Page 240 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes The Problem: Creeping Diversity
Several years ago Dell began a transformation from a hardware infrastructure provider to
a software solutions and services company. The 27-year-old company, which began as a
domestic PC vendor, had moved rapidly to embrace other countries and product sets. To
complicate matters, Dell acquired several large companies in 2010, including Perot Systems
and three other companies in 2011.
A Process for Rationalization
In order to achieve its corporate objectives, Dell needed to rationalize its IT infrastructure.
This transformative process involved consolidating multi-national systems to improve
efficiency, reduce costs and enforce common standards.

The rationalization exercise helps an organization identify what standards to move towards
as they eliminate the complexities and silos they have built up over the years, along with
the specific technologies that will help them get there.
Depending on the company, rationalization could start with a technical discussion and be
IT-driven; or it could start at a business level. Rationalizing involves understanding the
current state of an organization’s IT portfolio and business processes, and then mapping
business capabilities to IT capabilities.

In Dell’s case the EA team began by establishing an enterprise vision—a blueprint to
guide individual projects. This blueprint laid out the structure of the enterprise in terms of
its strategy, goals, objectives, operating model, capabilities, business processes,
information assets, and governance.
Using the blueprint, enterprise architects can now inventory all applications and the
underlying technology currently in use, and then map the applications to business
capabilities to identify omissions and redundancies. Completing an inventory and mapping
exercise has revealed overlapping and duplicate applications that are now candidates for
consolidation.

Driven by Architecture
Dell’s Enterprise Architecture team includes business architects, information architects,
application architects, and infrastructure specialists. They have completed the
rationalization process and are beginning the next wave: business process transformation.
These changes are as much cultural as they are technical. After creating a Center of Excellence
(COE) to study its fundamental business processes, Dell organized the company around
five key “process areas,” each of which exists to enhance the customer value chain:

 Develop
 Market
 Sell
 Fulfill
 Support

These process areas are underpinned by a corporate process area, which supports the processes
that support the customer. Process owners in each area are partnered with IT to establish the
future systems that will run these areas based on process and capability needs.
Typically, after management identifies a market or defines a strategic direction, the IT
department works with the appropriate business units to design the necessary IT solutions
Contd.....

234 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY