Intel Open Port: IT@Intel Blog : 2007 : August : 21

The power went out here in Austin this afternoon. Not in the office, mind you... Only in the data center. The root cause isn't all that important or interesting - some maintenance didn't go as planned so the DC was dark while street power was unaffected.

The impact, however, is a great illustration of the differences between the server-huggers and the grid-enabled. The former group -- who think it is important to know which server belongs to them and where it's located at all times -- were unable to work for several hours. Their jobs crashed with the servers, and their data was unavailable until the local fileservers came back online. They were standing around in the hallways or leaving for the day. The grid users, on the other hand, had already enabled themselves to take advantage of shared computing resources in at least one other site, sometimes as many as two or three sites. While they lost some local state and running jobs, they could go home and log in through VPN, or wait a few minutes until the network infrastructure was back online (Networks almost always first in the power-up sequence). Jobs could be re-submitted, schedules could be met.

While we often talk about the cost savings and performance improvements of grid computing, we shouldn't overlook the resulting business continuity benefits. If you have deployed a grid, does your BC plan allow a single-site outage to be absorbed by the remaining capacity? If you're considering grid deployment, is business continuity a factor in your decision?

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I look forward to sharing my thoughts related to IT business and management practices. I am interested in a variety of topics pertaining to the IT profession and the role of IT in creating value. We have been researching the topics of IT value and IT innovation for almost a decade, and that includes putting some tangible mechanisms in place for people to apply in their daily jobs, enabling better value creation through the use of IT. We (IT shops) have been so busy ensuring that the infrastructure runs smoothly, that customer requirements and expectations are met, that support is one click away, that we sometimes forget about a unique role that IT can play in a company by actually contributing to future value creation and business growth. In many cases we do it without acknowledging it, and so it goes unnoticed.

At the beginning of this past decade, our IT organization was challenged to measure the impact of IT's solutions to Intel's business results. So, with the help from Finance, we expanded our typical operational metrics to include those related to business impact, such as time to market for our products, capital purchase avoidance, throughput time, and others. We worked closely with our lines of business to quantify and measure improvements from IT solutions, and establishing better internal customer relationships. The data and results produced prove beneficial to IT and the customers of our solutions. We have also learned from the difficulties we encountered. For example, not every IT solution comes with a completed ROI. The lack of business value tools and understanding makes it difficult to get started. Speaking business benefit from an IT view requires common language and common indicators to gauge and value successful IT programs.

Now, more than ever, it is important that IT shops show that investment in IT will yield a positive business return that will be felt by the shareholders.

In future blogs I will share some of the methodologies we developed and continue to create in partnership with academia and industry fellow travelers, such as the IT Capability Maturity Framework (CMF).

1 Comments Permalink Tags: it_business_value, roi