Balancing enterprise strategy, business objectives, IT enablement and costs

WHITE PAPER SAS® IT InTellIgence Balancing enterprise strategy, business objectives, IT enablement and costs Table of Contents Executive summary ....................................................................................................... 1 SAS IT Intelligence — leaping tactical pitfalls ............................................................ 2 Resource optimization.................................................................................................. 3 Measuring resource usage....................................................................................... 3 Forecasting saturation and growth ........................................................................... 4 Maximizing the value of underused infrastructure.................................................... 4 Service optimization ..................................................................................................... 5 Financial optimization................................................................................................... 7 Summary......................................................................................................................... 8 About SAS ...................................................................................................................... 9 SAS® IT Intelligence Executive summary The pace and depth of technology expansion within enterprises has never been greater. The pressures placed on IT to squeeze costs are relentless. When IT investments don’t produce expected cost reductions or meet revenue projections, frustration within the business mounts. That frustration often results in the question: “What value does IT really provide?” For the sake of the business and in accordance with some government legislation, it is time for IT departments to get their arms around their usefulness, costs and value. One reason for the business to question IT value is the difficulty IT encounters in linking business strategy and objectives to IT investments and financial performance. In many organizations, business and IT sit on opposite sides of a chasm. On one side, executives and planners create enterprise strategy with business unit objectives and then look to IT for technology enablement at a cost and level of service that achieves business objectives. On the other side, IT creates and delivers services and technologies that often miss the mark. The chasm grows when IT is unable to document results to the business, successful or not. With the stakes so high, why hasn’t the problem of alignment between business and IT been solved? A look at the challenge of data management for IT reveals the crux of the problem. IT exists in a sea of dissimilar infrastructure components and technical processes. Technical skills are grouped by infrastructure type to keep components functional. With components splintered and isolated by technical attributes, IT must employ niche tools to monitor infrastructure, collect data, apply metrics and respond to emergencies. As a result, information about the infrastructure is often “trapped” in niche tools and provides little intelligence. IT service and management processes are often ad hoc. Ad hoc responses are generally inefficient and error-prone, resulting in higher costs, messy data, reactive service processes and poor alignment within IT itself. The marketplace is replete with products and ideas for helping IT achieve alignment with the rest of the business. But none of these ideas include applying business intelligence (BI) and forecasting to IT. Like the proverbial mechanic’s car, IT is responsible for implementing and maintaining business intelligence for the rest of the enterprise but seldom applies the same technology and resources to the business of IT. Often IT has one of the largest capital budgets in the enterprise and, along with it, a large burden of responsibility for enabling enterprise strategy. When the raw data about IT infrastructure performance is embedded within technology silos, intelligence is limited to those silos. Without the ability to link infrastructure to business planning and objectives, measured business results, service levels and financial results, IT operates blindly. IT is without a foundation from which to create and exploit IT intelligence. IT intelligence provides the basis for aligning objectives with outcomes; forecasting results; and optimizing infrastructure, services and financial results. IT intelligence links technology silos, service processes and financial data for seamless performance. Most of all, IT intelligence provides hindsight to review accurately what has happened, insight to ascertain why it happened and foresight to enable IT to optimize the impact of technology on the organization. 1 SAS® IT Intelligence SAS® IT Intelligence combines SAS’ expertise in data access and analysis with a set of unmatched capabilities for enterprise business intelligence. The first order of business for IT intelligence is getting past the perennial roadblock of disparate data sources, including IT infrastructure, transactional systems, financial sources and workflow engines. Without the ability to extract, transform and load infrastructure data on an enterprise scale and apply predictive analytics, IT intelligence will be blocked. SAS tools and services help organizations get past this roadblock. Frequently, service level management, financial management and capacity planning are not closely coupled to one another or any strategic goals because the tools are not integrated or the data is trapped. Service level agreements (SLAs) are defined without the direction of strategic goals and objectives. When SLAs do exist, they have often been negotiated with the wrong people. Agreements with end users (rather than strategic decision makers) usually result in a tactical situation rather than a strategic one, which prevents IT from being as cost-efficient as possible. Agreements are then measured and met, but business requirements are often missed. SAS IT Intelligence provides solutions for optimizing resources, services and finance: • Resource optimization enables organizations to analyze and predict resource requirements ® based on future business demands and constraints. Using SAS IT Resource Management, IT performance data may be consolidated from any source across the enterprise. SAS analytics are then used to profile and optimize the distribution of business-critical applications and workloads to streamline the delivery of services. • Service optimization is driven by SAS® IT Service Level Management, a solution integrated with SAS IT Resource Management to automate the calculation and reporting of service level agreements. • Financial optimization involves using SAS® Activity-Based Management to derive the costs of IT services, service levels, and resources, and to create scenarios for what-if analysis. In short, SAS IT Intelligence helps you balance enterprise strategy, business objectives, IT resources and costs. SAS IT Intelligence — leaping tactical pitfalls Let’s examine each part of SAS IT Intelligence in detail: resource optimization, service optimization and financial optimization. Each optimization capability equates to a section of management responsibility within IT. And, while each capability could successfully be used in isolation, the true strength of SAS IT Intelligence is its ability to help IT departments align with the business, achieve the best balance between cost and service, and develop accurate forecasts for a more proactive, value-based approach to IT. 2 SAS® IT Intelligence For the enterprise as a whole to be successful, all three optimization capabilities must also build off the same representations of data and business applications. An IT data mart reconciles infrastructure data from across the enterprise and in turn provides the basis for these representations. Through the process of creating IT intelligence, business application representations will continually be used in conjunction with capacity forecasts, service level results and financial capabilities to aid the alignment of IT services, cost and business objectives. Because the allocation of resources remains a primary issue for IT, we’ll begin with resource optimization. Resource optimization As organizations become increasingly dependent on technology, there is a renewed emphasis on capacity planning and demand management. It is imperative to buy and deploy the right amount of infrastructure at the right time without wasting existing resources.