Here’s the question IT management people, “How much of an understanding do have on how your company makes money thereby having a staff that knows where the money comes from and where it goes?”  This question gets asked a lot by some consultants with the same answer, “why would I want to do this? I don’t have enough time to do what I need to do now.” The answer is, “well by doing this you will carry out the task of having an IT organization that knows how to see opportunities to differentiate the company from the competition.”

According to the post on the Center for CIO Leadership the author still believes that there are no issues between IT and the business almost like he’s in denial.  There are issues and the key here is to get beyond the old cliché and first step of IT-Business alignment to more of the IT-Business convergence.  The term “IT-Business alignment” is wrong because it implies that IT is separate from the business, whereas IT-Business convergence is the pinnacle in the efforts to integrate, to a higher degree, IT into the business decision process.  To help accomplish that convergence, everyone in IT has to learn how the business makes money and how to use that information to generate new innovations and revenue opportunities. Doing so will help you to increase ITs value to the organization.  Today IT is the roadblock and you need to get it to a point where the lag gaps between change event and the profit are minimal.

The author of the article at Center for CIO Leadership (Paul Ingevaldson), even states that, “I teach a couple of sessions in a local MBA class that focus on IT Management to primarily non-IT students. Each semester I ask the students what they think of their IT department. Invariably I get the following comments:”

• IT doesn’t get its projects done on time or on budget
• IT doesn’t understand the business
• IT is more loyal to IT than to our business
• IT has their own language – I don’t understand them
• Why does it take them so long to do anything?
• IT lacks a sense of urgency

Hello!!! Now not every person in IT will have the bandwidth to pay attention to this but they should.  In most organizations, the IT staff has always been “heads down” and the IT organization as a whole has been content to just be the providers to the business.  But this is a whole new world of business, and if IT wants a seat at the strategic table they have to figure out how to speak the language of business.  There is another point to that statement that gets thrown back out in almost a grade school type fashion almost every day; “business needs to understand IT as well.  IT folks need to just quit complaining and get in the game. IT needs to shoot for a higher-level of understanding here and realize that this is a symbiotic relationship.

It’s time that IT management start thinking like a CEO and CFO.  I will guarantee you this, “that at the top of every CEO’s and CFO’s mind is the fact that for every dollar coming in the front door, a portion is going out the back in the form of costs. If you take time and study that equation you can discover ways to save and generate revenue.”

One of the things that IT needs to do is ask not just how IT contributes to today’s business model, but how that will change in the future.  This really gets folks thinking on a different level (strategically instead of tactically).

At one large customer the Sr VP of IT was asked if he could invite the CFO into one of the department meetings.  He asked why? the answer was that we need a focused conversation around the “bottom line” with the staff.  The importance of the “bottom line” discussion with his team was to share how the company earns revenue, where the profit goes and where excess cash may be invested.  After the meeting the Sr VP stated that this information would be invaluable to help focus his managers thought processes around innovation.  That was the point.  If you understand areas where the company is growing, you can potentially come up with new ideas or different ways to do things that will bring a competitive advantage. These ideas may range from a function on a website to improvements in customer service to changes in internal processes, etc.

The last way that you can help facilitate the move to convergence is to map IT functions to business processes.  Here’s an example; a customer relied heavily on IT to produce its products; customer-facing applications are tightly integrated with the ERP and manufacturing systems. But what was observed during analysis time sitting on the help desk was that agents didn’t understand how all the systems and manufacturing machines were integrated to scan and manufacture this product – which was a highly intricate process.

At the end of the day the  management review stated that the solution to better IT support lay in fostering a more integrated view of business processes and IT operations. In the final report to executive management it suggested they create an “anthropological team” and send this team out to the manufacturing sites to learn about the equipment and systems they were servicing from the user’s point of view, interview the users and document that business-centric view.  By taking the “Anthropologist” view they were able to eventually map out the company’s business processes to each application and the machines they run on and show how each was connected to the others. This map was a powerful illustration of how the employees who create and service each system contribute to their company’s top line. It also worked as a tool to show which systems impact revenue the most and which processes needed infrastructure improvements.

By getting in touch with what the business does, almost to the extent of embedding IT teams into the business, along with retooling the IT business model you can build a deeper understanding of the relationship between how the business makes money and the work it does everyday will be the only way to raise IT to the level that it should be. This will help you create better partnerships with the business users and further the movement to IT-Business convergence.

