IT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND COST CUTTING

The ability to innovate has become a critical success Iactor Ior many organizations.
IT organizations play a role in innovation only iI their services are delivered in a
credible manner and they have the ability to Iorecast the IT resources needed to meet
anticipated business demands, whether those resources are physical or virtual servers,
internal or external clouds, or contracted resources Irom a hosted provider. The Iirst
step Ior the IT organization to gain credibility with the business and comply with
budget demands is to deliver IT services and resources in a predictable and timely
manner. IT organizations have realized that they need visibility into the use,
availability and perIormance oI IT resources to measure and demonstrate their value
to the business and other stakeholders.
A Iocus on achieving this type oI strategic agility requires a shiIt Irom two
predominant resource management approaches that have thus Iar impeded project
management success rates:

Maintaining a narrow focus on time-tracking systems Capturing time is a key
component oI resource management, but when it is not implemented with a
parallel top-down resource planning process, the quality and value oI the data is
greatly limited. No question, capturing end-user time will allow you to perIorm
aIter-the-Iact trend analyses but it can`t help with up-Iront planning or
determining how an unplanned change is going to aIIect critical projects mid-
stream.
Lack of workflow automation for key processes
Without any automation to enIorce a consistent project methodology, you will get
inconsistent data as project teams capture data oI their choosing not necessarily
what the business needs to make smart decisions.
Practices Ior Achieving Strategic Planning Agility

O Secure and maintain executive management support
O Adopt a combined top-down/bottom-up approach
O Aggregate all IT demand not just project work
O Don`t over-engineer early eIIorts.
O Automate the request Ior resources.
O Measure and communicate early and oIten

ndustry Example
SAS IT Resource Management is designed to access, integrate, aggregate,
analyze and manage large quantities oI IT resource perIormance data about
hardware, operating systems, networks, Web servers, databases and applications,
whether they are used in physical, virtual or cloud inIrastructures. The IT resource
perIormance data is generated by the logging mechanisms that are inherent to IT
resources or that are created by the enterprise systems management tools used to
manage IT inIrastructures. Everything needed to analyze IT resource perIormance
data Irom multiple sources Ior perIormance management, capacity planning, IT
resource Iorecasting, seasonality analysis and enterprise IT perIormance
summaries is provided, including:
W IT-speciIic data warehousing tools and wizards to create, organize and
manage IT data mart(s).
W Out-oI-the-box methods to deliver concise and descriptive analysis and
report-ready data.