Where IT infrastructure and business strategy come together

The only constant is change. Today’s business is challenged by fiercely competitive landscape, increased customer experience demands, and economic constraints that force IT organizations to adjust their approach in order to effectively support the business. The need for businesses to adapt to today’s ever-changing market and business conditions requires agility to successfully support a dynamic business strategy.

Aviana Technologies takes a holistic view of your enterprise to determine how to drive the most effective IT strategy.  By directly aligning the business strategy with IT strategy, we help you leverage existing processes and systems that truly support the business while identifying redundancies and legacy solutions that are obsolete. Our team will work hand-in-hand with both your business and technology executives to identify and prioritize the goals of the organization.

---

Why Business & IT Strategy?

The scale of corporate IT infrastructure has increased dramatically over the past decade and a half.  At many companies, it has moved from basements with a few dozen servers to sophisticated data centers with thousands or tens of thousands of them.  Networked storage hardly existed in the early ’90s but today consumes tens of millions of dollars in large IT organizations.

There are good reasons for this expansion.  Infrastructure runs the applications that process transactions, handles the customer data that yield market insights, and supports the analytical tools that help executives and managers make and communicate the decisions shaping complex organizations. In fact, infrastructure has made possible much of the corporate growth and rising productivity of recent years.

Yet the very ubiquity of these computing, storage, and networking technologies makes some executives regard IT infrastructure as a commodity. That’s a mistake.  Yes, components such as servers and storage—even some support processes, like the monitoring of applications—have been commoditized.  Even so, an effective infrastructure operation creates value by making sound choices about which technologies to use and how to integrate them.  A technology product purchased from a vendor may be a commodity, but the ability to bring together hardware, software, and support to provide the right combination of cost, resiliency, and features for a new application isn’t.

Especially now, when every expenditure and budget item receives careful scrutiny, infrastructure leaders must engage with business executives and application developers to expose potential sources of value, agree on priorities, and measure not only the cost but also the impact of infrastructure.

Sources of value
There’s ample evidence that the creative use of infrastructure has helped leading companies to make themselves more efficient, redefine their business models, and improve the customer experience.

Real-time data collection
Insurance companies in Britain and the United States use GPS devices and sensors to record the speed of cars and even the damage to them. In manufacturing, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags now provide insights into the way goods move through supply chains and thus reduce inventory levels. In both cases, infrastructure supports and manages the sensors and other devices needed to capture information reliably and inexpensively.

Large-scale analytics
Pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers deploy low-cost computing grids that, respectively, make it possible to develop and test drugs and to develop products that would have been inconceivable even a decade ago.

Speed to market
Across industries, fast reaction times give companies advantages such as the ability to set up sales offices in rapidly growing territories quickly, to give customers strong off-site support for their initiatives, or to meet demand for services when online interactions surge.  The best infrastructure units can support all of these goals—and more.

The customer experience 
The best retailers and service providers let their customers interact with them via cell phones, call centers, and kiosks, as well as in person. To get the customer experience right, companies must be able to switch and route consumers across different types of networks flexibly. Only a well-tuned infrastructure can provide that kind of flexibility.

Employees’ productivity
Managerial, sales, technical, professional, and clerical personnel do most of their work on the corporate infrastructure, from desktop productivity tools to smartphones. Infrastructure organizations that aspire to create value must make decisions about issues such as how to balance security with ease of use, where to deploy videoconferencing equipment, and which types of personal devices make the most sense.

Developers’ productivity
Too many applications developers spend up to a third of their time as amateur systems engineers: they devote hours to consulting with server and network teams, grappling with incompatibilities, and struggling to choose technologies that bridge the gaps. That time could be better used modeling applications for business processes or writing code. One investment bank created a virtual-development environment, freeing up tens of thousands of developer hours each year.

Engaging with the business
What must you do to make business leaders understand the value of infrastructure—without seeming to be protecting your turf?  We’ve found that several approaches work well.