The majority of the CIOs on the CIO Executive Series call last week were concerned with the “nuts and bolts” of VDI, i.e. Storage, Security, etc. which again I think they are getting too far into the technical weeds and not enough at the higher levles that they need to be at.  They need to be more focused on the business value benefits of virtual desktops and how it can help drive growth and allow for improved performance/productivity.  They are so focused on the “nuts and bolts” that they aren’t developing the Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation.  This will eventually end up in the typical IT Sisyphean struggle that IT always ends up dealing with.  Most CIOs and IT executives today prefer the “what is” as opposed to the innovation path of “what could be”.  Traditional IT executives are not willing to spend time in the “dragon gap”.  They are under the illusion that the solution to a problem exists in the past, therefore all we have to do is reach back and grab a solution from the “solution shelf” as if we were buying a pair of pants from the read to wear rack.  This does not work in this era of the consumerization of IT.

I spoke of the Service Strategy dilemma that CIOs now face as it relates to VDI.  A lot of the contention that organizations are seeing with virtual desktops (in whatever flavor they use) can be mitigated by actually following some ITSM processes.  With the right service strategy these points of contention can be better understood and handled along with possibly forming a new organization within IT to handle this technology (again covering whatever flavor of virtual desktops are used).

In my opinion all Virtual desktop solutions should be gathered under one new organization within IT.  At this point the organization needs to follow a very standard phased approach, starting with.

1.      Service Strategy Phase: Whereby the new organization within IT determines the needs, priorities, demands and relative importance for a virtual desktop service. The organization then needs to identify the value being created through a virtual desktop service and the predicted financial resources required to design, deliver and support them.

2.      Service Design Phase: Here is really where the rubber starts to meet the road.  The architecture teams kick off the design for the infrastructure, the processes and the support mechanisms needed to meet the availability requirements of the customer.  By engaging the necessary teams and individuals at this juncture of the Service Design, the “turf wars” can be minimized if not completely mitigated.

3.      Service Transition Phase:  With the right teams and individuals assembled and working together, they can then validate that the Service meets the functional and technical fitness criteria to justify release to the customer.

4.      Service Operation Phase: Here is where the creation of the new organization within IT would/should be responsible for all current and future flavors of virtual desktops from server-based computing on down to the client-side hypervisor desktop virtualization that is coming.  This new organization would be responsible for the monitoring of the ongoing availability being provided. During this phase they would also manage and resolve incidents that affect Service Availability.

5.      Continual Service Improvement Phase: The new organization then ties directly into the team that manages and coordinates the collection of data, information and knowledge regarding the quality and performance of services supplied along with Service Management activities performed. Service Improvement Plans are developed and coordinated to improve any aspect involved in the management of virtual desktop services with the new support and operational team.

These steps would lead eventually to the re-architecture of the obsolete IT business model we have today and better enable IT to adapt to the change that the business needs.

The conversation needs to be elevated to beyond the device-centric and mobility conversation to the user persona virtualization and service oriented aspects.  IT needs to stop prognosticating about the trends and start developing the next generation IT organization to keep up with those trends and stop being the “department of No”.

I’ve stated many times that, change presents opportunities.  The ability to adapt to change is a key advantage in business.  To survive, compete, and win, enterprises must adapt.  However, because change is often disruptive and expensive, few organizations are prepared to take advantage consistently of the opportunities that change presents.

The IT organization, in particular, is sometimes often seen as a roadblock to business agility.  This is somewhat ironic because new information technology should be a key part of the solution.  But IT innovation causes so much change, that it is difficult to reap the benefits of this innovation.  Accordingly, CIOs have often paid close attention to cost, quality, and risk management concerns.  Because of the complexity of the business environment and underlying technologies, the desired end state was typically stability of operations, with changes managed as initiatives delivering new functionality while ensuring ongoing stability and controlling costs.

The situation we find ourselves in today is that IT is still sometimes an inhibitor of the business (in some respects) and we need to get the business and IT organizations to not merely align their efforts but to converge and synchronize them to reap the rewards of being flexible, responsive, and proactive.

