How productive is your infrastructure?

For answers, look to the Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimisation (BPIO) model. Microsoft's BPIO model maps an organisation's level of infrastructure optimisation and provides guidance for optimising IT infrastructure assets - helping you to better realise the full value of your IT infrastructure investments while enabling key business solutions.

The BPIO model has been developed based on industry best practices with extensive feedback and input from analysts. It covers the three capabilities previously described - UC&C , ECM, and BI. These capabilities represent key areas of investment for businesses.

As you progress through the model, note that:

• Dramatic cost savings can be realised by moving from an unmanaged environment toward a dynamic environment. IT management moves from being highly manual and reactive to highly automated and proactive.
• Processes move from fragmented or non-existent to optimised and repeatable.
• A company's ability to use technology to improve its business agility and deliver business value increases as it moves from a basic state up the continuum toward a dynamic state that increasingly empowers information workers and managers and supports new business opportunities.

"Most enterprises are drowning in a sea of information, unable to leverage its full potential.

Source: UCBerkeley. "How much information", 2003

By working with Microsoft and using this model as a framework, an enterprise can quickly understand the strategic value and business benefits in moving from the basic level of maturity, where the IT infrastructure is generally considered a cost center, toward a more dynamic approach, where the business value of the IT infrastructure is clearly understood and the IT infrastructure is viewed as a strategic business asset and business facilitator.

Compounding the impact of finding information online, Gartner estimates that employees get 50% to 75% of their relevant information directly from other people and more than 80% of enterprise's digitised information resides in individual hard drives and personal files. Clearly, information can be just as hard to find within the corporate environment. As Forrester states, "Most enterprises are drowning in a sea of information, unable to leverage its full potential."