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For most organizations today, the possibility of consolidating IT infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center is an idea that has been on the table to cut costs and boost productivity. After all, isn’t consolidation supposed to produce these benefits with nothing more than a small one-time effort of some time and money?
While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations - and by this point you’ve already created the ROI calculations that show a year or less payback period – it will take more than just a Friday afternoon to ensure that your consolidation project is truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly-planned consolidation project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place.
This paper lays out 5 steps to a successful IT consolidation project. While you’ll still be doing the hard work of actually consolidating infrastructure, following these steps will enable you to make sure that you’ve covered all the issues in order to ensure that your organization experiences the full benefits of IT consolidation.
Mapping out a successful IT consolidation strategy
Like most projects, successful IT consolidation requires time, planning, buy-in, and methodical execution. But IT consolidation has its own special set of challenges that relate to the fact that you are fundamentally changing the footprint of your IT architecture. This has wide-ranging implications that cover everything from budgets and capital expenditures to political considerations over the location of infrastructure and perceived impacts on business units.
Step 1: Lay out a change and risk management strategy
Risk management is part of project management 101, but there are some special considerations in the case of IT consolidation. In any IT consolidation project the benefits are most obvious to the corporate entity (immediate cost savings, less strain on IT) and less obvious to business units or remote offices. After all, these other groups may feel like they are losing “their” servers or local tools and will be penalized with reduced performance for no apparent reason. And, since IT is generally tasked to align their own goals with those of the business, this can create conflict and misunderstanding.
Similarly, IT teams located in remote offices may worry about their own ability to deliver on agreed-upon service levels to business units in a new environment where they may have less control of physical infrastructure to fine-tune.
A good change strategy always begins with communication. It will take time and effort to communicate to various business units the benefits that they will see from consolidation, as well as understand the corporate benefits. More than likely, users in remote offices will resonate with the following benefits:
1. Systems are patched, upgraded, and maintained more frequently. Because systems are located where the majority of IT staff is located, it is much easier to schedule regular maintenance of systems. This means less down time and the most up-to-date applications and services for users.
2. Collaboration with other offices will be simplified. Because all important data is located in one place, users do not have to hunt and peck for the right information across a multitude of servers spread to the far ends of the earth.
3. Revision control problems are reduced. With multiple users and multiple locations working on the same project, often times it is hard to keep track of the “right” file to work on. Again, with data in one place, these problems are diminished greatly.
4. The company will save money. Show users the results of your business case on IT consolidation and explain how it will help the bottom line. (For more information on the ROI of consolidation, read “The Business Value of Performance,” a free paper from the NetForecast Analyst Group.)
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