One of the key challenges I see, and I’m sure the rest of you see, is that there are silos of applications and information.  For instance, a customer of mine wanted to roll out a new app.  It needed to go through five different “silos” to get to the end users.  I was in the meeting with them along with the server team, network team, security team, systems mgmt team, and finally the desktop team.  All of these “silos” had concerns:

• the server team was worried about power and datacenter space
• the network team was worried about bandwidth and trafffic
• the security team was worried about all the risks and vulnerabilities
• the systems mgmt team was worried about  trying to make it all fit together
• finally, the desktop team who has to support all the end users

These guys were lucky to get any application project out in less than nine months.  One of the risks with these silos was that the business requirements changed three times by the time they could get it rolled out.  This is not acceptable today and the reason this happens is because of the obsolete nature of today’s IT business model.

Another dilemma here is what C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan referred to their book, The New Age of Innovation, as the “line of business and CIO disconnect”, because it involves a chasm between what the line of business managers want to accomplish and what CIOs perceive their jobs to be – and how they are perceived.  Most CIOs that I have spoken to are still thought of as operating in a technology silo concerned primarily with “internal efficiency” and this is a seriously limiting factor.  “It’s not surprising that the CIO focus is on maintenance of existing systems and not business innovation.”

So why aren’t CIOs devoting the required time and effort to innovation in IT?  The truth is that most do, and in other cases it’s something that isn’t really generally expected of them.  Overall, CIOs have a very difficult balancing act as seen by this graphic:

Over the years I’ve talked with numerous CEOs and CIOs and they pretty much tell me the same things.  They want to:

    * maximize the return on their investments
    * manage and mitigate risk
    * need improve their IT performance
    * and finally they want more agility

Basically the net here is they want to be able to handle and take advantage of change today to improve their competitiveness, lower costs, and serve their customers better — and build an IT environment and business processes that can easily accommodate tomorrow’s changes.  How?  In today’s perilous economic times IT budgets are growing but not by much.  CIOs are having a tough time with changes happening continuously, more of the budget is going to maintenance and integration tasks, with little left over for innovation; but it’s not time to retrench.  I’ve stated before that retrenchment will surely buy you time, but it will not buy you opportunity, growth or a future. 

The old business model of IT is dead.  It’s time to “rearchitect” the business model to get in the game.  If not, then get out of the way.

Overview

Providing network communication Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in VDI is a significant problem.  Whether it’s a terminal, thin client, repurposed PC or traditional PC with terminal client software, communication to and from the VM is facilitated through a connection brokering technology or “infrastructure access” package. Common protocols include PC-over-IP, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and ICA.

In traditional physical PC network architectures, QoS guarantees are achieved through a standard called Differentiated Services or DiffServ. DiffServ is a mechanism for classifying and managing network traffic. The goal is to provide guaranteed service (GS) to critical network traffic such as voice and email while providing “best-effort” traffic guarantees to lower priority non-critical services such as web traffic or file transfers. 

DiffServ operates on a traffic classification principal where individual data packets are placed into a limited number of classes. Each router is configured to differentiate traffic based on its class and each class can be managed in different ways. This ensures that critical network traffic get priority over other non-critical traffic.
Per-Hop Behavior (PHB) is indicated by encoding a 6-bit value called the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) into the 8-bit Differentiated Services (DS) field of the IP packet header. While a network could employ up to 64 different traffic classes utilizing different marking in the DSCP, the common and practical standard is employing the following 4 Per-Hop Behaviors.

• Default PHB: Which is typically best-effort traffic
• Expedited Forwarding (EF) PHB: Dedicated to low-loss, low-latency traffic
• Assured Forwarding (AF) PHB: Which gives assurance of delivery under conditions
• Class Selector PHBs: Which are defined to maintain backward compatibility with the IP Precedence field.

Default PHB
A default PHB is the only required behavior. In general, traffic that does not meet the requirements of any of the other defined classes is placed in the default PHB. Typically, the default PHB has best-effort forwarding characteristics. The recommended DSCP for the default PHB is ’000000′ (in binary).

Expedited Forwarding (EF) PHB – DSCP= (46 OR 101110)
The EF PHB has the characteristics of low delay, low loss and low jitter. These characteristics are suitable for voice, video and other real-time services. EF traffic is often given “strict priority queuing” above all other traffic classes. Because an overload of EF traffic will cause queuing delays and affect the jitter and delay tolerances within the class, EF traffic is often strictly controlled through admission control, policing and other mechanisms. Typical networks will limit EF traffic to no more than 30% and often much less of the capacity of a link. For more information the IETF defines Expedited Forwarding behavior in RFC 3246.

