I have been listening to the announcements from different vendors about how they “get” cloud computing and how each is the best vendor to drive it. It’s interesting to see how many of those messages are rich in “benefits” and claims about each vendor’s magnificent management tools. Yet there is little substance on why (not how) to use cloud offerings, nor on the processes you need to enable the transition from decentralized operations to a centralized, off-premises, or hybrid, model for cloud computing. However, there is already a model that has been around a long time: Despite its flaws, the IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) may be one of the best examples of a managed end-to-end architecture for distributed, cloud and on-premise solutions.

With SNA, everything, from the communication paths to inter-process communication, was defined and monitored in a hierarchy of physical and logical units. When something failed, it was possible to follow the track along the different components to know where the problem was. This was not an automatic process. But IBM created a resilient system and paired it with a quite extensive library that explained how to operate and keep the behemoth alive and well.

Then came the first economic shift, mini computers (DEC VAX, HP 1000 and 3000 series, IBM AS/400, for example) came to life and started to break the tyranny of the datacenter, not only by providing cheaper and simpler systems, but also by unlocking the communication paths for new and more flexible protocols.

Finally, the big revolution happened. Computing power entered the free market, running on top of a socialized network (thank you, DARPA). This revolution produced the personal computing world, with its easy-to-access resources, but also a communications model that was open to everybody.

The bad side of this accelerated change was the decline of the well-managed datacenter philosophy. The decline in itself was not a big problem. The horizontal scalability at the core, coupled with the decentralization of the middle- and lower-tier components of the architecture ina distributed network made failures on one side less costly or too far removed to justify fixing them in person. Problems were solved either by adding more hardware or applying a patch or service pack.

As more layers of the application moved to the end points, and these grew in numbers, remote management tools appeared. Their goal was mostly to continue the patching process, not to solve core issues.

Soon the problems with this approach started showing up in the form of cyber-attacks: An unmanaged system is the door to your or your company’s bank account. I should point out that social engineering attacks (like knowing a friendly and trustworthy Minister in Nigeria) are a separate issue.

In response, today, we are moving toward a regulated computing model. Resources arebeing  brought back into a managed datacenter environment, taking advantage of low cost (as compared to mainframes) hardware, an open set of communications protocols, and access interfaces between services, processes, and end users ona myriad of devices.

In other words: Welcome to the Cloud.

One attractive promise of the cloud environment is the return of the hierarchical model, which brings back end-to-end monitoring. The error is to rely on technology to make it happen, following the bad habits of the old free-for-all model.

Back in the ancient times of computing, mainframes were great, and the processes around them were even better. I suggest that we need to look back at the way we did things in those old days and adapt them to today’s needs. So the first step an organization needs to take in embracing cloud computing is simple: You need to review your existing operational procedures, policies, and regulations. Look for gaps and start building a catalog of services and processes.

A good place to start is looking into existing information—frameworks like the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and the IBM Redbooks library. There is no need to apply the new operations procedures to the old architecture, but knowing the need and planning for it in preparation for the move to the cloud will result in more efficient cloud environment.

For more information, here are some links (thank you Wikipedia):

IBM Redbooks library: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

IBM SNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Systems_Network_Architecture

COBIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBIT

ITIL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL

Microsoft’s systems management technology and the System Center family of products represent a business that is flourishing despite the current economic situation. In the past year, that business has seen a 30 percent growth rate. The growth in sales of System Center into the datacenter was 50 percent. Against this backdrop, Server and Tools Business President Bob Muglia today announced the promotion of Brad Anderson to Corporate Vice President, Management and Services Division.

Asked to comment on his role in System Center’s success, Anderson said, “Really understanding the customer needs is something that I personally brought to the culture of the management organization. So we’ve made a series of releases and acquisitions over the last couple of years, and the resounding feedback has been that we’re delivering exactly what the customer needs, both on the desktop and in the datacenter.”

Looking to the future, Anderson considers consistency and delivering on promises and value will continue to underpin Microsoft’s success in systems management. “We’ve been talking about the user-centric client computing vision, dynamic datacenter and the service-centric datacenter—the work we’ve been doing with virtualization. We’ve been talking about software plus services and delivering the ability for customers to consume the software on premises or to consume it entirely as a service. We’re making great progress in all these areas of focus. System Center Online is in beta right now and we’re making great progress on the next releases.”

