james kahn’s scratchpad

No matter the size of the organisation, location, or the platform that you run your information systems on, eventually all companies reach the point where the current IT infrastructure doesn’t match what the rest of the business requires. At the most basic level this can be a lack of disk space on the main shared drive, or a poorly performing Exchange Server. If an organisation is growing quickly, 24/7 IT operations with fast, anywhere-access to email and applications might be required. Regardless of what the current problem is, the fact remains that IT needs to constantly change, upgrade and enhance the operating infrastructure as business needs becoming more demanding.

In my experience, most companies IT departments don’t spend enough time planning what they should do with their infrastructure and spend too much time babysitting what they’ve got when it clearly doesn’t suit. Regardless of whether IT is on the periphery of your business or is strategic to your company’s survival, IT infrastructure planning is critical. While the helpdesk driven IT department was par for the course in the 90’s, the reality in today’s knowledge-centric economy is that IT needs to stay ahead to make sure that the business isn’t hamstrung by a lack of availability or functionality.

So how should you plan your infrastructure? Start at Step 1…

1. Be A Visionary

The first step in infrastructure planning is to be a visionary by investigating new technology and determining how (and if!) it applies to your business. Being a visionary is about finding out about new technology, getting excited about it, and then getting everybody else excited about it. Being a visionary isn’t a full time position - it usually takes just a few hours each week.

Most importantly, for a visionary to be effective, you need to have direct communication and trust with the decision makers in your organisation. If you don’t - then get on board with someone who is.

2. Have A Goal

So now you’re aware of what technology is out there, and what suits your organisation. With this information in your mind and notebook, you need to build a goal that your company’s IT department can work towards. This needn’t be overly complex, flowery or utopian - simple goals are best. You’ve probably heard of the principle of low hanging fruit. The same idea applies to forming IT goals - determine what will provide the largest benefit to the business, that will most likely be the easiest to implement.

The following are some good examples of goals. They are simple to understand, and specify concrete measures:

• To be able to withstand a full data centre outage while maintaining IT service availability.
• To be able to build or rebuild a Standard Operating Environment PC within 30 minutes.
• To be aware of any IT service line problem within five minutes of the problem occurring.
• To reduce hardware dependence and costs by virtualising all Windows Servers.

Some bad examples of goals include:

• To increase synergies by aligning efforts with business practise. (Excuse me?)
• To upgrade all the servers. (To what? And what is the benefit?)
• To enhance business flexibility by providing streamlined deployment services. (Sounds like a sales pitch, not a goal.)

What you need to remember about having goals in infrastructure planning is that they must apply to your business and that you must be willing to re-evaluate them if circumstances change. They’re goals, not the ten commandments.

Once again, the goals must have buy in from the decision makers for your ideas to be successful.

3. Build A Road Map

After you’ve defined your goals, you need to build a road map to achieve them.

A road map is a series of high level stepping stones to get you from where you are now, and end up where you want to be. You don’t need to get down to the nitty gritty - keep it simple, and keep it high level. The simpler the road map is, the easier it will be to communicate the road map to other people who may not be technically minded. Don’t confuse simple with easy - just because the tasks are easy to grasp, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be easy to do.

If your IT goal is “to be able to build or rebuild a Standard Operating Environment PC within 30 minutes”, you might include the following steps in your roadmap:

1. Evaluate and compare different Desktop management systems.
2. Discover applications and hardware already present in the organisation.
3. Compile list of standard applications.
4. Implement Desktop management system.
5. Build SOE and package all applications for deployment.
6. Pilot Standard Operating Environment.
7. Roll-out new Standard Operating Environment to all users through Desktop management system.

Depending on what your goal is, you may have completely different steps in your road map. You could have a different set of steps than I’ve got in my example for rolling out a Standard Operating Environment - that’s OK too. It’s important than your roadmap fits your situation, and your environment.

A word of caution - before you go ahead and complete your road map, you probably want to check that the vendor’s technology you’re implementing actually does what you’re investing in it for. You might want to include a proof of concept stage at the beginning of your road map, or receive a product demo from the vendor.

4. Execute The Road Map

Okay, this should be obvious. Once you’ve formed your goals and built your high level road map, what now? In the much-cliched words of Nike, just do it.

Depending on the size of your organisation and the size of the change, this could start off by buying product, forming a project or submitting a business case to the board. Whatever it is, it’s getting into action that counts. The hardest part of launching any technological change in an organisation is getting started. Once you’ve kicked off, everything else falls into place. Form your project team, build your project plan, and go for it!

5. Stop, Re-Evaluate, and Go Back to Step 2.

So now you’ve bullet-proofed your data centres, are able to deploy a new PC with the touch of a button and halved your support costs, what next? Go back and build a new set of goals! By the time you’ve finished upgrading one part of the business’ infrastructure, you’ll no doubt need to improve some other part. Information Technology in business is like The Never Ending Story - just when you think you’ve finished, requirements will change and you’ll need to augment your business’s IT infrastructure in yet another way.

That’s the fun of IT!