Assured Forwarding (AF) PHB
For more information the IETF defines the Assured Forwarding behavior in RFC 2597.

Class Selector PHB
Class Selector PHB provides for legacy standard support in DiffServ. Before the DiffServ standard, IP networks could use the Precedence field in the Type of Service (TOS) byte of the IP header to mark priority traffic. The TOS byte and IP precedence was not used to large degree. The IETF agreed to reuse the TOS byte as the DS field for DiffServ networks. In order to maintain backward compatibility with network devices that still use the Precedence field, DiffServ defines the Class Selector PHB. 

VDI/QoS Problem

In a traditional physical PC network architecture, applications and their associated data are assigned specific ports on which to communicate. Web traffic is generally port 80, SQL traffic is port 1433, FTP traffic is port 22 etc. Network routers take advantage of traffic segregation by port to prioritize business critical traffic over non-critical traffic.
The problem with QoS in today’s VDI implementations resides in the underlying display protocol. Communication to and from the VM to the thin client or terminal is facilitated through a single protocol communicating on a single port, regardless of the application in use. All network traffic is treated the same, whether it is video, email, file transfer or some other application. As an example, if you’re using PC-over-IP to connect your thin client to a VM, the data that flows between the two devices communicates via the PC-over-IP protocol on port 50002. There is no differentiation between the various applications in use, because all traffic to the VM is on the same port and is therefore treated with the same priority. For example, a person streaming a YouTube video will consume a predominate amount of available bandwidth, thus impacting users performing their regular business related computing activity. The router cannot segregate and prioritize the traffic under this scenario. Further complicating matters, the user frequently changes applications over the same connection over time.

So how do you prioritize the traffic so as not to adversely impact the productive users from those that are running bandwidth intensive applications or websites?  With Lakeside Software’s SysTrack you can easily configure DiffServ priority based on the application or website with which the user is actively working. Priority would then be dynamically applied to the Windows TCP/IP stack, resulting in packets being DS-tagged according to the application in use and priority assigned. Unique to this solution, priority is dynamically established based on applications being executed.

Let’s use the above example, running various applications over PC-over-IP on port 50002. We simply define specific applications and the priority that they should receive. We might decide that SAP traffic and a particular URL associated with a company web application has a higher priority than other traffic. With a simple SysTrack configuration, we assign an Expedited Forwarding (EF) Per-Hop Behavior DSCP value of 46. This results in the DS field for IP packets that support high-priority applications having a higher priority tag at the router level, even though all traffic operates over port 50002.

In the example above, if we have a 128KB WAN link between the terminal and the VM, although the data stream is all communicating via PC-over-IP on port 50002, when the YouTube video data and SAP data is routed, the router can prioritize the important traffic by looking at the DS field tag.

Conclusion
As virtual desktop infrastructure implementations begin to grow beyond just proof-of-concepts and limited production pilots the branch office and WAN considerations will take on a higher priority.  WAN acceleration via the prominent vendors in the space is not enough to ensure that the data infrastructure is adaptable and dynamic.  The only way to reach this level of adaptability is to have a firm grasp of the workload and the deep analytic capabilities about that workload to drive infrastructure performance to benefit the users.

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There has been a lot of talk in the last decade or so about IT and Business “alignment”. But no one seems to actually achieve this elusive goal.  Why?  Because “alignment” is actually only the first step in achieving a higher level of coordination in what I call IT/Business convergence. One way that we can help this convergence happen is to use virtualization and application delivery technologies. 

In this first stage, or alignment stage, IT is still in a support role.  Always playing catch up to what the business wants to do.  This is actually where most IT departments are today.  So what does this stage look like?  It is where IT is still stuck in the old “siloed” structure with every department within IT having their own little fiefdom.  What I mean is, most companies still have their “Desktop”, “Security”, “Network”, and “Server” groups and they rarely talk to one another.  And when one group needs something from the other it takes forever to get it done.  The consequence of having these functional silos is that the infrastructure becomes hard to change – the more hard-coding you add to the infrastructure, the more rigid it becomes.  Some of the challenges look like this:

    1.  Lack of scalability, inflexible (hard and slow to change)
    2.  Costly to implement and maintain, hard to work across groups
    3.  Changes to the infrastructure can cause unintended consequences in what becomes
         a “brittle” environment

I have seen some companies actually try to optimize each and every silo in this current model.  This NEVER increases business agility nor does it change IT’s operating cost dynamics.

