Segmenting Demand

There are three critical drivers of infrastructure demand in large IT organizations, Kaplan points out. The service and storage needs of the thousands of applications they support; the network connectivity required to support hundreds of physical sites; and the desktops, laptops, PDAs and the like demanded by their tens of thousands of end users. No IT shop can standardize any of these segments without first developing a deep understanding of the shape of current demand for infrastructure services and how that demand will most likely evolve.

"Carve out a piece of the environment, a vertical piece of the environment, from which you can build practice," Kaplan advises. "When you think about it, you can't build the entire product portfolio. You need either a deeper product set and a narrow applications portfolio or a shallower product set and a broader application portfolio. It's okay to have a fairly small number of people be end to end for a relatively small number of things and vice versa," he says.

"If you look at a pool of 200 applications within business units, how many of those are truly enterprise-class financial systems? How many are the low-end Web sites? How many are extranet applications? How many are low-volume transactional applications? How many are low-priority recording applications?" Grouped in this way, most applications fall into a few clusters, he says. And you can group physical sites and user groups' needs in a similar way.

In all of this work, and in setting governance structures, Kaplan says the CIO has an important role to play.

"There is a set of things that CIOs should be doing," he says. "The first of these is engaging pretty deeply with the application development teams to understand the forward-looking set of application needs, the way the architecture is going to evolve and other constraints on the application environment. They can use this to, in effect, start to create a product portfolio. What is the full set of requirements across many potential users? How do you prioritize them? How do you integrate those into a release plan? How do you build an operational factory that can execute against new product sets fairly efficiently?"

CIOs should be determined to optimize resources and minimize costs when deciding the scope, depth and breadth of product offerings, Kaplan says. And the IT group must define the features, service levels and price of each product.

They also need to build strong governance around the initiative. The idea should be to go deep and narrow quickly and demonstrate the economics and the architectural validity. "Then you can credibly to start to lay out the governance and business relationship processes so you can eventually expand the product portfolio," he says.

New Roles for a New Organization

Next-generation infrastructure has enormous implications for the roles, responsibilities, and governance of the infrastructure organization, Kaplan says.

The most critical new roles, he says, are those of the product manager, who defines products and product portfolios, and of the factory architect, who designs the shared processes to deploy, operate, and support them (see "Running the Factory", page 77). Product managers must focus on service offerings and be accountable for reaching productivity targets. Factory architects are, in equal parts, technology strategists and industrial engineers, codifying the architectures, processes, and tools that support the product portfolio, Kaplan says.

Organizational structures must change as well, the report says. Specialized silos with administrators focused on specific technology platforms - mainframes, midrange computing, distributed servers, storage, and voice and data networks - should give way to multidisciplinary teams that manage the performance of the infrastructure and the delivery of services.