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Gartner Infrastructure Maturity Model Lights the Way for IT Organizations Seeking to Increase Agility, Reduce Cost and Improve Service Delivery version franηaise New maturity model from Gartner offers IT managers and professionals a systematic approach to assessing the state of their infrastructure, identifying shortcomings and establishing priorities for improvements that will move them ever closer to achieving the real-time infrastructure needed to give their organizations the speed and agility to compete effectively and win. by Jay Parkes The Real-Time Enterprise it's not about 20/20 hindsight! In tomorrow's world, whether it be to solve problems or seize opportunities, your business simply won't be able to compete and survive unless it's fast and agile the 'real-time enterprise'. Industry analyst firm Gartner Inc. first published its definition of the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE) in 2002 as "an enterprise that competes by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays to the management and execution of its critical business processes." [1] However, after analyzing bankruptcies, positive and negative corporate earnings results, sudden market share losses and other types of business events, Gartner concluded that business surprises occur after an ample supply of warning signs, and that if these signs had been detected and acted on early enough, the harmful effects of surprises could have been reduced or avoided. Accordingly, Gartner recently updated its definition of RTE to incorporate the vital importance of early detection: "The RTE monitors, captures and analyzes root-cause and overt events that are critical to its success the instant those events occur, to identify new opportunities, avoid mishaps and minimize delays in core business processes. The RTE will then exploit that information to progressively remove delays in the management and execution of its critical business processes." [2] Real-Time Enterprise Depends on Real-Time Infrastructure IT infrastructure servers, operating systems, storage, networks, peripherals, etc. plays a critical role in enabling the real-time enterprise do what it needs to do sense earlier and respond faster. However, today's IT infrastructure tends to be too complex, slow to change and difficult to manage, with expenses that are not only high, but relatively fixed, regardless of changing business requirements. With as much as 70 per cent of IT budgets being spent on infrastructure, IT managers and executives want IT infrastructure that is more agile, service oriented, easily managed and exhibits costs that better align with business requirements characteristics that are all found in a new generation of distributed computing that Gartner calls Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI), a critical platform for building an RTE. A Real-Time Infrastructure is one that is shared across customers, business units or applications where business demand for IT resources is automatically met; infrastructure is efficient and self-managing; fixed costs are replaced by variable pay-per-use costs; and the enterprise can move expensive, rapidly depreciating assets off its balance sheet. [3] 
In an informal survey of CIOs, IT operations heads and data centre managers attending Gartner's Data Center Conference in late 2004, 67 per cent of those surveyed indicated that achieving RTI was an imperative for their organizations. When asked what was driving them toward RTI, 32 per cent were focused on improving quality of service delivery, 26 per cent on reducing cost, 18 per cent looking to increase business alignment, and 17 per cent seeking increased agility. [4]
But How Do I Get There from Here?Although Gartner predicts that the RTI vision for transforming how infrastructure assets are used and managed could take five to 10 years, many vendors are already providing technology pieces that can help organizations begin the RTI journey. Some larger players are even offering total RTI initiatives, including IBM's On Demand operating environment, HP's Adaptive Enterprise and Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative. But how do you know where your organization is today with respect to RTI, and how to move it along the path that gets you there? According to Gartner analyst Donna Scott, achieving the benefits of RTI requires that an IT organization become 'mature' in terms of both its infrastructure and the processes used to manage it (see accompanying diagram). 
In 1999, Scott and her Gartner Research associates created Gartner's IT Management Process Maturity Model to help IT organizations plot a course toward service management and value creation by enabling them to measure where they stood in terms of managing IT processes such as change management, incident & problem management, and configuration management. In brief, the model categorizes IT management processes into five stages of maturity chaotic, reactive, proactive, service-based and policy-based while best practices such as are described by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provide organizations with a framework for improvements (see accompanying ITIL article).
New Infrastructure Maturity Model Completes the PictureHaving mature IT management processes is only half the battle, however. "If you have all the process pieces in place, but don't have a mature infrastructure, you still might be able to achieve your SLAs, but your costs could be quite high," says Scott. To help organizations understand where they are and help them build a road map toward a mature, real-time infrastructure, Gartner has introduced its new IT Infrastructure Maturity Model that enables firms to self-evaluate and build a strategic plan to reduce infrastructure costs, increase agility and improve service-level management. The accompanying diagram summarizes the seven stages of infrastructure maturity that represent Gartner's view of the most efficient steps to evolve toward RTI. 
Gartner believes that roughly 90 per cent of organizations today have evolved no further than the third stage of infrastructure maturity. [5] "Transforming to the service-based stage, for example, is not something you can do overnight," claims Gartner's Scott. "It takes two to three years and a lot of commitment, resources, process design and leadership." However, Scott goes on to explain why it's getting from that stage to the final, policy-based stage that takes the biggest chunk of time. "It takes even more changes in your culture to work cross-organizationally to make things more dynamic and automatic; and the technologies aren't all there yet." 
©2005 Gartner Inc.
When asked how difficult it might be for IT managers to be able to sell such a long-term proposition to senior management, Scott claims that there are gains to be made all along the way on both the infrastructure and management process sides. She cites the example of server consolidation that is now being done every day in IT shops across the country, yielding substantial savings in infrastructure cost and administrative effort.
The maturity model offers IT executives, managers and professionals a systematic and structured approach for assessing the state of their infrastructure against an established set of best practices, identifying shortcomings, establishing priorities and setting goals for improvement. By adopting a maturity model approach, IT organizations have a means of continually improving their infrastructure, moving them ever closer to RTI.
Compugen Offers Infrastructure Maturity AssessmentsAs an extension to our existing TCO Assessment offerings, Compugen, a Gartner TCO Alliance Partner, is now offering Infrastructure Maturity Assessments to help customers apply the best-practices concepts behind Gartner's Infrastructure Maturity Model to their own IT organizations. If you'd like more information on Gartner's new Infrastructure Maturity Model or on how Compugen can help you use this approach in your IT shop, click here or contact Dean Reid at 1-800-387-5045 ext. 2053. | ||
