Productivity tips: Spending less time managing your infrastructure

Looking into efficient infrastructure management

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With time and staff resources limited, these productivity tips can help you be more efficient and think more strategically about your infrastructure (consider implementing Windows Mobile 5.0). Follow these five steps.

The problem with managing your infrastructure is that it is so interconnected. The infrastructure is not just the network, Windows Mobile 5. 0, other applications, or the hardware—it is all of them working together. Most management tools focus on one piece of the puzzle, so it's not always easy to know, with certainty, how much you are spending on the task. Applications such as Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 provide an integrated view, but there are other ways that you can simplify the process. We recommend the following productivity tips.

"Determine how mature your infrastructure is—both your technology and your processes—compared to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library." Anthony Baron Global vice president, Dimension Data

1. Conduct an assessment. The first step to efficient infrastructure management is to understand your environment, recommends Anthony Baron, global vice president for solution architecture and strategy for Johannesburg, South Africa-based Dimension Data, a global systems integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. "Determine how mature your infrastructure is—both your technology and your processes—compared to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library [ITIL]." The Microsoft Operations Framework, which is based on the ITIL, includes best practices for the delivery of IT services.

The more of these best practices you use, the more mature your infrastructure is. "At a lower level, you tend to be more tactical, responding to issues as they occur rather than being proactive," Baron says. Create a catalog of the IT services you've committed to, he suggests, and track how well you perform them.

2. Track tech-support calls. This is a simple way to maximize your technical support staff, and further your efficient infrastructure management goals. Set up a knowledge base to track problems, noting the ones that show up on a repeated basis. A knowledge base may also alert you to configuration issues that your staff can easily fix, and allow you to create a self-service site with solutions for common problems.

3. Make processes consistent and automated. Baron notes that tools such as Active Directory and Group Policy in Windows Server 2003 can categorize people and equipment into groups and apply standards and permissions to those groups, rather than to individuals.

Whenever possible, automate your management processes. Whether it's configuration management or software upgrades, consider applications that check and propagate changes automatically. Microsoft's newly released System Center Essentials 2007 offers several tools for proactive efficient infrastructure management, as does System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

4. Think strategically when adding devices to your network. After you've done an assessment, you can see clearly where servers might have extra capacity. That means you can consider virtualization and consolidation technologies instead of adding another server.

5. Consider service-oriented architectures (SOA). Midsize companies can migrate to systems oriented architecture (SOA) without eliminating their legacy applications, and still reduce the cost of integration. To prioritize what components you shift to SOA first, return to the concept of the IT service catalog, identify your highest business priorities, and start there.

Infrastructure Optimization is not a complex process, insists Baron, but it is an ongoing one that requires an organized approach. "It's about focusing on key problems in a systematic manner, so that you incrementally improve your [IT] organization's capabilities and increase its maturity," he says.

Silicon Valley-based freelancer Howard Baldwin writes regularly for the Microsoft Midsize Business Center. His work has also appeared on AllBusiness.com and in CIO.

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