GIET UNIVERSITY, GUNUPUR

IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND MANAGEMENT

LECTURE NOTES
UNIT-1
Acquiring Executive Support
1Q) Define Systems Management (Long)
 Systems Management is the activity of identifying and integrating various products
and processes in order to provide a stable and responsive IT environment.
 This entity is a management activity. It does not mean we will be creating new
hardware and software products in and of themselves.
 It does mean we will be looking at a group of products and processes which interact
with each other to bring stability and responsiveness to an IT environment.
 For example, an enterprise may choose to enact a thorough business resumption plan
by contracting with one of the major disaster recovery service providers. For the plan
to be executed successfully, however, there must be an extensive and flawless data
backup and restore process in place.
 In other words, the overall goal of business resumption depends on both the disaster
recovery component and the backup/restore component.
 The overall objective of systems management is to bring stability and responsiveness
to an IT infrastructure. Stability means that systems are always up and accessible as
scheduled.
 Stability is normally measured as a percentage of available uptime for both online and
batch applications.
 Other related gauges include the amount of actual downtime, measured in minutes per
day or hours per month; the elapsed time between outages, commonly referred to as
the mean time between failures (MTBF); and the average time spent in recovering
from an outage, usually called the mean time to recover (MTTR)

2Q) Why do you think Executive Support Is Critical in recent days? (Long)
There are two reasons why executive support is more important today:
The first is that more critical functions of systems management are necessary
to run contemporary data centers effectively, requiring more key resources
and more management support to acquire them.
 During the initial growth of the use of computers several decades ago,
systems management was not as significant a factor in the success of a data
center as it is today. In the early 1970s, availability and online response times
were key measures of an effective data center.
 Functions such as storage management, capacity planning, change
management, problem management, and disaster recovery were not major
factors in the equation for effective computer centers.
 Fewer functions meant fewer resources were required and less management
support was needed to acquire them.
 Second, the infrastructure support groups of computer centers from
two or three decades ago focused primarily on technical issues.
 Internal support groups were relatively isolated from outside influences such
as
executive management, end-users, and to some extent even application
software developers.
 What little contact many internal support personnel had outside of IT was
with hardware service engineers or software marketing representatives.
 Today these internal support groups are frequently bombarded with requests
from a user community that is far more technically educated and computer-
literate.
 This includes executives who are much more likely to be technically astute
than their counterparts from several years back.

3Q) Define Business Case (Long)

 A business case is a clear and succinct cost justification for the funds to be expended
for new systems or for upgraded support of existing systems.
 A business case will itemize all of the associated costs of a new system or process
(including hardware, software and labor) and compare it to the expected benefits.
 One way to be effective with business cases is to develop them for the appropriate
systems management function.
 Understanding which functions are the most beneficial to a company at any point in
time is critical to acquiring the necessary management support.
 One aspect sometimes overlooked is that an organization’s dependency on a specific
systems management discipline may change to reflect a company’s changed goals.
 The maturity cycle of a typical Internet, or dotcom, company will serve to illustrate
this point.
 The next step in building an effective business case for selected disciplines of systems
management is to meet and confer with senior IT executives to confirm that the
infrastructure functions thought to be critical are in fact the correct ones.
The most challenging step comes next, in terms of
estimating all associated costs of implementing a particular function and doing so
with reasonable accuracy. The obvious costs for items such as software licenses and
the labor for implementation and operation are easy to identify and quantify. But
some costs are occasionally overlooked when implementing a systems management
function, and these expenses are summarized as follows:
 1. Recruiting
 2. Training
 3. Office space
 4. Software enhancements
 5. Software maintenance
 6. Hardware upgrades
 7. Hardware maintenance
 8. Scheduled outages
There are several benefits of implementing a system management function that
are occasionally overlooked:
  1. Being able to predict capacity shortages before they occur
 2. Avoiding lost labor time of users by reducing both the frequency
 and duration of outages
 3. Increasing productivity by improving response times
 4. Ensuring business continuity during disaster recovery
 5. Avoiding the cost of rebuilding databases and reissuing transactions
4Q) List the basic steps used to develop an effective business case for any number of
systems management functions. (Short)
1. Understand which IT business goals are most critical to a company’s business goals.
2. Determine which systems management functions are most critical to meeting the IT
business
goals that are aligned to those of the company.
3. Meet and confer with IT senior management to confirm and prioritize the systems
management functions to be acquired.
4. Accurately estimate all costs associated with the implementation and maintenance of a
particular function.
5. Itemize all benefits associated with the function.
6. Convert benefits to dollar savings to the extent possible.
7. Solicit customer references for the product being proposed.
5Q) List out the Three Universal Principles Involving Executive Support. (Short)
During my many years working among IT executives, they have observed three universal
principles involving executive support:
1. Managers love alternatives.
2. Managers hate surprises.
3. Managers thrive on metrics.
Since one of the primary responsibilities of managers is to make decisions, they appreciate
when you simplify the decision-making process for them by presenting viable alternatives.
For infrastructure decisions, these could involve choices among products, vendors, platforms,
or levels of support. Most managers do not like to be blindsided by business surprises, such
as hidden costs, unpredicted delays, or unscheduled outages. The third principle deals with
the use of meaningful business metrics

6Q) Discuss the Factors to Consider in Designing IT Organizations. (Long)

Few employees enjoy departmental restructuring, and IT professionals are no exception.
Although IT professionals are involved in one of the most rapidly changing technical
industries, they still tend to be creatures of habit that, like everyone else, prefer stable and
unchanging environments.
Newly assigned executives and managers are notorious for proposing a partial or total
reorganization of their entire department as one of their first official acts.
For example, most start-up companies initially structure their IT departments with a very
basic organization such as that shown in Figure:

As the company grows and IT begins expanding its services, an administrative department is
added to the base structure as shown below:

The administrative department is responsible for billing, invoices, asset management,

procurement, human resources, and other tactically oriented support activities. During a
corporation’s early building years, IT usually structures its organization by departmental
responsibilities.
As the departmental responsibilities in each of the three groups reporting to the CIO continue
to grow, they will likely evolve into an organization similar to that shown in Figure 2-3.
The ongoing growth of the company and its customers would cause the applications,
infrastructure, and administration departments to similarly subdivide into dedicated groups.
This further evolution of the IT organization is shown in Figure 2–4.

A final modification to the IT organizational structure is the alignment of the applications

areas along business units as shown in Figure 2–5.