The Real-Time Enterprise | Tony Bishop

90 Days to Radical Cost Take Outs

Tony Bishop — 2008-05-05T19:40:27-08:00

IT organizations are increasingly challenged these days just to keep the lights on. Additionally, the business is looking to cut costs, maximize efficiencies and reduce spend during these economically challenging times. IT leaders usually leverage standard playbooks of consolidation, rightsizing, outsourcing, and vendor rationalization to meet the objectives of the business. When leveraging such playbooks, IT leaders should incorporate a “lean discipline blueprint” that will not only amplify the impact of their initiatives, moreover, it will serve to create a sustaining operating model that is best in class compared against their peers. To do this, IT leaders should execute the... READ MORE

Forensics for real-time computing

Tony Bishop — 2008-04-21T07:34:39-08:00

Firms IT organizations cannot become real time in practice or reality – without instituting a systematic discipline to decomposing problems within their IT infrastructure. In our experience, we found that by leveraging a forensic sciences approach to cause and effect ecreation or identification can rapidly improve IT service delivery and quality of experience. Below overviews an IT based Fo•ren•sic (f -r n s k, -z k) adj. - Relating to the use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment of facts. Meth•od•ol•o•gy (m th -d l -j ) n. - A body of practices, procedures, and rules used... READ MORE

Service orientation of IT

Tony Bishop — 2008-04-16T01:54:23-08:00

We are entering a new phase of IT where organizations must orient delivery of service across the entire IT supply chain to behave and operate in a real time manner. Those organizations that don’t embark on this transformational journey will not deliver the desired business growth and maximized shareholder value that is the fiduciary responsibilities of IT executives in support of their businesses. Let’s call this the Service Orientation of IT, where leading innovative firms are using as a strategy to improve the long term competitive position of business – by delivering anytime, anywhere information and processing as the business... READ MORE

Change management strategy for legacy IT transformation

Tony Bishop — 2008-04-08T17:44:09-08:00

One of the biggest challenges facing IT executives and organizations trying to transform their legacy applications, infrastructure and operations is the resistance to change. In many cases, this resistance to change is likely justifiable for numerous reasons – shortage of time, skills, resources or perceived disruption to the business. More often than not though, the true cause of resistance is due to the “unknown” in terms of a lack of understanding of new technology and the state of poorly documented/understood applications, systems, dependencies and actual user experience. The other big “unknown” is actually due to IT’s inability to step out... READ MORE

Aligning business and IT through instrumentation

Tony Bishop — 2008-03-22T02:02:33-08:00

As globalization of business continues to evolve and the drive to conducting business digitally in the "cloud," it is imperative that IT organizations get a handle on being able to track in real time every discrete user experience AND correlate this with end to end IT service health. Business and consumers alike have become accustomed to the “instant gratification” of ubiquitous processing experience of the Internet. Most IT organizations have typically invested a fortune in traditional systems management tools that provide insight into each individual layer of the IT platform – without an understanding of the correlation of events across... READ MORE

Datacenter in a box: delivering next-generation datacenters today

Tony Bishop — 2008-03-21T04:25:51-08:00

One of the biggest barriers to innovation today, is dealing with current datacenter complexity. This forces the largest IT investment dollars to be focused on keeping the lights on and containing infrastructure sprawl. The inability to focus a majority of time and investments on innovating and differentiating the business thru IT causes continued missed expectations and disappointment within the business user community. It is essential to understand that past design choices resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers and cost models that don’t work for the customer or best in class distinction. The lack of transparency of what has been done... READ MORE

"Information as a service"

Tony Bishop — 2008-03-10T13:56:32-08:00

One of the more significant gaps facing IT organizations today is “information on demand”. Most IT organizations have typically inherited an information repository approach that has been built in silos. This typically is exacerbated further with an infrastructure that is not well designed to either gather or move information to the appropriate destinations – combined with the appropriate entitlement of access. In our experience, we took a top down approach to mapping business “information demands” with relationship and dependency of “information resources” correlated against “infrastructure qualities” to visualize, capture and isolate how to enable the right information be delivered in... READ MORE

9 steps to a service utility

Tony Bishop — 2008-02-07T08:12:59-08:00

Virtualization is the topic du jour in IT today. The technology is cool, the attributes are slick and now the stock market even is tracking it. The adoption problem that is facing virtualization strategies stems from a bottom up IT driven approach versus a top down business aligned approach. Furthermore, the technology is limiting in value unless it is implemented as a “virtual service oriented platform architecture” with a dynamic operational model. In our experience, we took a business aligned approach and created a virtual oriented utility platform that incorporates the needs of the business, the control over execution and... READ MORE

Can IT become the "nervous system" of business?

Tony Bishop — 2008-01-28T14:13:34-08:00