These are tough times. The economic crisis has swept across every industry. The slowdown has led to lower revenues and the recession everyone is talking about now. Layoffs and delayed procurement have already begun. To survive the downturn, network professionals must prove their business value and work within the constraints the business can afford.
So, how can network professionals apply their knowledge and experience to help their businesses weather the storm? Implementing IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices is one of the best ways to help our businesses withstand the test of these hard times. A full-scale ITIL adoption takes a significant amount of time and manpower. Therefore, we don’t need a complete, across-the-board deployment. Network teams can selectively leverage ITIL best practices to deliver measurable value to the business, which also helps the network team break through during these difficult days.
This chapter is the first part of this series, where we will explore ways for network professionals to apply ITIL best practices to help business partners make more informed decisions about, and coordinate with, cost reduction. Throughout this series, we will discuss methods for understanding business processes, aligning business process reporting, improving financials, and building strong working relationships with business units.
Understanding Business Processes
Currently, most senior executives are analyzing the economic impact on different business areas. Most are likely considering selling off business units or outsourcing functions and services to cut expenses. Unfortunately, most capacity planning organizations do not approach this from the perspective of providing substantive value to business decision-making. Research from Forrester and Gartner shows that fewer than half of all enterprises have a formal IT capacity management plan. Moreover, most of these plans tend to focus on individual IT components, thus failing to attribute usage to a specific business process or function.
Since the early 1980s, ITIL has recognized the value of capacity management. All three versions have addressed different types of capacity management: Component, Service, and Business.
鈼咰omponent-level capacity planning manages individual infrastructure components.
鈼哠ervice-level capacity planning aggregates component usage according to predefined IT services.
鈼咮usiness-level capacity planning manages IT infrastructure resources from a business process perspective, aggregating views of services and components that support individual business units.
In the vast majority of cases, Version 1 adopters chose to implement a component-view process. ITIL Version 2 is business-aligned. However, few adopters would choose to skip the business-level view in favor of only component and service-level views. The recently released ITIL Version 3 articulates a method for aligning all IT services with business processes so that IT becomes an integrated, equal partner among other business units. Unfortunately, an organization-wide ITIL implementation requires considerable time and effort to succeed. The good news is that specific best practices can be used in isolation, so we don’t need to undertake a full-scale implementation. This way, parts of ITIL Version 3 methods can be applied quickly to improve the business.
The network holds a unique position in enterprise IT because it is the glue that binds all infrastructure components together. Unlike a freight manager at a large shipping company, a network professional sees how business data is transported within the enterprise. Typically, network professionals focus on individual components, such as routers, T1s, and VoIP packets, while rarely concerning themselves with how these IT resources impact business processes and transactions.
To improve the business, it is essential to understand the impact of changes in customer-driven and internally-driven transactions on the infrastructure. For instance, a decrease in customer transactions might only slightly affect a few communication links; however, a decrease in internal support transactions could have a much larger impact, especially if the capacity reduction occurs from one specific location or VLAN, as it would allow for the release of more network resources. Once we understand this, we can move on to the next step, which involves customizing reports and tracking costs for individual business processes. This way, we can express network utilization in business terms鈥攍ike business process network footprint鈥攖hus enabling more accurate business decisions. Once we understand the business process network footprint, these relationships can be easily translated to other domains, such as servers and printers, yielding a broader business view of IT resource consumption by business processes.
The first step in exploring business capacity management is to understand the different business processes. Only with this knowledge can we effectively link usage conditions to individual business processes. The best way to accomplish this task is to use an organizational chart or a company phone directory. Identify the leader of each business unit and schedule time with them to discuss how they use IT systems. In my personal experience, these leaders are quite proud of their contribution to the business, and they are often happy for an opportunity to showcase their teams’ achievements.
During these discussions, it is vital to identify the specific ways the business unit uses IT services. Keep the conversation focused on specific functional usage. Do not complain. Our goal is to understand how the business actually uses IT applications. Beyond daily activities, we are always looking for specific locations and cyclical business processes, as they may differ from common assumptions. For example, most retail operations