Rearchitecting IT: Simplify. Simplify

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Rearchitecting IT: Simplify. Simplify

6/26/2006

By Joseph C. Panettieri

Six vital steps to standardizing your IT infrastructure— reducing complexity and increasing IT performance overall.

When university CIOs look back on 2006, they will likely deem this “The Year of Simplified IT Infrastructure.” From Alaska to New York, universities are overhauling their IT infrastructures to include fewer standards, fewer vendors, and fewer potential integration issues. The goals are clear: Even as IT departments strive to improve student, faculty, and benefactor services, they must also squeeze hidden costs out of their infrastructures.

By leveraging fewer vendors and standardizing on a core set of products, universities can gain economies of scale in terms of IT acquisition and support costs. “It’s simple math,” says Cheryl Currid, a former CIO who now runs Currid & Company, an IT consulting firm in Houston, TX. “When you deal with fewer vendors, you can negotiate better licensing terms and reduce your organizational training costs. The trick is making sure you standardize on an infrastructure that truly meets your current and future needs.”

Consider, for instance, the University of Alaska, which has been working overtime to consolidate operations and IT standards across 16 campuses. “The goal is to improve efficiency, reduce unnecessary redundancy, diminish fragmentation of services, and contain future costs,” says Steve Smith, the university’s CIO.

On the opposite side of the country, the situation is similar at New York College of Osteopathic Medicine of New York Institute of Technology, the nation’s second largest medical school. According to Chellappa Kumar, CIO of NYCOM, all technology purchases are now carefully scrutinized to ensure new projects adhere to the school’s existing infrastructure standards.

Gone are the days when university networks were built on a hodgepodge of server operating systems, databases, network switch platforms, and telecom systems (see “A Painful History Lesson,” for a look back at past problems).

Six Secrets to Success

Admittedly, simplifying and securing an IT infrastructure isn’t easy. It often requires rethinking years of hardware and software investments, and a gradual migration to modern systems. Even so, universities can take six practical steps to success (see the accompanying summary, “6 Secrets to Success.”).

Step 1: Audit Your Software Infrastructure

The first step may sound elementary, but it’s surprising how many institutions let this step slip by them: It requires reviewing and auditing software licenses across a university. In some cases, schools will find that their current license agreements don’t match actual software deployment figures, and that can be a mighty expensive mistake. Institutions with too few licenses risk lofty fines (some can exceed $100,000!) from the Business Software Alliance, a watchdog group that fights software piracy. On the flipside, universities with too many licenses are paying for unneeded software.

That’s troubling news, considering that 91 percent of IT managers say their primary systems management challenge is reducing the cost of software licensing, according to Decision Analyst, a market research firm in Arlington, TX.

The fastest way for universities to slash software costs is to determine which programs are installed on the network, and cancel licenses for unused software. Instead of physically visiting each PC, IT administrators can leverage administration software from companies like LANDesk Software to perform global network audits that identify areas where licenses can be reduced.