We believe that your IT infrastructure should serve four key business units; Technical, Operational, Financial and Executive.
Each of these units should evaluate your IT infrastructure on four key outcomes; Optimization, Consistency, Predictability and Agility.
This diagram shows the inter-relation between the four business units and the four key IT infrastructure outcomes.
The four business units represent a grouping of departmental and individual associations.The Technical Unit represents IT teams, managers and directors. The Operational Unit holds the consumers of the IT infrastructure. The Financial Unit represents the fiscal responsibility of the IT infrastructure. The Executive Unit represents the totality of the business units. In other words, when the technical, operational and financial units achieve the expected outcomes, the executive has therefore achieved the business outcomes for the organization.
Your IT infrastructure should strive to reach the four business outcomes to best serve the needs and objectives of each of the listed business units. Each outcome should be measured against each business unit to determine if the IT infrastructure is suitable for the organization. Balancing these goals is a continuous objective that helps the organization leverage a competitive IT infrastructure that is foundational to the business.
An optimal IT infrastructure for the technical business unit, means that it is designed around your technical requirements not just for today but also for the forseable future. Making sure that it is manageable, easily scalable and delivers the necessary services on a technical basis is crucial. From an operational standpoint, your IT infrastructure is optimal if the consumers of this infrastructure, your users, can claim that the infrastructure meets their needs. Financially, the solution is optimal if it fits with the organizations budgets, economics and fiscal goals. An optimal infrastructure for these business units means the organization can leverage an optimal solution to achieve the executive organizational goals.
From a technical standpoint, today’s technology and tomorrows will certainly be more capable than todays. Unfortunately, this comes with the fact that it is becoming even more complex. This complexity cannot be reduced but instead can be curbed by dosing the solution with a high degree of consistency. Through this consistency objective, your IT infrastructure can reduce the amount of exception handling it has to cope with and focus instead on delivering a consistent level of operation. An achievable example of this is the democratization of your application systems.
By delivering a consistent high level of reliability mechanisms, performance features and redundancy layers; all your application systems operate and behave consistently which reduces the overall exception handling which has been the foundation of IT for so long. From an operational standpoint, delivering consistent usage to your users is paramount. Increased productivity and less frustration, allows your operational teams to start leveraging IT as a solid business tool. From a financial point of view, a consistent IT budget is a long sought objective.
Delivering your IT infrastructure with a consistent cost is imperative. Once your IT infrastructure becomes consistent, the organization can focus on executive organizational goals more effectively.
Who would not want a predictable IT infrastructure? Your IT staff does, your users also, you finance teams are tired of the financial disruption that comes from unpredictable IT investments and certainly the executive management also. A technically predictable IT infrastructure means your IT staff can relax a bit more knowing they are not in the dark on how their systems will operate at any given moment. Predictable sclability, reliability, redundancy and performance are just a few of the benefits of a predictable infrastructure.
Your users can rest easy knowing they can access their business applications with a level of predictability. When new applications need to be purchased to advance the organizations goals, the lifecycle of implementation, deployment, operation and use of those applications becomes predictable. No executive team can set achievable growth objectives without having a predictable IT infrastructure.
Agile
By targeting the above business outcomes for each of the business units, an organization
