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 le 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 following 90 day plan to creating a lean IT organization. The proven benefit of such a program can drive substantial gains over traditional approaches to cost & efficiency projects. There are four fundamental steps to the strategy. Know what you have – Businesses must cope with a highly volatile and risky climate for commerce. To do so, successful organizations maintain “accurate to the minute” intelligence dashboards of what business they are doing, what resource capacity they have and the associated dependencies of the workload. PLAN – IT organizations must operate in the same manner. In the first 30 days, firms can leverage tools that self-discover and automatically document, inventory and map 1000’s of applications and infrastructure devices with their associated dependencies. This data can be leveraged to show “exactly” where deployment designs or design inefficiencies can be quickly addressed to reduce infrastructure costs. Understand how it is used — Businesses need to report to regulatory and shareholder bodies how they invest capital, how it is leveraged and how they derive returns and execute business. IT needs to incorporate such discipline. Most IT organizations do not track infrastructure usage in a “holistic” nature of correlating who is using what, for how, long, where, etc…PLAN – IT must implement a business driven workload and consumption behaviors analysis, tooling and tracking program (with factors of wall clock, calendar, special events, geography and channels) that are then encapsulated in service contracts with qualities of experience associated to performance, priority, costs and efficiencies needs of the business. This then needs to be translated into a mapping and orchestration model of workload matched with qualities of infrastructure service units that are then translated into the optimized footprint configurations. In the first 30 days, firms can leverage tools that extrapolate log data from all tiers of the infrastructure and correlate these event logs to usage consumption by user, by location, trended, etc… This data can be used to “exactly” target high waste, inefficient usage or in appropriate workload balancing models to reduce costs and drive greater consolidation, rightsizing and efficiencies. Change how you manage it – Firms must manage business in a real time manner – adjusting their workloads based on customer demand. PLAN – IT must incorporate this discipline into how they manage the workload of applications & services. Firms must implement dynamic runtime control and execution enforcement of ensuring the right work gets done at the right time with the right resources – virtual data, virtual access, distributed availability, etc… are matched as infrastructure services with client and applications sessions based on policy and entitlement. In the first 60 days, firms can implement and roll out such a management fabric and consolidate distributed applications onto a 1/5 smaller footprint while improving service level 30 fold. Implement a “less is more” footprint – Just because it ain’t broke … you know the saying. Organizations can radically reduce costs, consumption of power/cooling/space and deliver better performance if they institute the discipline and design efforts to create the “optimized footprint”. PLAN – Firms can incrementally and quickly implement an a optimized footprint of a self contained fabric of logical building blocks housed in a single footprint and interconnected with high-speed fabrics between each container. The building footprint container includes: multi-core processors, optimized memory configurations, multiple I/O fabrics (10GigE, Ethernet, Fiber-channel, Infiniband), optimal commodity disk (solid sate and spinning), simplified storage with tiers of provisioning, processing appliances, integration appliances, connectivity appliances, integrated switches, networking accelerators – all housed in vertically cooled containers with DC feeds, simplified cabling and a virtualized stack from the network to the transaction. In a 90 day plan, a firm can implement, test and roll into production an optimized footprint of best of breed components that can reduce costs by 80%, and improve performance 50X or greater. This rapid transformation strategy can position organizations into a continuous improvement process of LEAN IT. Our experience, pain and agony proved this kind of model works for any organization that operates distributed applications in support of a “for-profit” business. 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