For further information on Anderson’s new role, see http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/. For videos of Anderson discussing System Center, see http://www.platformvision.com/mmsinterviewwithbradanderson2.aspx and http://www.platformvision.com/mmsinterviewwithbradanderson.aspx.

For further information on System Center and its market position and competitive impact, see

A major concern in most IT organizations is connecting the two worlds of project management and software development. Project managers generally are interested in the statistic of project health, project profitability, and the timelines of the project milestones. In contrast, developers are more enthusiastic about upcoming technologies, tools, components, and frameworks. The challenge is to find a way of connecting these two different perspectives for developing an effective, smooth-running, and automated working environment to maximize profit and overall growth of the organization.

A united approach for Portfolio Management (PPM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes can improve the entire development lifecycle, enable visibility across the various stages of the project development, and as a result connect two distinct perspectives. Microsoft provides such an environment with the integration of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution and Visual Studio Team Foundation Sever (TFS). The two products from Microsoft are already used by organizations to support PPM and ALM processes. Their integration allows the development team to work in a familiar environment, maximizing productivity and focusing on quality. At the same time, it ensures that all required data is available to the project manager and stakeholders to facilitate enterprise resource management and reporting as and when required. The approach empowers project managers and development teams to follow their own methodologies, select the optimal productivity tools and yet remain seamlessly connected throughout the development lifecycle.

Main Features of the Solution:

1. Automatic creation of TFS project once the project is selected for the development
2. Automatically link the Project Server and corresponding TFS projects
3. Aggregation of detailed development tasks in TFS to summarize development activities in Microsoft Project Server. This ensures project managers and stakeholders can track progress at the summary level, while providing the flexibility for the development team to break down development activities into more granular tasks / features

Business Benefits

•       Transform IT from a cost center into a key contributor do business value

•       Integrate governance controls into processes; minimize the risk of non-compliance

•       Facilitate project success by following standard processes

•       Efficient Utilization

•       Increase return on investment (ROI) by using resources more effectively

•       Maximize limited IT resources by leveraging the right people on the right projects

•       Gain insight into resource gaps/strengths; know when to hire or train

•       Efficient Project Execution

•       Deliver high-quality projects on time, within scope, and on budget

•       Gain visibility into project performance across the portfolio

•       Make more informed and timely decisions

•       Enhanced Teamwork

•       Bridge the gap between the PMO and development teams

•       Allow teams to spend more time developing and less time in overhead activities

•       Allow teams to work in familiar tools that support team and company objectives 

By taking advantage of existing tools and methodologies, you can unite your IT organization and ensure that developers and project managers have what they need to be successful. The resulting efficiencies and benefits will add to the business value of IT and make your organization more successful overall.

After years in IT, working in various areas of software development, application deployment, and infrastructure and security solutions architecture, I think that security is the most important platform investment for any organization. I think you should invest in security before investing in any of the other Platform Vision solution patterns because if your environment is not secure, it is vulnerable to failure at every level. From an enterprise perspective, when you think about security, it covers everything – identity management, protection of intellectual assets, application and network security, and physical security. Security means protection of organizational assets in all ways. And security is implemented with a combination of technology, processes, and training.

Numerous technologies are available for implementing security at various levels. Some of the forms these solutions can take include hardware and software solutions like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, anti-malware solutions, identity management, authentication mechanisms, encryption, gateways, and VPNs. Also, supplemental technologies are available to protect collaboration, integrated communications, business applications, and development of secure applications from the ground up.

