Demands for more services are increasing and high performance and reliability are expected, yet budgets, labor and floor space are all being constrained. I guess nobody said running a data center was easy.

The need for increased efficiency and reliability points to capacity management processes. And like anything else, you have to crawl before you walk, but the value of capacity management practices is there. So what’s it take to adopt more mature processes?

TeamQuest has released our Capacity Management Maturity Model that identifies different levels of IT management competency.

 

Following the lead of Gartner’s IT Management Process Maturity Model, we’ve drilled down even further to highlight the levels of Capacity Management maturity specifically.

After all, moving to mature Capacity Management tools and processes lowers costs, improves service quality and increases IT productivity since staff can focus on the most important duties rather than fight fires.

Take a look at our latest white paper entitled, Introducing a Capacity Management Maturity Model. Let us know what you think! Post your comments below.

Ten years ago it was all about data collection and working to get good performance from infrastructure components. Toward the end of the last decade the emphasis changed for the better, with IT management tools providing more of a service point of view rather than looking at things from a strictly technical infrastructure point of view.

So what’s next? Jeane-Pierre Garbani at Forrester Research recently wrote about “The Next Decade,” summarizing the progress we are making in the IT management software industry.

Business management looks at IT from a value perspective. They want to know, what business benefits am I getting for my IT dollar? Is my IT organization providing me with the ideal value-to-cost ratio? IT organizations are going to have to focus more on that value-to-cost ratio, says Garbani. I think he is right.

IT management and IT management tools vendors need to focus on optimizing that value-to-cost ratio, helping to ensure that business benefits are realized at the lowest overall cost. As Garbani says, IT management vendors need to position their tools “in the global context of the ‘IT Enterprise’ and show how they will contribute to internal IT optimization.”

What are your thoughts? Click the comments link below.

This entry is one in a series of Top 10 lessons learned by Ron Potter in his previous job as the Director of Capacity Planning at a Fortune 100 health insurance provider.

Short term memory goes first

For the most part, executives have a short attention span. You have to keep reminding them of your past accomplishments, especially when the benefits span IT and non-IT departments. For example, IT adds an application that automates a process. As a result, a business unit needs 200 fewer people. Management makes a conscious decision to add costs to IT in order to enjoy the benefits of the overall reduction. During the next budget cycle, the CIO is attacked because his costs are up while others are substantially down. What went wrong?

When we were developing IT Service Optimization (ITSO) processes, we noticed that several successful IT organizations kept a historical log of their accomplishments and the overall benefits the organization enjoyed as a result of the work. Every year the previous year’s log would be included in the budget submission. A log reminds management of the decisions made over the past year where tradeoffs between technology expense and business cost reductions were made. Doing so usually results in much more constructive budget discussions. As a result, historical logging has been, and will continue to be, an important part of ITSO.  It is included in Step 5 – Manage service performance.

For more information on ITSO, please visit our website or you can always contact us.

Until the next post…

Ron