So how you do you increase business agility and change ITs operating dynamics?  It won’t happen overnight, but we can start down the road by utilizing a “virtual first” tactic.  You notice I used tactic and not strategy.  “Virtual first” is not really strategic, but a great policy.  In the adoption lifecycle of virtualization technology, this “Virtual first” tactic comes after the “limited deployment” of virtualization technologies.  Believe it or not, even though the adoption of virtualization is hitting the mainstream, there are still pockets of where only “limited deployments” like dev/test and non-critical production usage are as far as customers take it.  A “virtual first” policy will help in the operational areas of provisioning, standardization, configuration changes, and maintenance/patching and lay the groundwork for a more operational transformation in IT.

From that operational transformation perspective, provisioning with standard builds will be easier as we use hardware-independent templates.  Utilizing those templates and other tools such as visionapp’s vSM product, we can drive a higher level of standardization.  From the configuration perspective, we can use tools like snapshots, to give us the ability to rollback to known trusted states and for maintenance/patching, we can use those snapshots to test patches or rollback from bad patches.

The next stage is “synchronization”.  Here is where IT plays a more active role in “how” the business should operate.  For instance, how the company manages its supply chain, improves efficiency, goes to market, or introduces a new product.  At this stage I’ve seen companies that start to get how to be enablers of the business.  They are in the process of re-architecting their IT to adapt to the rapid pace of business change and become more of the operational component of business strategy and success.  Here is where I see companies focusing on responding faster to changing business needs by improving the ability to quickly integrate and deliver applications, data and work flow that support new business requirements.  Companies use IT to monitor business performance and speed the business’s operational adjustments to market changes and supporting policy-driven actions.

Using virtualization technologies as the base of an overall larger framework, we can get IT to that more active role in how the business should operate.  Here is where we can be more business transformational with the usage of virtualization technologies.  What kind of technologies? well virtual desktops for one, advanced automation of workflows that would otherwise be manual.  There are others as well like:

On-demand infrastructure
Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity
“transient” VMs.  Meaning purpose built VMs that are the destroyed when finished.

The final stage would be the convergence of IT and business.  At this stage the business model is so intertwined with IT that there is no separate orientation.  IT has become part and parcel of management’s vocabulary.  I’ve worked with companies in the past like this and the one thing that they have in common is that they are very much in tune with the global economy, and are playing a significant, leading role in terms of new business models and innovation, and are very much converged when it comes to business and technology.  One common theme among these companies is that they take a very holistic viewpoint towards technology.  They have a very dynamic IT environment.  This is where they are truly using the virtualization technologies and concepts as the base of business technology.

So how else does a company reach this convergence level?  It’s a matter of management maturity.  There has to be a vehicle for measuring that maturity. Not technology or business maturity, but a holistic maturity that looks at organizational and governance structure, at the way companies make IT investments, at enterprise architecture, overall strategy and planning.

One thing that I have seen in the companies that have matured in the way I described above is that the traditional CIO (or insert the name of your head of IT here) role has changed.  That role is not about technology, but a business role that is focused on improving processes by using technology.  Your company’s head of IT can’t be a supporting role.  It has to be very holistic because at the end of the day the CIO is responsible for the information and processes. So how can they be just a supporting role?

I’m known for saying this many times in the past – that any company for whom technology is a strategic enabler will become obsolete if they don’t reach this convergence stage.  So don’t think that just being at the alignment stage is satisfactory.  I’m not saying that companies have to be on the bleeding edge of technology to be “converged”.  I’ve seen companies that are very early adopters of new technology and they are floundering.  Why?  They are misusing the technologies.  Two questions to everyone: What are you doing to get to that convergence level? and do you have a plan for developing a dynamic IT environment?
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Liquidware Labs is also rolling out a new “user experience calibration” feature.  This new feature is going to be called, “Stratusphere UX Calibration”.  This feature now allows admins to customize performance and usage thresholds and then use the calibration feature to set specific metrics for known good user experience.  If a user falls below the calibrated metric values, the proper support teams are automatically notified of the negative trend that is impacting users.  This moves troubleshooting to a more proactive manner instead of reactive, thereby keeping the typical metric businesses usually set and that is, “equal to or greater user experience as compared to physical desktops”.

