At a recent event our CIO, Diane Bryant, talked about our continued plan to replace old servers in our Data Centers (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44213/135/). Here is a summary of her key points:

• Not replaceing servers could have costed Intel $19 million due to high maintenance and cooling cost
• Our plan of refreshing old servers with Nehalem servers will save Intel $250 million over 8 years

If you are an IT manager looking at where you can find extra dollar in your IT budget to invest in new technology, new innovation and new competitive capability for your organization, this must be good news for you! Moreover, if you do nothing, you are opening a hole in your IT budget.

Here is a recent white paper and a video we published to discuss our server refresh strategy and how we are getting the cost benefit Diane Bryant shared:

Realizing Data Center Savings with an Accelerated Server Refresh Strategy

We have also developed a Server Refresh ROI estimator so you can calculater the amount of savings you can get from these cash machines:

http://www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator

If you ain't satisfied, here is a video showing you how to use the estimator!

Go and install those cash machines into your data centers now! 8-)

I just read this paper authored by some of Intel's IT experts in the area of client management.  As an employee of Intel, I am now a huge fan of these rock stars.  Why? because they were able, through proactive IT management practices, reduce blue screens inside Intel's employee base by over 50% in the last year (Q2'08 to Q3'09).  There are now 3,000 fewer laptop blue screens than there were a year ago --> that is a huge productivity advantage for Intel workers.

Issue Tracking, Pareto Analysis and use of new management capabilities and technologies like Intel vPro Technology were at the center of these capabilities.

Read about how Refael Mizrahi, Shachaf Levi and Jeff Kilford made my life as an intel employee a whole lot easier by Improving Client Stability with Proactive Problem Management.  You Rock!

Chris

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the CIO Forum held in conjunction with the Insight 2009 Annual Conference in Orlando, FL.  While being held adjacent to Disney’s theme park, the theme of this event was appropriately titled “Vision Voice Value”.




I spent two days discussing best practices, sharing lessons learned from Intel IT and comparing notes and strategies with leading CIOs, IT Directors, Managers and Administrators in the Health Care profession.  Our focus? ways to deliver and articulate the business value of IT. I had the opportunity to:



• participate in a roundtable discussion of ~15 Health Care CIOs titled “The value of IT in improving financial performance”
  
• present to 50-60 CIOs on the business value of server refresh
  
• present to 20-30 IT Directors and Administrators on using the Xeon ROI tool as a way to justify server investment




One of the most thought provoking questions at the CIO roundtable that has stuck with me is … “How does your CEO (or your business customers) view IT?”  … as a cost center (necessary evil) or as a value center (strategic enabler).  While no one directly answered this rhetorical question, it was clear that our collective mission is to migrate IT from cost center to value center.  This migration will not be immediate.  It happens over time.




To enable this transformation from cost center to value center, we concluded that the accountability remains with IT, as IT professionals and CIOs must individually and collectively demonstrate business value through our investments and establish are relationship of IT predictability, trust and credibility with our business partners.   These are core themes I have seen very visibly inside Intel IT as I began my journey to the center of IT a few short months ago.




My second observation from this event reinforces some personal experiences I have had working with many other IT professionals in the past several months.  With the global recession and it’s impacts to capital funding, the need to justify IT investment is greater than ever – and the competition internally for capital $ is very high.  We may never go back to the way it was.  We have seen this inside Intel IT’ organization as well and as a result, created at server refresh savings estimator tool to share what we learned in justifying our investment a proactive server refresh strategy in 2007 and staying committed to that investment in 2009.




I demonstrated the server refresh savings estimator tool at the event to both the CIOs and IT Directors / Administrators and the feedback was very positive (“session was well worth my time”).   Prior to the event, I also had the opportunity to work with Deborah Gash (CIO for Saint Luke’s Health Services) and her staff.  Debe provided a glowing endorsement of the tool (Thanks Debe !!) after demonstrating the business value from a project already completed and the in intent to use it for several future projects. I invite you to learn more about why we created this tool and how to use it.  If you have a question or want to give us feedback on how to enhance it – just let me know with a comment on this blog.




My final thought comes from a blog written by Don Sears at eweek.  Don discusses about the need for IT to be right, accurate, credible and trustworthy is so important whether you are working inside IT or with IT.  Credibility and Trust is something that is hard to gain and easy to lose … so it is easy to understand why being right is key to working with IT.  Getting it wrong can have huge consequences.




Join us at IT@Intel and share your insights on our shared journey to transform IT from a cost center to a value center for business.  I look forward to hearing from you.





Thanks, Chris

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Yesterday I wrote a blog titled “Submarines, Stealth Fighters and Evolving Needs of Information Security” in the Server Room where I discuss some new server technologies aimed at better securing data from hackers, viruses and new malware called rootkits.

