DO NOT embark on a large IT project unless you can clearly commit to creating stakeholder-recognized business value.
In most large enterprises, the total number of hardware devices, software instances, network connections and associated traffic continues to explode.
While efforts such as SOA, virtualization, product consolidation and other simplification initiatives are common, the fact is that most IT infrastructures still struggle to support multiple platforms and products that, at some technical level, still require proprietary management and support. In fact, SOA initiatives can easily disrupt a carefully managed infrastructure unless SOA governance is an integral part of your infrastructure management processes and tooling.
As enterprises move towards the integrated IT Service Management goal, there are no easy answers to the need for integration. IT process automation, based on orchestrating tools to improve infrastructure management, becomes a survival imperative to control IT costs and ensure availability.
“You folks are great. I never need to worry about missed deadlines or deliverables. I wish all our services providers were like you…”
Senior PMO manager for a global financial services firm
A company's infrastructure management approach must be driven by the business strategy. It must manage and measure the infrastructure from the business customer's viewpoint; improving the quality of service while reducing costs. This includes:
- Increasing total quality of service in ways that the business will acknowledge, preferably with measurable SLAs linked to granular business services and not just infrastructure components
- Practical inclusion of virtualization, automated provisioning and cloud computing technologies
- Improving operational stability while supporting deployment agility for responsiveness to rapidly changing business needs by implementation of SOA infrastructures with SOA governance integrated into the infrastructure processes
- Ensuring the developers;' viewpoint is not ignored
- Managing incidents, root cause and change risk more efficiently
- Providing built-in support for IT Compliance initiatives
No vendor can deliver infrastructure management nirvana out of a box. Each company's specific legacy technology deployments become critical constraints on the critical path to better Infrastructure management.
HHG Technical Leadership for Project Success
HHG consultants have deep and extensive experience delivering improvements to IT infrastructure management as well as in depth experience with enterprise SOA and cloud infrastructure. Oftentimes working with your process, operations, ITIL champion or consultant as well as your vendors' tools specialists, HHG can provide the practical technical leadership to ensure that your project succeeds, by:
- closing critical gaps where tools, configurations or processes interface by analyzing, designing and guiding implementation to prioritize and track gap closures to completion
- delivering tactical enhancements across people, process and tools that match the priorities established by the enterprise IT infrastructure strategy
- migrating your infrastructure to cost-effective but bullet-proof SOA, virtualization and cloud computing suitable for your business and financial goals
- providing to-be process and technical designs in advance of deployment for vetting
- evaluating and selecting the best vendors for the project and for your company
- building an end-state program management to identify critical paths and projects, elaborate on requirements, create designs, and justify expenditures.
- Executing and leading critical projects – tactical and strategic projects focused on the most critical IT service improvements.
- successfully executing strategic projects that do not fail due to dependencies, scarce resources and competing priorities
- delivering demonstrated business value – every 90 days from project start
- delivering recognized value and updating strategy
- providing iterative deployments against a well crafted end-state architecture
- implementing complex cross tool integrations at a deep technical level
- controlling multi-lane program management
People, Processes and Tools are the key business success factors for improving IT management
Critical Business Success Factors
While addressing the complexities of technical detail, our consultants never lose sight of the critical business success factors:
- Finding the appropriate balance of people, process and tools for your business
- Specifying business value required by the business strategy, end-state vision and technical and process architectures
- Iterating design and implementations to provide the best chance for success and eliminating fragile "one-off" tactical fixes
- Preventing "religious warfare" from impeding business agility while carefully prototyping and migrating to more agile technologies including, virtualization, SOA, cloud computing and elastic application operations
- Developing detailed use-cases that apply leverage to the iterative process
- Focusing on real business value for your organization by providing prioritized and quantified business cases with top-down executive support
- Updating strategy, technical architecture and multi-year roadmap
- Incorporating the requirements for successful virtualization and emerging hybrid cloud technologies
- Using program management to increase value across multiple connected projects
- The need to ultimately create successful infrastructure integrations at a deep technical level