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Liquidware Labs Stratusphere v4.6 Sheds Desktop Agent while Beefing up Assessments and Service Assurance for Citrix XenDesktop and VMware ViewNew agent‐less design gathers data without the need to install software on desktops

Alpharetta, Ga – May 24, 2010 ‐ Liquidware Labs, the leader in Assessment, Migration, and User Experience Management for next generation desktops, today announced the availability of Stratusphere v4.6 with a new agent‐less desktop monitoring design, a user experience calibration feature, and a oneclick
proof‐of‐concept (POC) validation report for planning and implementing next generation desktops such as Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.

Stratusphere provides organizations moving to VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) decision support data to develop a clear path forward. Stratusphere Fit is first used to perform a full assessment on an organization’s desktop infrastructure. The solution gathers usage data and metrics at all integral levels–from the desktop, to the network, to the datacenter, to the SAN. Stratusphere UX (User Experience) then goes to work immediately after a migration by using similar metrics to ensure that an optimum desktop experience is being delivered to users. The solution has built‐in alert mechanisms to inform
appropriate teams when performance of any integral part of the infrastructure falls below a specified threshold.

Stratusphere v4.6 now gathers metrics from desktops with a unique agent‐less approach through a centralized network loadable module. This feature makes assessments non‐obtrusive and easier than ever to perform. To get started with an assessment, the administrator simply applies the Stratusphere module to selected user(s) through a straight‐forward Microsoft Group Policy Setting. Stratusphere then runs silently on the chosen desktops, quietly gathering usage data and performance metrics for later reporting and trending analysis. The solution is automatically accessed over the network without the need to install software on any client PC or virtual desktop. The Stratusphere module can be set to dissolve after a specific date or can easily be turned off by deleting the Group Policy setting. A standalone agent remains available to support laptop and mobile users.

A new user experience baseline feature named Stratusphere UX Calibration™ has also been added in v4.6. Once Stratusphere UX gathers initial usage and infrastructure metrics, the solution reports the status of the user experience as good, fair, or poor based on Stratusphere’s analysis of pre‐populated thresholds. The administrator can then customize these thresholds if desired and can then use the calibration feature to set metrics of a known good user experience with a single click. If the user experience falls below the calibrated values, proper support teams can be automatically notified before negative trends impact users.

Validations for Citrix XenDesktop/VMware View Proof of Concept Projects Many organizations are exploring test cases of VDI and have implemented POCs in an attempt to confirm a selected desktop’s effectiveness for performance and user efficiency. Stratusphere v4.6 now includes a one‐click proof of concept validation report to provide clear answers for these POCs. To use this feature, an integrator or customer would simply run Stratusphere Fit before installing the new Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, or Windows and then run Stratusphere UX after the installation. After a short validation monitoring period to ensure accurate results, the administrator can use the simple oneclick feature to generate an in‐depth before‐and‐after report of performance increase or decrease at all integral levels – from the desktop, to the network, to application servers, to the SAN.

“Our new agent‐less desktop design makes assessments easier to perform than ever before while the robust features we’ve added in Stratusphere v4.6 provide detailed metrics at all integral levels of an organization’s desktop infrastructure ‐ giving integrators clear solutions to recommend and customers a clear path forward for implementing VDI,” said David Bieneman, CEO and founder of Liquidware Labs.

Other notable new features include numerous report additions and a Desktop 360 diagnostics view in Stratusphere UX which offers administrators the ability to see all key data on machine/network/ host/SAN on a single pane of glass.

About Liquidware Labs
Liquidware Labs™ (LWL) is the leader in Assessment and User Experience Management for next generation desktops including VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and Microsoft Windows 7. The company’s Stratusphere™ and ProfileUnity™ solutions have been described by analysts as the industry’s first “On‐Ramp to VDI” by providing complete methodology and software that enable organizations to cost‐effectively plan, migrate, and manage their next generation desktop infrastructure with best practices in mind. LWL’s comprehensive solutions provide Assessment, Personalization Management, User Configuration, and Service Level Assurance. LWL products are VMware and Citrix certified, and are available through a global network of certified partners. Visit www.liquidwarelabs.com for further information.