After writing that blog, I began to think about the variety of levels by which information security is delivered.  To truly manage risk and provide information security for a business, you need many levels of controls and defenses. In fact, I learned that Intel IT has a Defense in Depth strategy for information security

Within Intel IT, every strategic discussion I have witnessed from implementing cloud architectures, deploying server virtualization and client virtualization, evaluating Windows 7  (more coming soon on our plans here), developing business intelligence and social media collaboration solutions, designing for security is a paramount factor.  Every IT solution must take into account aspects of information security – the risks of not considering it are too great.  There is a rich set on content dedicated to Intel IT’s approach to security solutions.

Of course the question for IT is how much is enough. Is meeting the minimum regulatory requirements sufficient – or should we strive for a higher level of protection – at what cost.  There is no formula here.  It is a delicate balance to match risk, investment costs and ROI to deliver sufficient information security protection.  Over-invest in security and you could be constraining business growth or restricting process improvement … under-invest and you risk exposure to information loss could be too high; or (worst of all) don’t innovate business processes because of worries concerning security exposure

It was only after taking our required annual IT security training mandated for all Intel employees last week did it really hit me that PEOPLE are our primary defense against information theft.  Within the Intel IT organization, I have found a huge focus on the value of our people – our subject matter experts.  From the engineers, architects and IT strategists to the training of all employees on the principles, expectations and tools we all need to use to maximize the effectiveness of what IT has put in place.  This was reinforced by a recent Gartner call I attended where the speaker proposed that people are our most agile and important asset.  I agree.

The bottom line: IT’s job is simultaneously deliver business value through innovation aimed at enabling growth, boosting productivity, maximizing efficiency and maintaining continuity.  This is what makes PEOPLE so critical because the balancing act is a question of IT governance – the formal means to evaluate, benchmark and decide how to balance these critical questions – in close collaboration with partner business units, HR, legal and senior management.

Technology can’t do it alone – we have to deploy technology with intelligence, purpose and controls.  That is only possible by enabling people to be trained, educated and empowered with the ability, tools and support to be successful. 

Do you agree?

Chris Peters

@Chris_P_Intel (twitter)

Employees need the ability to communicate securely.  Deploying the right capabilities can empower employees to keep the organization’s information more secure.  Matthew Rosenquist discusses a strategy to establish secure communication channels.

Video 2:35 minutes

Among the projects I am working on recently, one of them is deploying video conference solutions in Intel. Video conference has been gaining a lot of attention recently here. When I was talking to the CIO of a large organization in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, video conference was also a topics that came up in the conversation.

From what I have heard and seen, there seems to be a increase interest in this subject. There are three factors I believe are driving this. One is the impact of the current economy, which drives down travel budget. Video conference is a lower cost alternative to meet people when one cannot be physically there. The second factor is the increased focus in sustainability. By replacing travel will video conference, one can reduce the carbon footprint of the organization. The third factor is probably the advance of video conference technology. The systems have been getting better in terms of performance and cost. Many of them have gotten much more user friendly and Support more usage models. Some of them also work reasonably well on a laptop PC.

In Intel IT, we have a program that is trying to make video conference capabilities pervasive to our employees. We have deployed some high end solutions in a number of large sites during last year. We are going to deploy some middle tier and lower tier solutions during the rest of this year. We see these video solutions will bring benefits in areas of travel reduction, sustainability, employee productivity, enablement of new business models, and enhancing collaboration.

A simple survey for the pilot users of a table top solution confirmed that the video conference capability had increased team collaboration comparing to audio only meetings and increased engagement from remote participants. The survey also revealed that some tips and tricks needed to be advertised to use the solution effectively, although the system might appear intuitive to use.

How are you using video conference solutions in your organization? Do you have any experience and best know methods to share?

I'm pretty excited.  Last week we completed and posted our very first whitepaper related to Intel IT acquisition projects!  Several peers and I got together and worked up some key learnings from past projects and compiled them into a whitepaper where we discuss the various aspects of IT and how we go about integrating an acquisition into the overall Intel IT environment.

As you can probably guess, we have more than our share of challenges on such projects, and I have personally found that even the smaller, "no brainer" acquisitions each have their own unique twists and challenges.

Anyway, I'm very proud of this whitepaper, and I hope you'll take a look and post your thoughts and comments!  Perhaps this will be the first of many efforts to share our experiences on M&A projects with other IT folks around the world.

Check out our whitepaper at http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3563

Thanks!

Chad

Greed drives behaviors of cyber attackers.  Matthew Rosenquist discusses the pain and benefits of the Greed Principle.

Video 3:29 minutes

Purpose of Security Programs