Be credible on the basics
Now more than ever, business leaders demand solid execution on costs and service levels before they will seriously consider moving to the next level.  They see value creation and innovation as a complement of efficiency, not a substitute for it.

Understand the pain points
Infrastructure touches every part of a business. Use that central position to figure out which groups struggle with analytics, need to open (and close) sites more quickly and cheaply, or have the greatest need to get more value from their development teams.

Be proactive
Go to business leaders with ideas that they can evaluate and refine--before they ask for them.

Retain funds for R&D
Even in tight times, the ability to offer IT infrastructure innovations regularly, before the business demands them, protects you against being seen as a purveyor of commodities.

Invest in talent 
Supplement your team’s depth in technical and operational matters by adding financial and business analysis skills. To do so, you’ll have to invest in working to develop employees who can explain the IT infrastructure’s business value and work with business partners to deliver it.

The IT infrastructure organization can be positioned not just as an efficient taker of orders but also as a partner in determining and executing a company’s business strategy.

Technology Infrastructure at Scale

We assist leading institutions in optimizing their application hosting, network, and end-user environments to operate at scale.

What we do

Infrastructure 360
CIOs and other senior executives often ask, “Infrastructure is half my IT budget.  How do I know whether I’m spending that money well? Are we meeting business needs, and are we as efficient as we can be?”

Infrastructure 360 is a proprietary methodology for developing a multidimensional view of an organization's infrastructure capabilities and for identifying specific opportunities to improve cost and quality performance.

Next-generation infrastructure platforms
Trade journals and airport billboards proclaim a cloud revolution. But aside from the hype, there is proven business value in shared, virtualized, and highly bundled infrastructure platforms.

We help clients determine in which types of platforms to invest and which workloads to migrate.  We also address the operational and organizational changes required to capture value from next-generation platforms.

Front-to-back demand optimization
Infrastructure exists only to support business needs and requests. However, the connection between true business needs and an institution’s infrastructure environment is often indirect and opaque. The result:  multiple levels of over-provisioning.

Front-to-back demand optimization brings together the full set of factors that affect infrastructure cost, including business requirements, application architecture, and systems configuration.  We often help clients see a 10 percent overall improvement in infrastructure costs.

Building the service-management organization
Business users and applications developers increasingly expect infrastructure to provide integrated services, with provisioning and incident-management processes that cut across traditional technology domains like servers, storage, mainframes, end-user devices, and networks.

We help large infrastructure functions create organizational structures that strike the right balance between supporting technical depth and providing processes and services that span multiple technologies.

Lean infrastructure operations
Immature processes and a culture of “heroics” create pervasive waste in many infrastructure organizations (e.g., frequent rework and large queues) that both drive up costs and diminish user experience.

Lean operations techniques have driven 20–30 percent productivity and cycle-time improvements in all aspects of infrastructure delivery by eliminating rework, segmenting requests by complexity, and increasing “time on task” for key resources.

Targeted sourcingInfrastructure organizations want to tap vendor scale, investments, and capabilities, yet the all-encompassing IT infrastructure “megadeal” is often ineffective.

Targeted sourcing identifies the “slices” of IT infrastructure in which vendors can provide incremental value or which can be provided from low-cost locations, and defines the capabilities required to orchestrate, govern, and optimize a multivendor environment.

Data centers designed for value
Data center facilities are one of the largest investments that an IT organization can make—often running to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. A program designed for value can require 40–50 percent less.

Designing data centers for value draws on new rules for data center strategy, including demand reduction, green design approaches, and modular designs.

Our Approach

• Clearly understand where your IT organization currently stands
• Identify goals that support the business
• Establish metrics for measuring success
• Create a repeatable process for the ongoing evolution of IT which consistently delivers value to the business

Aviana Technologies can guide your IT organization to develop an IT strategy that aligns with the business objectives, creates efficiencies from top to bottom and enables an agile approach to consistently delivering value today and into the future.