Contact:
Media & Analyst Contact
media@liquidwarelabs.com
866‐914‐9667

I’ve been a noticing a lot recently that companies are only looking at what is going on today in their environments, instead of stepping back and getting a fresh perspective. Let’s face it most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing; they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn’t see?  In the book “The Art of Innovation”, Tom Kelley gets a term from George Carlin; vuja dé; what does this mean?  It means taking a look at something familiar with a new perspective as if you had never seen it before, and with that new perspective developing a new line of sight into the future.

Now I have to make this statement as it relates to IT, this doesn’t mean that you need to be on the bleeding edge, and maybe you don’t have the resources to invest in multiple areas of technology. Still, you need to ask yourself the question: What do we need to focus on to ensure the future readiness of your own IT organization and to enable the businesses we support to go forward?

I think Citrix has the technology to help you ensure future readiness and enable the business to go forward.  I ask a lot of potential clients and current clients to look at Citrix with a new perspective.  We all know how hard Citrix is trying to remove the ‘one trick pony’ stigma, and I think everyone that has the technology or was looking at the technology a while ago should experience some vuja dé and take another look.

When it comes to innovation in IT, I’ve seen customers actually form small teams within their IT departments that only focus on the future of technology.  They work closely with their counterparts on the business solutions side to ensure that the technology will meet the business requirements and spur further productivity gains and competitive advantage.  I call this planning today for tomorrow’s new technology.  This begs the question, “how far do you look into the future?”  Well the quick answer is it depends.  It depends on the role of your IT department in your company.  I know that in some industries I’ve been engaged with can be at a serious competitive disadvantage if IT doesn’t stay on the leading edge.  These are the companies that are using radical innovation to alter industry economics and redefining for competitive advantage.  The most creative executives I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when the best in class aren’t all that great. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.

One of the ways that I think IT departments and businesses in general can be innovative is to look again with a fresh perspective to a concept that has been around for a while; dynamic IT, and what this strategy can do for them around competitive advantage etc.  There has been a lot of debate over the last few years whether IT “matters”.  I’ve seen cases where there is not much debate in the minds of some business executives, who recognize that IT is critical to the execution of business strategy.  This isn’t to say that Mr. Carr is wrong; he is most definitely on target with his theories and statements, but many business strategies – including collaborative product development, consumer-driven supply chain, and multi-tiered channel management and customer service – are actually impossible to execute without the support of underlying apps, data repositories, and workflow systems, that may not be a fit for “the cloud”.  That is a whole other conversation that is outside my scope for today.

What needs to be on the mind of every executive is a new, more innovative way to make IT dynamic and create that competitive advantage.  Some companies are creating that “dynamic IT” with application, server, and storage virtualization technologies, but that is probably very innovative for the majority of some companies out there.  Incremental innovation is better than no innovation at all I say, but I’ve said it before in an increasingly nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas are likely to create competitive advantage.

Like I stated before, the concept of “dynamic IT” has been around for a few years now and has started to gain some traction but not as much as it really could (or should).  The “dynamic IT” concept and push for innovation go hand-in-hand here. By taking the vuja dé idea IT and the business should be looking at and understanding what capabilities exist in the marketplace that they aren’t taking full advantage of, moving on them, and then using them to improve the way they do business today.  A word of caution first; An enormous divide exists, albeit the gap is starting to close quickly but the business still faces the accelerating challenge to be more dynamic, IT has historically responded slowly to changing business needs.  This divide can be very evident in fast cycle industries such as high-tech manufacturing, consumer goods, etc, where the speed of business cycles often outstrips the speed with which IT can react to new market demands.  Here is where IT needs to be utilizing vuja dé more now than in any time in history.  Virtualization and other technologies allow IT to break the old traditional ways IT has worked and really provide that flexible infrastructure that is needed.  To use another quote from a previous post where, Jim Champy said, “For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past”.  Again; vuja dé
I’ve mentioned ‘dynamic IT’ many times now in this post and I’m sure you’re asking “so what are the drivers for a more dynamic IT?”  In my experience of getting vuja dé wit it, the most pressing needs driving the dynamic IT shift are:

