IT's Getting Better

Microsoft Optimization is the company’s latest big idea, enabling enterprises to rate their IT infrastructure and move towards “Dynamic IT” nirvana. But will it improve anything other than Microsoft’s profits?

At July’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft underlined its commitment to Software + Services and launched another big idea: Microsoft Optimization (MO).

Microsoft says MO is: “A structured, systematic process for assessing an organisation’s IT infrastructure and platform across capabilities in order to provide an optimisation roadmap toward a Dynamic IT. The roadmap helps companies to define and implement optimisation initiatives that will enable proactive IT management and deliver cost and risk reductions across the
IT organisation.”

MO divides your IT capability/maturity into one of four increasingly valuable competency levels: Basic, Standardised, Rationalised and Dynamic.

At the Basic level your infrastructure is a cost and much administration is often just firefighting. Management tends to be fragmented and there’s little knowledge retention or re-use. Your IT is just a cost centre.

At Standardised level, you are beginning to benefit from automation, including automated identity management and access control. The automation helps you to retain knowledge about your infrastructure and use it more effectively. IT is still a cost centre, just a more efficient one.

At Rationalised level, your infrastructure is using virtualisation and has self-provisioning security and configuration policies. IT is becoming a business enabler.

At the nirvana “Dynamic” level, life is good, the weather perfect and IT is a strategic asset. MO helps you to assess your IT infrastructure to see where you sit within these four competency levels. Not too surprisingly, most companies are at the lower levels and very few are Dynamic.

For most organisations, MO means that you end up with more work to do, at least at first. At the same time, the journey towards Dynamic IT is useful, even if you never get all the way there. Each step should provide you with some tangible benefits. Behind MO are modern Microsoft products and some proven methodology. For example, MO emphasises the value of automation and the journey from Basic to Dynamic level relies on it.


Figure 1: Paving the way to “Dynamic” heaven

Microsoft provides several case studies that aim to show the value of MO. One partner, TUV Nord, reduced database administration costs by 56 per cent and TCO by 37 per cent. (See http://tinyurl.com/5wbrb8 for details.)

MO divides your infrastructure into three layers, or what the MO model calls capabilities (Figure 1): Core Infrastructure, Business Productivity and Application Infrastructure.

Core Infrastructure
The Core Infrastructure capability covers your IT backbone and provides the environment for the other two layers. Within MO, Core Infrastructure includes:

• Identity and Access Management How you manage identity and use identity to manage access to IT resources. It also covers things such as identity provision, password management and synchronisation of identity across the enterprise.
• Desktop, Device and Server Management Using automation to manage system configuration and deployment along with patch management helps greatly to move the organisation towards the Dynamic level.
• Security and Networking Ensuring your network is protected against unauthorised access or denial of service as well as malware.
• Data Protection and Recovery All hardware breaks eventually, usually at the worst time. You need to protect against data loss but also have the ability to recover from it.

Microsoft and third parties provide a wealth of tools that can help you to optimise your core infrastructure. At the same time, you need to ensure your internal processes are in sync.

Business Productivity
This includes the tools to manage and control content and to communicate across all areas of the enterprise. Business Productivity includes:

• Unified Communications Enables you to streamline communications both inside and outside your organisation. Unified Communications systems can significantly simplify internal and external communications, leading to reductions in costs.
• Collaboration Making it easier for your organisation to collaborate, both internally and externally, can provide significant benefits.
• Enterprise Content Management Every organisation has content that could usefully be shared, but all too often isn’t, creating information silos.
• Enterprise Search Content management makes it easier to organise your information; Enterprise Search enables your users to find it.
• Business Intelligence Using BI to mine your operational data helps you to use that data to make better decisions.

The Business Productivity Infrastructure layer relies heavily on the Core Infrastructure layer to be fully effective. But you can tackle the layers independently.

Application Platform
This final layer looks at how you can build applications to improve the capabilities you can offer to your users. These include:

• User Experience Your developers need to ensure applications you develop are as easy to use as possible.
• Business Intelligence Your applications need to be able to access your data to provide you with the information to improve your decision making.
• SOA and Business Process By providing easy access to heterogeneous systems, you are able to manage data between you and your customers, suppliers and partners.
• Data Management As you develop new applications and deploy application packages, you need to ensure you can manage the base information simply and reliably.
• Development As you develop applications, you need to treat development as another aspect of your business that can benefit from automation and great processes. Development Integration following the best principles of ITIL will help to ensure your internally developed applications support your movement from Basic to Dynamic level.

The three capability layers and what they contain are somewhat artificial, but a great start. There is some duplication (eg Business Intelligence) and just now there’s not a lot of prescriptive guidance or help. However, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of that in the coming months as the package matures. To some degree, MO today is a bunch of tools in search of a problem. But for any IT infrastructure, using great processes, leveraging modern tools and automation plus providing a productive and open work environment for your employees will yield benefits.

Assess Yourself
Microsoft provides a series of assessments on its web site (http://tinyurl.com/6935fk) that show how well (or not) your organisation is doing with respect to MO and how you rate against other organisations within your industry. The assessments also provide some specific suggestions as to how you can improve your MO.

But It’s Marketing…
MO’s prescriptive and descriptive guidance is a mixture of broad IT wisdom (eg patch management is a good thing) and Microsoft-centric solutions (using SUS/SCCM to perform patch management, plus certifying your people with Microsoft certificates).

Most organisations will have a mixture of Microsoft and non-Microsoft components. But the MO framework, though it can still be applied, is not really designed to help with non-Microsoft platforms. The advice and guidance is pretty Microsoft-centric and tends to focus on the areas where Microsoft has products that it is marketing. MO is also good for Microsoft (and its partners). Hopefully this will improve as Microsoft matures the MO package.