Posts Tagged ‘IT Benchmarking’

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Benchmarks for StaaS

October 7th, 2011

A consistent focus area for IMF benchmarking clients over the past year or so has been more robust implementations of utility models for storage. We’ve all seen the charts in meetings showing exponential growth of storage footprints year over year, and seen storage become a bigger and bigger piece of the IT cost pie. Caleb Masland, who heads The IMF’s benchmarking practice, recently gave a presentation to members on benchmarks for storage as a service (StaaS). Below is a snippet from that report involving some observations on storage technologies:

“Backup infrastructure is being virtualized quickly. This is the space where you can reach a lot of “low hanging fruit” because the environment tends to have a lower transaction volume. Therefore, you have some ability to take dedicated backup islands and consolidate them. Most physical and off-site media is disappearing. Physical tape in general is decreasing drastically and really only used for compliance purposes. There are more specific backup management policies that are being developed. Note that companies are not backing up everything because that is the easiest policy to make. They realize now there needs to be a correlation between data availability for business reasons and for compliance reasons. Somewhere in the middle is the right balance to strike as it relates to your data backup policies.

Storage resource management and storage footprint reporting are becoming critical skillsets. A lot of organizations have historically had a problem with footprint reporting in terms of storage installed on the floor that is allocated to business units, applications, or being utilized. As you move toward a StaaS model, companies need to take a step back and make improvements in their capacity management and planning. One trend The IMF sees is companies having more mature and robust capacity planning organizations and teams that are being centralized. More importantly, those groups are earning a seat at the table for major decisions about infrastructure upgrades and even project portfolio management…”

IMF members can download the full report here.

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Posted in IMF Updates, IT Outsourcing, Member Identified Trends, Strategy

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Communicating Value in a Benchmark

April 26th, 2011

The primary goal of a benchmarking project is to communicate the value that is delivered by a given product or service and what opportunities may exist to improve the value being delivered by that product or service. This methodology has been rated pretty successful with organizations that have taken it up as a measurement tool. Looking at applications with a measurable and comparable unit can lead to some good indicators of how the organization is doing.

There are three ways to look at the performance of an organization:

1. Cost

2. Productivity

3. Quality

Cost

Looking at the applications, you can say how effective the organization is at provisioning resources or people for completing application development, support and maintenance. Is the mixture of in-house FTE, contractors, and 3rd party resources provisioned at a cost that is reasonable compared to your peers? This really breaks down into what is the average cost per headcount that you are paying and are you more or less expensive based on what types of resources you are using.

Another measure is unit cost to deliver or support your applications and the efficiency of your resources. How does the group deliver applications? Is it in a manner as such that the business is spending its dollars efficiently? The way we look at this based on this methodology is the cost to support an end user of an application or the cost for an application support or programming hour. Instead of looking at some of the other metrics, such as lines of code or function points, we are actually basing this on the unit of work rather than the unit of production.

Productivity

On the productivity side, we want to see if you have the right mix of resources in place such that development teams have a competitive level of programming time per person. This is focused on the ratio of your billable hours to the total number of hours in a year minus travel, vacation, sick time, etc. What are your man hours per person compared to your peers?

Quality

In terms of quality, we like to look at a couple of areas. One is process quality. Does your software development process lend itself towards applications, enhancements, having a minimal amount of bugs/errors? Another way to look at this is how many trouble tickets are you reporting compared to pure organizations?

The second is project quality and return. Does your group deliver projects that meet the needs of the business as stated and provide the financial benefit expected? In general, this is accomplished through post mortem surveys comparing the project estimate to actual. This can also compare, if an organization is able to measure it, ROI to projects compared to estimates at the beginning of the project.

*For more information on measuring application development, members can download our recently published report: A Simple Approach to Measuring Application Development.

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Savings Comes in Two Ways with Cloud Storage

June 29th, 2010

As we observe more adoptions of cloud technology for storage, we have noticed a drastic reduction in the storage growth rate by volume and cost. A recently completed IMF benchmark study on storage for a number of large IT organizations revealed some fascinating statistics. The average growth rate year over year across all companies for the last four years was 23%. That did not surprise us but what did come as a bit of a shock is that the rate seems to be slowing. Last year’s average growth was 32% and this year it plummeted to 13%.  We did detect a significant increase in the use of technology to reduce storage needs. These methods ranged from de duping to thin provisioning but, in the end, it appears the real driver is the cloud.

 Two notable trends include:

1) The raw cost per managed TB appears to be cheaper in the cloud. We all knew this would happen. The question now becomes will it continue to happen as service offerings mature? We all remember when outsourcing was perceived as the low cost alternative.

2) Many of the cloud offerings we have observed charge based on utilized storage. However, interestingly enough, organizations purchasing storage only use a percentage of the storage they purchase. The average utilization for internal IT groups is only 55%. At this rate you can see that paying for usage only, even at a higher per unit cost, could lead to real savings.

We found the storage spend, as a percent of IT spend, to be 5% so the savings can be dramatic.  For more information on IT benchmarking and trends please contact us at The Information Management Forum.

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Posted in Strategy

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