I see these top drivers mapping directly into two paths that organizations are taking as they develop a more dynamic IT capability, focused on improving:
    

I want to share with you some of the numbers that support my case:

1. 82% of respondents agree that technology is core to their business, but only 71% see IT as effective at supporting that requirement.
2. 72% of respondents see technology as central to the goal of competitive differentiation, but only 61% see IT as effective.
3. 77% view IT as mandatory for sales and distribution, but only 67% see IT as effectively supporting them.
4. When asked to assess the importance of business drivers and compare how well IT is supporting them, the gap widens.  The only category where IT support quality approached importance of the business driver was in improving end user workforce productivity – 78% viewed this as a somewhat or critically important business driver, but only 45% viewed IT as supporting this need very well or excellently.  Worse of all, IT’s support for global expansion was viewed by 61% of respondents as important, but only 23% of respondents said IT was doing a good job at it.

See?  So how what is behind these numbers?  An inescapable factor in today’s business environment: the constancy of change. I’ve said it before, enterprises must adapt to the economic imperatives or whither and die; enterprises mastering the art of business agility can gain substantial and sustainable advantage.

The complexity of today’s modern enterprise – its business and IT components, and its linkages with other enterprises – increases the difficulty of implementing changes.  Different elements change at different rates, but the pressure to change is always there.

As you can see by this graphic there are many pressures on the business:

In this type of environment, how can you make your business more agile and capitalize on change?  By having a model/framework that addresses many of the difficult problems associated with change.

The Business Technology approach:

• Targets change as the fundamental architectural problem to address
  • Recognizes that being adaptive requires balancing agility with three other key dimensions: financial returns (especially lower costs), performance, and risk management
• Defines a core set of architectural principles to promote agility, and applies them consistently across people, processes, and technology throughout the extended enterprise:
  • Modularity: to minimize the dependencies between changes
  • Integration: to enable the composition of separate modules into useful systems
  • Standardization: to facilitate integration, maximizing reuse and extraction of value
  • Simplification: to minimize what needs to change and the associated costs

So stay tuned in 2009 as I start to put together the framework and show you ways to transform IT into Business Technology.

You can check out the new column at www.dabcc.com/michaelkeen

An interesting statistic I read recently was that “fully 11 of the 27 companies born in the last quarter century that grew their way into the Fortune 500 in the past ten years did so through business model innovation.”  That is an impressive fact.  So why aren’t more executives taking a harder look at their companies ability to maintain competitive advantage?  The fact is that most are.  A 2005 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that over 50% of executives believe that “business model innovation will become even more important for success than product or service innovation.”

The big question I’ve been asking myself in the past few months has been “what is GM/Ford/Chrysler doing to rearchitect their antiquated business model?”  The more I think about it, the more I can understand that I think these companies are so big that they will have to be very creative in the way they build this new business model for the 21st century and beyond.  That is a completely different conversation that I’ll work on for a later post.

For everyone else in the world, why is it so difficult to rebuild or create a new business model?  Some of the reasons that it’s often very difficult to pull off a new business model is that there really isn’t a sense of the processes into business model creation.  Nobody has really sat down and done a true study into what it really takes or has defined it.  Secondly, is that most companies don’t have a good understanding of what their existing business model is.

There are three tenets that, I think, must be followed to create a new business model:

1. Your customer value proposition.  Every successful company creates value for customers.  They provide a way for their customers to get a “job” done.
2. Your profit formula:  the core of why people are in business.  This formula is how the company creates value for itself, while creating value for the customer.  The formula consists of models like, the revenue model, cost structures, margin models, and resource velocity.
3. Your key resources and key processes.  Key resources would be your people, technology, products, etc.  The key resources are the ones that would create value for the customer, not the generic resources.  Key processes are those managerial and operational processes that allow you to deliver value in ways that are repeatable and scalable, like training, planning, sales, etc.

With these elements you have the building blocks for any business.  Your customer value proposition and the profit formula will define the value for your customer and the company.  Key resources and key processess will describe how that value will be delivered to both the customer and the company.

This is a simple framework, but the real power lies in its complex interdependencies of all the parts.  Any successful business will devise a more or less stable system in which these elements bond to one another in consistent and complementary ways.