Next-generation infrastructure platforms

We help clients determine in which types of platforms to invest and which workloads to migrate. We also address the operational and organizational changes required to capture value from next-generation platforms.

Front-to-back demand optimization

• Infrastructure exists only to support business needs and requests. However, the connection between true business needs and an institution’s infrastructure environment is often indirect and opaque. The result: multiple levels of over-provisioning.
• Front-to-back demand optimization brings together the full set of factors that affect infrastructure cost, including business requirements, application architecture, and systems configuration. We often help clients see a 10 percent overall improvement in infrastructure costs.
Building the service-management organization
• Business users and applications developers increasingly expect infrastructure to provide integrated services, with provisioning and incident-management processes that cut across traditional technology domains like servers, storage, mainframes, end-user devices, and networks.
• We help large infrastructure functions create organizational structures that strike the right balance between supporting technical depth and providing processes and services that span multiple technologies.

Lean infrastructure operations

• Immature processes and a culture of “heroics” create pervasive waste in many infrastructure organizations (e.g., frequent rework and large queues) that both drive up costs and diminish user experience.
• Lean operations techniques have driven 20–30 percent productivity and cycle-time improvements in all aspects of infrastructure delivery by eliminating rework, segmenting requests by complexity, and increasing “time on task” for key resources.

Targeted sourcing
• Infrastructure organizations want to tap vendor scale, investments, and capabilities, yet the all-encompassing IT infrastructure “megadeal” is often ineffective.
• Targeted sourcing identifies the “slices” of IT infrastructure in which vendors can provide incremental value or which can be provided from low-cost locations, and defines the capabilities required to orchestrate, govern, and optimize a multivendor environment.