtualization at Microsoft. “Virtualization software allows businesses to pool computing resources to drive down IT costs, increase IT efficiency and be more responsive to business needs. Customers are getting a better bang for their buck with the Microsoft platform and virtualization solutions because virtualization is in both the operating system and in the holistic management tools. Customers can manage IT services and a broad set of applications across the datacenter and desktops. There is less of a learning curve for customers, and it eases interoperability with existing systems.”

Savings Through Available Built-In Virtualization and Management Automation

Microsoft’s approach to virtualization, which incorporates server and presentation virtualization into Windows Server 2008 and unlimited virtual machine management with Microsoft System Center suite license, is helping break down barriers to broad virtualization adoption.

“The VMware ESX solution would have cost $30,000 (U.S.) for four servers. With Microsoft, we have a service provider agreement that allows for monthly payments with no capital costs — costing us less than $1,000 over the life of the contract,” said David Straede, president and chief operating officer for Santa Barbara Web Hosting. “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has the core features businesses need. It’s the Windows people know, is installed just like other Windows-based applications, and works in a management console that IT staff are already using. The ESX feature set simply doesn’t justify its additional expense.”

If making it easy for customers to implement virtualization is important, making it easy to manage the environment is just as critical for saving time and money. With Microsoft System Center, customers have a single solution for managing the entire IT life cycle, from deployment and provisioning to monitoring and backup. Equally important, customers can manage both server and desktop resources, both virtual and physical assets, and both Microsoft and VMware hypervisors, all with the same platform.

These capabilities helped Banverket ICT choose Microsoft for its virtualization strategy. “We knew we wanted to build a compatible virtualization platform that would encompass server consolidation, Terminal Services and application virtualization that we could manage with a single set of tools,” said Pontus Blomkvist, service design manager, Banverket ICT. “With Microsoft Application Virtualization for Terminal Services, we have been able to reduce the number of terminal servers because we can run many applications on any server at any time, without worrying about conflicts. With Hyper-V, we are now running 50 virtual machines in production, with a utilization rate of 80 percent for some of the servers as opposed to 15 percent before we deployed Hyper-V.”

Savings Through Consolidation, Reductions in Power

By running multiple virtual machines on fewer physical servers, Microsoft customers are drastically cutting hardware requirements and easing server management. For example, Indiana University’s Auxiliary IT Department went from 152 to just 32 servers, which it expects will save $85,000 (U.S.) annually. Saxo Bank had an average physical server utilization of just 20 percent and was deploying nearly 200 new servers per year before using server virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V allowed the bank to reduce the number of servers needed by 36 percent and realize savings equivalent to $1 million (U.S.), because of lower server hardware costs and associated reductions in space, power and cooling costs.

Many customers have realized similarly dramatic electrical savings as a result of server consolidation, which is a particularly important benefit in today’s climate of volatile power prices. TALX expects to save approximately 50 percent in annual power and cooling costs by consolidating its server environment with Hyper-V. HotSchedules, which noted that its No. 1 cost in the datacenter is power, spent about $11,000 (U.S.) a month on datacenter power costs, but with Hyper-V it anticipates that this monthly figure will go down to $2,500. Santa Barbara Web Hosting uses Hyper-V to reduce its power consumption costs by $5,220 (U.S.) per month, helping the company provide more cost-effective services to its customers. And Slough Borough Council took advantage of the savings from eliminating 10 physical servers to preserve the electrical power needed to turn on a new storage area network.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see us virtualize 60 servers once our physical-to-virtual analysis is complete, which represents nearly half our server holdings,” said Chris Wintermute, technical infrastructure manager for Slough Borough Council. “We’ve achieved hardware savings of $148,000 (U.S.), and we expect to reduce server deployment costs by $23,700 (U.S.) annually, based on rolling out 20 servers a year.”

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.mspx.

