IT is an enabler for corporate strategy, not just a support function. Companies are now waking up to the fact that their IT and Business needs have to be aligned to achieve their goals. Done well this will improve the capabilities of your business, help achieve corporate objectives and ensure customer satisfaction. Planning is essential to ensure that you have the resources waiting for the business as and when it needs them. Too soon and you’ll waste money by spending too early. Too late and the business opportunity has passed. Effective capacity management aligns what the business wants to do with the IT infrastructure needed to support it and in doing so encourages the business to flourish, allowing your organization to be more competitive, more productive and more profitable.
The traditional view of capacity management is that it is all about maths and equations; Little's Law to calculate utilization and more. Whilst there is proven mathematical rigor underpinning the work of the capacity analyst, the questions that capacity management addresses are more simple math. As we move from recession to growth, many businesses are seeing the opportunity to grow through merger and acquisition. Capacity management has an essential role to play pre and post bid, assessing what potential there is for financial savings on combined IT infrastructure, what needs to be kept and what can be sacrificed in the merged entity whilst still guaranteeing the business service levels will be met.
Once you've worked out what you need, you need to decide what you want. Effective capacity management enables this through providing the analysis and advice that lets you tune your current systems so they perform to best effect. Once you have the current infrastructure under control, you have a sound base on which to make informed investment decisions. Capacity management is essential in identifying what you need to meet business expectations, driving a hard bargain with suppliers over what you need to buy and creating the right amount of capacity within the infrastructure to enable the business to exploit new opportunities quickly.
Ensuring IT can grow with your business
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The right outfit whatever the weather |
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The expectation currently is that we will come out of recession and into a growth phase. Businesses that have managed the downturn well in IT terms, using technologies such as virtualization to recover costs in a tightening economy, will now need to plan what resources are needed by the business as it emerges into growth.
Capacity planning, that subset of capacity management once the realm of the IT technician, is now a business function. It provides the tools and techniques to give you confidence that you have infrastructure in place or planned to support growth. In the more conservative climate that will prevail for some time, it will create the justification you require to support your needs and meet the changing demands of the business. |
The same circumstances won't fit every organization. Whilst some businesses will surge out of recession and face the challenge of growing IT infrastructure to support an expanding business, others will have to handle the effects of severe cuts and underfunding for some time.
Capacity management helps you choose the right outfit whatever the weather. Just as it will show the business what more can be achieved with IT for a given cost, so it can also show how much more can be got from the current investment. Either way it's about getting the right resources in the right place at the right time, whether you need a sunshade or an umbrella. |
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The last round of growth in IT of course meant spiralling costs. Distributed systems, singleapplication servers, adding infrastructure in small monetary units. It was the easy option to add resource, so we all did. The result of over-provisioning was initiatives to utilize resources better leading to new technologies like virtualization and Cloud. Already there are clouds on that horizon. Gartner warn of 'virtual server sprawl' as virtual machines are even easier to roll out than physical boxes. Whilst the Cloud might take some of the infrastructure away from our direct sphere, enough resource for any sudden requirements, or 'cloud bursts' we might have needs to be available - and someone will have to pay for having that capacity.
Of course it could go the way of airline seats and 'overbooking' and we all know how nice it is to get to the gate and find out we are being bounced onto a later flight! Capacity management gives you the information you require to match what infrastructure you need with what the business wants to do. It shows how you can achieve the business goals and avoid the financial penalties of over-provisioning.
Capacity Management:
Getting IT where the business needs it to be ahead of when the business gets there
IT is essentially a support function. IT availability is crucial to enable the business to meet its goals. If we get to the destination with the right infrastructure in place but after the business has reached a point where it needs it, it will be too late, that business opportunity could have passed by.
Planning is therefore essential to ensure that we have the resources waiting for the business as and when it needs them. Too soon and we waste money by spending too early. Too late and the opportunity has passed. Effective capacity management aligns what the business wants to do with the IT infrastructure needed to support it. |
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