One important aspect of implementing security technology is that the implementation should be governed by the use of proper IT policies and procedures with operational controls. Creating IT policies and procedures is the first and most critical component to any security and management program.  The benefits of this approach include the following:

·         Creating a baseline from which to operate

·         Communicating management’s intent

·         Describing acceptable uses of various systems, expectations from users

·         Providing best Practices to base the solution on

·         Establishing a framework for business continuity and disaster recovery

So to establish a roadmap for implementing security in an organization, you need to:

·         Create an IT strategy

·         Perform a comprehensive risk assessment

·         Establish a control framework

·         Determine IT policy

·         Implement your security solution

·         Set up programs for user awareness and training

·         Perform regular audits

Implementation of security with proper IT policy and user training is the key element to creating a solid foundation for all other solution patterns. Security is also key to enabling all of the Platform Vision solution patterns: user experience, Business Intelligence (BI), data management, collaboration and ECM, data management, SOA, next-generation Web solutions, and cloud solutions. A good security strategy and implementation allow you to get the most business value for your organization. When all business functions are surrounded by a security layer, the business can focus more on core business functions rather worry about security issues.

But no matter how much you focus on security, maintaining a secure environment is always an ongoing process. I still remember a quote from a security expert: “Security cannot be measured in absolute terms – either you are less secure or more secure; there is no term like ‘most secure.’” 

I’ve just finished presenting a webcast (https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032397348&role=attend&pw=49211D6C) about Microsoft’s Unified Communications (UC) solutions and finding the right level of information for this webcast was tricky. 

When we put our IT Manager webcasts together we have two primary goals.

1.       Introduce the technology and show how it fits into the overall IT platform

2.       Provide IT managers resources they can re-use

The first goal is fairly obvious, and feedback from the live webcast indicates we did exactly what we set out to do. 

The second goal is really where the value of the webcast comes in. 

I’ve yet to meet IT managers that didn’t know exactly what it would take to improve their environment.  Their challenge is in proving they need the money, time, people, training, and partners to make it happen.   This is usually done in the form of some kind of justification.  Every organization approaches business value justifications (BVJs) differently.  Some have a single authoritative individual guarding the door, while others have a series of committees.  Either way, the IT manager is on point to provide compelling information about why their organization needs this technology. 

As an IT manager, by the time you are putting together your BVJ you’ve probably been socializing the idea with executive management to see what their thoughts and concerns are.   When it comes time to actually develop your BVJ you, most likely, will research the topic and look for reputable sources to validate your findings and show that you’re not the only one with this “crazy” idea.  This validation is where we hope our webcast can benefit you. 

This webcast can help you build your argument in three specific areas:

1.       Background for why UC makes sense

a.       This information can be helpful for executives that are either stuck in the past or aren’t prioritizing new technology over established solutions

2.       Return On Investment (ROI) reality check

a.       If your organization is like most, you’re going to look not only at a Microsoft UC solution but solutions from many vendors.  This is simply good practice.  What is unique is that the ROI numbers for UC are so large that you might have a hard time believingthem.  A surprising fact is that ROI numbers for UC  are so large that when we are consulting with our clients we give them a very conservative number.  Even that conservative ROI number is called into question.  What kind of range are we talking about?  It depends, but we’ve seen ranges from 300 percent to well over 1,000 percent.

3.       Delighters

a.       It isn’t possible to look through the UC capabilities as an IT Manager and not see cool things.  Yet, most organizations dismiss “cool” as valueless. So for every capability we need to provide the business value.  I recently worked with an organization that found a successful way of approaching “coolness.”  They would take capabilities, such as the ability to forward a UC call to another device and classify it as a “delighter.”  A delighter is a capability that you intrinsically know has value, has a certain coolness about it, but you simply can’t place a hard business value on it without really stretching credibility.  No, it won’t save time.  No, it won’t save money, but wouldn’t it be nice if….  The organization I worked with collected a group of these delighters and when it came time to present the various solutions, it was much easier to present “cool” in terms their executive management  could appreciate.

In my experience most IT Managers not only know what UC is, but they know exactly why they want it.  Organizations that don’t or won’t embrace UC do so less from a technical standpoint but more because they’ve recently invested heavily in other technology, have no funding to invest in new technology, or have senior management that are unwilling to embrace change.  It’s our hope that these webcasts will help you find ways to make your business case for UC.

Let us know if you got more out of the webcast and if not what kinds of things you’re looking for.  We look forward to hearing from you!

