Cost Control and Metrics Improve Productivity
IT is at a crossroads: Metrics can show IT's importance to the business

IT organizations run the risk of being marginalized if they are not seen as contributing to survival today's troubled times. Relevant IT metrics can help IT organizations deliver traditional IT services in a more cost effective and credible manner.
 
Complexities in IT environments continue to rise as new technologies and as new IT delivery models gain adoption along with interest in leveraging new data sources (e.g., unstructured, semi-structured). Business unit managers add pressure to IT organizations as they demand outcomes that range from reducing order processing time to expanding the customer base and showing revenue growth that is commensurate with the company's investments in IT.
 
IT performance metrics are critical instruments as IT organizations work to improve established service levels.  IT metrics need to align closely with business goals to achieve top performance. At present, most IT organizations would hurt themselves by focusing on measuring IT operational efficiency-specific metrics. Instead, IT organizations are better served by measuring and reporting on the value derived from IT infrastructure resources to meet the organization's business objectives.
 
IT organizations can adopt software technologies to improve performance of their IT infrastructure and operations organization.  The foundation for making fact-based decisions and raising the IT organization's credibility with the business includes:

• IT Resource Optimization
• IT Service-level Management
• IT Charge-back and Financial optimization

Resource optimization will allow analysis of IT infrastructure resource needs--both physical and virtual--in terms of how much of it is over provisioned or under provisioned, provide accurate forecast of future IT resource requirements and deliver insights that allow IT staff to move-in lockstep with the business side to meet their planning needs. Today's powerful what-if scenarios and modeling capabilities will give light into the impact expected on infrastructure components from business growth so that the IT organization can plan accordingly in terms of capacity, service-level commitments and licensing.
 
As more physical servers are deployed and shared between applications and business units and as the IT organization tries to improve the use of their infrastructure resources using server vitalization technologies, they will also need to come up with a rational way to allocate costs and charge-back to business units using the resources.      
 
Finally, IT infrastructure growth should reflect business cycles and business growth scenarios.  Then, IT and business units can better understand and complement each other.
 
IT performance metrics are critical and can help ensure that IT becomes a critical path in building a performance driven organization.  When IT organizations provide this level of visibility into the use, availability and performance of IT resources and tie it to business objectives, they demonstrate their value to the business units and other stakeholders.

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In This Issue

Cost Control and Metrics Improve Productivity

IT Infrastructure Leads to Cost Control

Record Management

Security Audit Program

IT Infrastructure Drives Cost Control

In today's business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.

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Record Management Retention and Disposition Policy

Template comes in MS WORD format and is easily modified to meet the needs of enterprises of all sizes.  It comes with a dozen forms which can be used immediately to create a record retention and disposition schedule.

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Security Audit Program

The audit program is one that either an external auditor, internal auditor can use to validate the compliance of the Information Technology and the enterprise to the ISO 27000 Series (ISO27001 and ISO27002), Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

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