Full Virtualization Article - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-09VirtualizationSavingsPR.mspx

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization  - http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/47304891-46fa-4763-95f4-65329870b7b7?vp_evt=eref&vp_video=Cost+Savings+with+Microsoft+Virtualization

How Customers Save Money - http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/tco-roi.mspx

Virtualization Case Studies - http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/case-studies.mspx

Core Infrastructure Information - http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/resources/spotlightoncost.mspx

CIO Scorecard Fosters Strategic Performance Management Culture

Microsoft IT (MS IT) falls under strict corporate scrutiny to demonstrate its business value and return on investment. The CIO Scorecard at Microsoft helps to strategically align the organization with corporate and fiscal objectives, manage organizational performance, and demonstrate the value of IT across the enterprise. The CIO Scorecard has matured to a level that enables, sustains, and drives business strategy execution.

 

Click here to view the Business Case Study.

To learn more about how Microsoft does IT, please visit www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase.

Justifying Your IT Infrastructure Project

In today's economy, many IT projects are being cut or drastically reduced in scope as businesses look for ways to cut costs.  Because most companies view IT as a "necessary evil" or as another cost of doing business, IT departments often fall victim to deeper cuts than their revenue-generating counterparts.  To avoid these types of cuts, IT managers must be able to articulate the business value of infrastructure upgrades and other IT projects that are truly in the best interests of their company.

Let's look at a Windows Server upgrade project as an example.  Aside from normal hardware refresh cycles and end-of-life or end-of-support upgrades that present obvious uptime or security maintenance risks, it's important for IT managers to understand the technical benefits associated with an infrastructure upgrade and to then translate those technical benefits into business benefits.  The easiest way to do this is by constantly reminding yourself of the business initiatives or strategies that are most important to your CEO or primary business stakeholders.  These commonly include "Cut Operational Costs" and "Increase Revenue" among others that vary by industry such as "Increase Customer Care" or "Improve Production Time".

Whether you think "left-to-right" or "top-to-bottom", I find that a simple table is often helpful in mapping the technical benefits associated with an infrastructure project to the business strategies that are most important to your CXOs or key stakeholders.  Start with the business initiative on one side and map capabilities and benefits to the Strategic IT initiatives and to the technical capabilities or products you plan to deploy.  Below is one example with Business Initiatives (typically set by the CEO or Board of Directors), Business Value (terms that resonate with business leaders), and IT Strategic Initiatives (typically set by the CIO).

This is only an example and may not be applicable to your particular business, however, the principles remain the same.  A good place for most IT managers to start is with the capabilities of a given technology.  By asking ourselves, "Why do we need to do this?" and "What benefits will this bring to our organization?", we can more easily map the answers back to our CEO's business needs and make budgeting discussions more fruitful.  This can also be a fantastic motivator for the IT professionals on your teams when they see the real impact they have on the way your company does business.

Providing Business Value as an IT Manager

With the growing complexity of IT systems, it's no wonder that IT professionals can easily become "wrapped around the axle" when trying to solve problems or deploy new technologies. Technical team members can get so deeply focused on solving a problem or operating a technical environment, that they can easily lose sight of the business reasons the technical challenge appeared in the first place. IT Managers have to work harder than ever to keep teams focused on the ultimate business objectives and the capabilities that need to be delivered to their business customers.

It is not the technology being used, but the capabilities delivered to end users and business customers that make the most difference in how each business views their IT department.  With challenging economic conditions expected to continue for some time, it is more important than ever for good IT managers to focus on value creation and business-enablement in order to be viewed as valued partners rather than overhead cost centers.

In working side-by-side with many IT Managers and CIOs over the years, I have seen many different approaches to this problem that I'll discuss in later posts.  The most successful IT Managers and CIOs are keenly tuned into WHO their primary customers or customer-sponsors are, WHAT those customers are responsible for delivering to their end-customers, and HOW the services delivered by IT impact their ability to perform their work on a daily basis. These successful managers and CIOs focus on improving the efficiency of the general workforce through technology, take a genuine interest in making the lives of their business users easier, and place priority on the capabilities needed to give their companies a competitive advantage in their fields.

I'll focus more deeply on some of these methods and their practical application in future posts.