Find the Efficiencies in Your IT Organization

A more efficient IT organization means there are more resources that can be devoted to innovation. If your IT department is spending most of its resources keeping the lights on and the existing systems running, then your business is missing out on an innovation engine that can redesign business processes, create new products, and develop new markets and customers.

For many businesses, the idea of investing in new IT infrastructure in an uncertain economic climate sounds like a bad idea. In this article, we're going to look at organizations of various sizes that made investment in IT and saw a significant return on investment, improvement in their business processes, and increases in their overall productivity.

New technologies like cloud computing allow IT to outsource many of the day-to-day tasks that prevent IT from contributing to the business. Better infrastructure management tools help monitor and automate the physical and virtual IT environment. Collaboration tools reduce costs by making it easier for organizations to work with partners, customers, and employees around the world. Unified communications technologies make it easy to send and receive information from any device or any location. Better data management tools help your organization find the right information at the right time to make informed decisions. The list goes on and on.

Hosted Solutions

Regardless of the industry or locations, organizations of all sizes are feeling the pinch of limited budgets. The City of Carlsbad, Calif., like governments across the globe, was stretched for resources when the economy turned for the worst. The city employs 1,100 people to serve more than 100,000 local residents, and many of those employees work on team-based projects.

Carlsbad was working with an aging e-mail system and no real platform for collaboration. Despite strict budget limitations, the city found a communications and collaboration solution with Microsoft Online Services. The system is hosted remotely, which means fewer infrastructure costs for Carlsbad, and it also delivers the security and functionality the city needed for online collaboration, desktop and mobile e-mail, and Web conferencing.

Carlsbad is saving approximately 40 percent annually by opting for a hosted solution that provides more productivity-enhancing tools for its workforce compared to an on-premises solution.

Unified Communications

Many businesses are exploring unified communications because it allows a workforce that is spread across the globe to easily access voice and electronic communications wherever they are. The use of IP technology also helps reduce telecommunications costs.

Unified communications can also help reduce the costs associated with conferencing and travel, saving money and improving collaboration in the process.

Intel Corp. deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to all 86,000 of its employees. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 lets Intel employees use HD quality video, server-based audio conferencing, advanced voice capabilities, and user-friendly desktop sharing.

Intel expects that the cost savings from audio conferencing and HD video conferencing will reduce conferencing costs by 20 percent and allow for even greater process efficiencies.

Collaboration

The need to collaborate on documents and create repositories of information made Microsoft SharePoint one the fastest-growing products in Microsoft's history. But SharePoint's capabilities can also help business quickly and efficiently communicate with their customers as well.

When Kraft Foods needed to give its brand groups greater speed and flexibility in connecting with consumers online, it chose Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a new global standard for Web content management. Kraft is now running its three largest Web sites on its new solution, with plans to migrate all consumer-facing Web sites by the end of 2010.

Through its use of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Kraft is benefiting from streamlined Web content publishing; support for new forms of digital marketing; and the performance, scalability, and reliability needed to support more than 100 million page views per month.

Kraft's new Web content management system is expected to save the company millions of dollars over the next two years in agency fees, support costs, and development costs.

Data Management

Hidden in all of the electronic data that businesses generate on a continuous basis are the details that can help save millions of dollars, create more efficient processes, and help develop new ideas.

Samsung Electronics carried out an innovative project to strengthen its global Supply Chain Management (SCM) execution ability. Samsung placed its emphasis on the business management scenario of predicting and preparing for future environmental changes and competitiveness, which is one of the survival strategies of an industry with an unpredictable future.

Microsoft's Business Intelligence (BI) Platform provided life to Samsung Electronics' SCM system. An action-oriented BI solution enables on-demand changes of business management plans and reflects these adjustments. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 can satisfy all three major requirements of the BI solution, including performance and reliability, cube write-back, and user convenience.

Samsung expects to introduce the application across the enterprise. Once the roll out is completed, Samsung Electronics expects to increase its forecast accuracy for product demands by more than 20 percent.

Infrastructure Management

Data center costs, including the costs associated with power and cooling, are getting increasingly difficult for IT organizations to manage. Server sprawl and low utilization rates are part of the problem, and virtualizing the infrastructure is one way to help.

In Le Mars, Iowa, Wells' Dairy produces ice cream and frozen desserts under the BLUE BUNNY brand. As the company faces a challenging market, the IT department aimed to provide cost-effective services and promote business continuity and agility using virtualization.

Wells' Dairy ultimately deployed the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter operating system and Hyper-V virtualization technology. Today, it has a scalable server consolidation solution and a data center that is saving more than $12,000 in annual electrical costs. The IT staff is virtualizing critical applications in the production environment using clustering for high availability and is offering efficient, cost-effective virtualized test services.

For years, Continental Airlines relied on Terminal Services in the Windows Server 2003 operating system to give employees access to programs and data on the company's servers. Continental also used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to increase hardware utilization and save costs. With the release of Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Continental expanded its virtual environment by using Hyper-V virtualization technology and improved Terminal Services technology.

Windows Server 2008 R2 provides Continental with high system reliability for better service. One feature that contributes to the high reliability is Live Migration, which supports transferring virtual machines from one host server to another, without interrupting service.

The improved Hyper-V feature supports using up to 32 logical CPUs on host computers, adding and removing virtual hard disks without restarting the virtual machine. The new solution also supports rapid deployment of new services.

Continental is taking advantage of Remote Desktop Services to streamline the management of its growing virtual desktop environment. IT administrators can use the Remote Desktop Connection Broker in RDS to easily set up user access for both virtualized and traditional session-based desktops. The virtualized desktops can run full Windows client operating systems.

Security

Security isn't an option. Even under the most strict budget restrictions, organizations that fail to maintain their IT security are taking risks they can't afford. It's well known that a breach that exposes customer information or sensitive corporate data carries a stiff price in terms of financial penalties and loss of goodwill. An efficient business-ready security solution protects the networks and its endpoints from attacks and "everyday" Internet threats like viruses and spam without commanding a lot of attention from IT administrators.

To better safeguard sensitive customer data, such as addresses and Social Security numbers on computers, servers, and in e-mail messages, Guardian Real Estate Services LLC wanted better visibility into its security environment.

Guardian deployed business-ready security solutions from Microsoft's Forefront family to secure its messaging environment and its endpoints, such as portable and desktop computers. The company gained automatic security updates and multiple scan engines to keep up with evolving threats. It also uses URL filtering to help prevent access to inappropriate content and employs backscatter scanning to help protect against e-mail "spoofing." With new visibility and reporting features, IT staff should save two to three hours a week that they used to spend manually checking security performance.

That's two to three hours a week that Guardian's IT staff can devote to creating innovation for the business instead of babysitting security solutions.

Summary

A number of products and solutions exist to help the IT organization at your business move beyond managing IT so they can contribute to the business. An uncertain economic climate might seem like the wrong time to invest in new IT products and infrastructure, but as we saw in the examples in this article the latest products and software can help businesses operate more efficiently and quickly achieve return on investment (ROI).