CIOs must also re-examine existing control systems, with an eye to establishing new governance procedures to deal with such things as capacity planning, the launch of new services, and investment-financing issues. Many companies create an enterprise-level infrastructure council to ensure the consistency of products and service levels across business units.

To make sure the new infrastructure is running efficiently and to sustain performance improvements, Kaplan says, CIOs should focus on five key areas:

1. Demand forecasting and capacity planning. A key goal of the new infrastructure model is to match supply and demand more closely, thereby minimizing the waste of resources. To achieve this objective, the IT group must work closely with business units in order to forecast demand and thus improve capacity planning. Forecasts are more accurate when companies aggregate demand across products instead of applications.

2. Funding and budgeting. Product demand drives budgets. Since the new model uses real demand forecasts, budgeting is easier. Moreover, with pricing transparency comes knowledge. Business units will now know what their IT choices are going to cost; the infrastructure group will understand the budget implications of user requests and be able to create a more accurate capital plan.

3. Product-portfolio management. Companies can expect to spend six months developing new-product portfolios. The infrastructure team should re-examine them two or three times during the first year to ensure that they are appropriate given projected workloads and emerging end-user needs. Thereafter, a yearly review usually suffices. Teams should monitor all phases of the product life cycle, from planning and sourcing new products to retiring old services and redeploying resources.

4. Release management. To ensure that new technologies or upgrades are integrated effectively and that change causes less upheaval and lost productivity, leading companies carefully manage the release of both infrastructure products and applications in parallel. Moreover, to plan ahead, application developers need to know about any impending change in the infrastructure catalogue.

5. Supply and vendor management. IT leaders must ensure that computing resources are available to meet the contracted service levels of product portfolios. Infrastructure managers should revisit their sourcing strategy annually, seeking opportunities to lower costs and improve productivity.

Easy Case to Make

Kaplan says the business case for productization should typically be easy to make. Usually where good data is available, the economics and the soft benefits should be compelling, he says.

However, there will be some organizations where building an operational factory will never pay off. "For example, for an IT shop that was trying to do very, very little new application development over the course of the next three or four years, productization or next-generation infrastructure may not make a lot of sense," he says.

You will want to secure the open-minded cooperation of the application development teams. Often you will get enthusiastic support, Kaplan says, since it will free them up to spend more of their time automating business processes. However, he cautions that there are some organizations where for cultural reasons the application development teams will push back hard. When people have built a career mediating between infrastructure and application development because of the dysfunctional relationship, they are unlikely to be enthusiastic supporters.

In these cases you can either manage from the top down, by making a top-down economic impact case and then using that to plough through some of the resistance, or you can choose to co-opt these people.

"The folks in AD [application development] who mediate between infrastructure and AD, while their jobs should go away, are often the most creative and talented people thinking about infrastructure in any given organization. And it's tough because they may not want to think about themselves as part of the infrastructure organization. Culturally they may think of themselves as AD-aligned guys, but if you can bring them into the infrastructure organization and give them the opportunity to help create something new, that can be in certain cases extraordinarily effective," Kaplan says.

He warns one of the major barriers to success is in the availability of tools and automation. Getting the most out of next-generation infrastructure requires automating processes that have been executed manually, because one of the benefits to standardizing the technology is that you can standardize then automate the process around the technology. He says not many infrastructure organizations are extraordinarily mature in the way they have selected and implemented management tools.

Finally, there is a process change. Many infrastructure organizations, Kaplan says, have a culture of heroics, which brings with it a certain attitude: "I'm the smart guy, I'm the system administrator, I know everything about these 10 servers or these 20 servers, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this stuff up and running". This attitude may be admirable, but is not necessarily sustainable or scalable, he says. Next-generation infrastructure implies a small, repeatable set of processes, which is quite an uncomfortable thing for many of the most talented people within the infrastructure organization.

"There is an opportunity there to pull some of the most talented infrastructure people out of the AD organization and put them in key roles. You can also pull some of your most talented 'heroes' out of the delivery organization and put them in some key roles around product management or relationship management. You want to take your truly talented guys, who shouldn't be doing operational stuff, and put them in much more leveraged roles so you harness that creativity for good rather than for evil," Kaplan says. v

SIDEBAR: Matter of Trust

Find a common language to get users on board

Gary Slinger, general manager, Windows Systems at CP Ships, has been thinking hard about next-generation infrastructure and says staff resistance is likely to be a major barrier to any attempt to introduce a new architecture.

"I could probably find some other ways of phrasing that, such as 'cultural resistance', but it comes down to 'not invented here'," Slinger says. "However, introducing a new architecture is, fundamentally, no different from introducing any other new initiative into an organization, and should be handled as such. Communicate the goals and desires clearly, get the opinion makers/leaders on board early in the process, keep the communication process open throughout the deployment, and be open to feedback."

Slinger says the CIO must fix a common language between the implementers or originators of the new framework and those who will need to understand the new framework when it is in place. You should also settle early on "who needs to know what", and "when". That is not to suggest censorship or restriction of the information flow, he says; just to point out that a genuine communication plan needs to be in place.

Related, but separate, is the issue of trust between the customer (the business) and IT. Whether the business trusts IT will depend in large part on the history. Do they see IT as a service group, a strategic group, a cost centre or a deep, dark, money pit?

"It helps to have had some successful deployments in the 'current state' before attempting to overhaul and deploy a new architectural framework," Slinger says. "Trust, in the business sense, is just like trust in the personal sense - it has to be earned, over time, through proof of action."

He warns that since the new architecture will typically need to take in to account legacy systems, the mantra must be "document, document, document!" "I think that a lack of understanding of what you already have is one of the common issues and roadblocks. Is it necessary to completely abandon everything you have, or will some or all of it merge into the new environment? With the right documentation, that's the kind of decision that can be made," Slinger says.

"I think that it's important to establish a clear, and realistic, set of guidelines up front that can be followed throughout the process - these lead to the migration plan, and it all channels in to the communications plan/strategy that is key," he says.