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Chris P_Intel
3

For the past couple months, I have been working to understand Intel IT's innovation model ... specifically, how do we create business value with IT investment.  I have come across many approaches, opinions, projects, programs and more.

 

One of the key answers and best practices that I have found sits within a small team of Intel IT employees that is led by Martin Curley, Director of IT and co-founder of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI).

 

The IVI and Martin's role and goal in developing the IVI was written up in an article online at InnovationManagement.se, titled "intel Initiative Aims for More IT Enabled Innovation"

 

This article does a nice job summarizing one of the core IT governance tools we use internally inside Intel IT to drive innovation for the purpose of creating business value.  Originally formed through a strong link between NUI Maynooth and Intel, the consortium’s more than 30 members are among the world’s leading companies such as Chevron, Google, SAP, BP, Ernst & Young, and BCG.  While Intel IT has been using this model (the IT Capability Maturity Framework) ourselves for a few years we are not alone.  I'm told that over 200 companies utilize the resources and framework developed by the IVI in helping create more value through IT investment.

 

Learn more about the Innovation Value Institute

 

What tools does your IT organization use to create business value?

 

Chris

3 Comments Permalink Tags: intel_it, it, it@intel, chris, peters, value, business, innovation, it-cmf, institute, martin, curley, strategic, planning, capability, maturity, framework, ivi
David Buchholz
0

As I sit back and think of some of the newer technologies we have looked at recently, I find myself wondering if IT is in the never ending cycle of re-inventing the wheel. What I mean by this is sometimes it seems as if we continue to try and re-engineer everything to make it fit our environment or how we think it should work. When viewing newer technologies, usage models and trying to pass data off to other groups the phrases I think I hear the most are, “That will never work in our environment,” or “If we can get them to change this, this and this, we may be able to use it here” or my favorite, “This will never be secure enough for us to use it as it exists”. While these may be valid assessments against the way we do things today, the big question is: should we be pushing ourselves to look for new ways of doing things? Five years ago, employees preferred to use their machines and software loads supplied by IT because they were more powerful or feature rich than anything they had at home. But in today’s society, people have higher end machines at home than IT supplies them. They also use newer technologies that are usually off limits or not supported by IT. Think of some of the tools we use today, such as this blog or even instant messaging. These technologies exist in our corporate environment because we saw people using them at home and brought them into our corporate environment. It wasn’t something that IT created and people took home to use. So with so many of these newer technologies out there, should we keep pushing to make them adapt to our IT world, or should we start pushing IT to start adapting to new models. We take umbrella approaches to everything today. Total security of the platform, instead of trying to reduce the footprint we have to manage. We look for solutions that will cover the majority of the users, versus what may be right for smaller enclaves. We place several management clients on the platform to perform numerous tasks instead of using native components or reducing some of the redundant requirements we have. Moving forward, the next generation of workers will expect businesses to offer familiar technology and won’t accept tradition as an excuse. IT shops need to provide workers with “cool” ways to work. If they don’t, they risk becoming obsolete.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: it, value, innovation, generation, usage, model, alternate_compute_models
David Buchholz
0

For the past year I have been working with several client technologies that revolve around the area of Client Virtualization. As I looked into these technologies and benchmarked them, I began to realize several key things.

 

  • These technologies are finally mature enough to start using mainstream. True they may not all fit your current IT model, security rules or management framework, but that is another discussion. The pure fact is with hardware virtualization now enabled in chipsets, we can expect virtualized environments that perform faster than yesterday's systems and almost as fast as the host OS. Moving forward, technologies will be released that will support side by side OS or multiple instance virtual machines. Imagine a world where IT can manage something as simple as a virtual environment and get out of the platform support and enterprise OS business. There are tools there today that allow this to happen and we have done some work in this area and released a white paper recently with our results, it is called Client Computing with a VUE and can be found at (IT@Intel Client Computing with VUE (Virtual User Environment)). The key is to make sure you start planning around these technologies now, versus scrambling to support them later.

 

 

  • Some of these technologies are flexible enough, they can be used to enable our users in ways we never could before - Imagine going home at night and not having to carry a laptop. Simply carrying a USB stick that has your IT build on it and being able to plug it into your home system to check email, review documents etc. Imagine users having a choice in the platforms they use. No longer is getting a system in IT like picking the first Model T, do you want black or black? We could enable our users today to be able to simply go to any computer access a website, log in and authenticate, and a few moments later, they can have corporate apps streamed to the system they are on and access their data from cloud storage.

 

 

  • IT can sometimes be more than a cost center - After reviewing some of these technologies, I realized we as IT could use some of these to provide more than standard services to the corporate environments we support. Imagine a corporate environment with thousands of desktops that users use day to day but don't fully utilize. Using some of these technologies, we can take processor and memory slices off these machines and add them to a grid computing environment. Allowing our corporation several thousand more process cycles without having to expand their server or data center space.

 

Again, not all of these can drop right into your environment today. Some things may need to change on the technology or your IT side. But the key is this area is changing fast. Let's stop thinking about how we have always done it and instead ask how we should do this tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts!

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: client, virtualization, streaming, operating_sytems, application, saas, innovation

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