Information infrastructure: the new IT discipline.

Increasing the productivity of information technology (IT) resources--people and equipment--is the key challenge managers of information technology face today. Labor costs still account for 40% of the typical IT budget, and utilization rates are far from optimal. Economic and geopolitical uncertainties have placed additional pressures on the IT organization to optimally define and rapidly adjust service levels to the specific requirements of different end users inside and outside the enterprise.

Regardless of ongoing cost-containment efforts, the IT organization is still expected to provide an agile and flexible service, integrate well with the enterprise and its external constituents, and respond quickly to constantly changing business needs. It is still expected to manage the constant increase in the volume of information, digitize and bring online new sources of information, and apply new ways of using this information for competitive differentiation. It is still expected to deploy, customize, upgrade, maintain, and retire hundreds of applications each year, all with their associated server, storage, network and software resources. And the IT organization is now expected to provide service guarantees at the lowest possible cost.

The greatest challenge, however, could be the emergence of new and negative attitudes toward the IT organization in 2001. After several years of ever-growing investments in new information technology applications and with the economic downturn forcing close scrutiny of capital expenditures, business executives started to ask new questions:

* Where is the promised return on investment in the last application we invested in?

* Why are IT resources so under-utilized?

* Is there a better and more disciplined way to manage IT, rather than one latest-and-greatest application at a time?

New and Risky Prescriptions for IT Management

Some have concluded that the correct response to these challenges is to move information technology outside the corporation to be bought as a package of metered services. Others argue that the answer lies in complete customization, preferably with the help of business consultants. Each information technology investment, according to this view, should be tailored to the specific business and the specific business conditions at the time of investment.

Both approaches minimize the role of IT managers and view information technology as a burden on the corporation, no longer contributing to its competitiveness. Instead of better and tighter integration of information technology with the business, following these new prescriptions will result in moving information technology governance outside the corporation, decreasing accountability and increasing risk.

Moreover, these approaches abandon the key mechanism for making information technology a crucial contributor to the business' success: The learning accumulated and jointly experienced by business executives and IT managers. As successful users of information technology have proven again and again, this knowledge becomes the intellectual property of the business and a key source of strategic advantage.

Specialized Infrastructures: The New Discipline

A better approach to creating management discipline and reaping productivity gains from information technology is through the establishment of specialized IT infrastructures. Specialization has been the key to productivity gains ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and it must now be applied rigorously to the practice of information technology management.

Businesses that have continued to gain strategic advantages from their investments in information technology are those that have established four separate but inter-related infrastructures for the management of information: information processing, information access, information storage, and information distribution. In these businesses, investment in information technology has advanced from being viewed as a monolithic bundle of additional "capacity" to be applied every time a new application is installed to the planned development and proactive deployment of four horizontal infrastructures. The existence of separate infrastructures (and specialized IT staff) for processing, accessing, storing, and distributing information reduces the time and labor needed for integrating a new application with existing information technology resources and increases the organization's flexibility and responsiveness to changing business conditions.

To make the investment in information technology more productive, IT organizations must focus on accumulating specialized skills and expertise in the key technologies for processing, accessing, storing, and distributing information; invest proactively in developing a best-in-class process for each of these technologies; and coordinate these infrastructures for fast deployment and scale efficiencies.

When the four infrastructures are well established in the organization, a new IT landscape will emerge. The new IT landscape will have applications layered in grid-like fashion across four distinct infrastructures. Instead of creating separate infrastructures for each key application, the IT organization will run applications across four scalable, efficient, standards-based infrastructures. Each infrastructure will be based on standards, best practices, and best-of-breed technologies. The key benefit coming out of these four infrastructures will be that the IT organization will only need to deploy them once, and then run all existing and new applications on them. With specialized, repeatable, and scalable infrastructures the organization will gain both economies of scale and flexibility to respond on-the-fly to changing business conditions.

ILM: From Storage to Information Infrastructure

The deployment of specialized, consistent, and standards-based IT infrastructures will provide the management discipline that ensures greater productivity of IT resources. But it will not guarantee a strategic advantage for the business. This will come only from a better understanding of why we should bother at all about information technology.

The new prescriptions for information technology management, as described above, put the emphasis on technology, not on information. "IT" is viewed as a necessary "equipment," a required "capital expense"--no different from buildings, electrical generators, or telephone exchanges.

In contrast to this outdated view, think about "IT" with an emphasis on "information." Successful users of IT understand that the technology--and the four infrastructures--is just a means to an end. The ultimate goal is to use information, use it creatively and efficiently, in a way that is unique to the organization and provides it with a strategic advantage.

To get the most value from their information, organizations are beginning to pursue Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), a new information management strategy (as opposed to "information technology" strategy). ILM is a strategy for proactive management of information. The goal is to meet business requirements across a wide variety of applications, regulations, user needs and corporate policies, while delivering the lowest overall cost. In the new IT landscape, the deployment of Information Lifecycle Management strategy will transform the storage infrastructure into an Information Infrastructure.

Information storage has evolved rapidly in the last ten years. In each stage of this evolution, the storage array was connected to more and more servers and, through them, to more and more users. At each stage, the storage array incorporated additional intelligence, providing more and more functionality and versatility.

With the deployment of Information Lifecycle Management, the additional intelligence added to the storage infrastructure is of a nature and at a level that is radically different from the intelligence that was added in the past, making for a qualitative evolutionary jump. With ILM, the added intelligence pertains not only to blocks of data on the storage array, but also to unstructured documents, electronic files, and database records. The added intelligence pertains not only to the management of the storage network, but also to the management, optimization, and increased utilization of the other IT infrastructures. And the added intelligence is based not only on the tools provided by IT vendors but also on the information policies, practices, and processes as defined, documented, and deployed by the IT organization.

In the new IT landscape, rather than applying new information requirements manually, application-by-application, the IT manager will set enterprise-wide policies which will automatically move information and its associated resources to the most optimal storage and compute platforms to the right location at any given point in time. The IT manager will see resources as a single pool that can be allocated and provisioned on-the-fly and will respond to changes to the business in real time without service interruption. The Information Infrastructure will serve as the glue that binds the other infrastructures together--harnessing the power and the knowledge that is in the information about the business and in the information about IT resources, and delivering it widely with a lower total cost of ownership. With the management discipline of four horizontal infrastructures and the proactive strategy of Information Lifecycle Management, the Information Infrastructure will become the indispensable strategic asset for all businesses.

Mark S. Lewis is executive vice president, Open Software, EMC Corporation (Hopkinton, MA)

www.emc.com