The Platform Vision model is meant to be a community effort, and it’s exciting when I get feedback from people who visit this site. Recently, I received the following email that discusses the model and provides input on how to extend it. I asked Clyde’s permission to blog about his message because I want to encourage other readers to comment on his thoughts and to give their own feedback. We’ll be updating the model soon, and it would be ideal to be able to include your contributions as we refine the model. So please let me know your thoughts!

Here’s Clyde’s message:

My name is Clyde Nelsen and I am the director of a managed services company located in Mexico City.  I am a huge believer in using a platform as a baseline for helping companies look at technology as an enabler and strategic asset.  I have been using Microsoft’s Optimized Infrastructure model as part of our key operations framework – especially the Basic to Dynamic IO stages.  People get that!The one thing that we are adding to the model is building intelligence and smart energy solutions, with the latest technology gains, a device is a device, it doesn’t matter whether it is a computer, server, printer, IP phone, FW, Switch, or lighting, HVAC, Cameras, etc.  Every device can be networked…..I ran across your website and actually like you spin on the IO model as it is better suited for a vender agnostic solutions and for adding additional services, such as smart energy and building intelligence.  Cisco actually does a better job with this with their SONA idea but leaves out the major software pieces that Microsoft has included.  Your model captured both elements.

My thought is that I would love to [make your model] relevant to the market here, and then add additional layers that are specific to my managed services market.  In addition to energy and building intelligence we are also working heavily in Mesh Wireless and Community networks.    

Justifying IT investments is hard work. Trust me, I’ve been in the business of doing IT investment justifications for over 20 years and I am still surprised at how difficult it is to make such a simple proposition.

Why is this so hard? In general, I find that it is simply a matter of communications. In any relationship, you can trace most relationship faults to deficiencies in communication. In IT’s case, it is more of an issue of vernacular, or choosing the right words to communicate with others in the business. But it is also understanding the hierarchy of relationships in the IT decision-making process. In most organizations, decisions look something like this:

   Business defines a requirement --> Technical advisor makes recommendation --> IT enforces Enteprise Architecture

There are two potential problems in this:

First, the technical advisor sometimes misses the intent of the business requirement. This often comes because their job is to make solution recommendations. Over time, they tend to collect a “bag of tricks” which works most of the time, not to mention saves a lot of time and money in the process. Unfortunately, what is in the bag of trick doesn’t always meet the needs of the business. So the business occasionally gets a recommendation that is somehow off base.

The other problem is IT. Poor maligned IT. They don’t get proper credit for executing their mission, which is to deliver a technology architecture that supports the most functions of the business at the lowest cost possible. Enterprise Architecture is a great way to do this, as IT can define a set of technologies and how they integrate with the business (and business systems), then define how new business solutions will (or will not) integrate with it. The problem comes in asking IT to implement a solution that does not conform to Enterprise Architecture, and the answer comes back “no.”

A real-life example might help here. I worked with a global manufacturing operation based in the Southeast United States. They have a well-defined and extensive Enterprise Architecture, built up over the years by a very competent centralized IT organization. Their marketing group wanted to add a search box function to their external website. Well, the solution definition put in front of their IT wasn’t something supported by their Enterprise Architecture, so they were told to “build it on your own.” So they bought a search solution, hired some expensive talent to implement it (because it was new to their IT organization), and for the low, low price of $1 Million they now have a search box. Turns out their web site technology already had it – and it integrates with internal business systems. Was the million dollar investment really worth it?

Often times, the organization really doesn’t understand the true capabilities of the Enterprise Architecture in front of them. A simple example is a tool like a word processor, where most people cannot find (therefore cannot use) 80% of the functionality in the tool. Extend that concept to the IT data center, and the vast majority of users has no idea what’s there (and therefore doesn’t know how to access it).

I help large enterprise organizations realize the true potential of their IT assets through a concept called the “integrated platform approach.”  It comes from the realization that an Enterprise Architecture is not meant to solve a single business solution, but rather many of them. If you focus on the best technology solution for each business need, then you get a lot of very good technologies that don’t integrate well, and worse are duplicative of each other. Instead, by taking a survey of all of the business needs, coalescing those needs into solution patterns, then aligning Enterprise architecture to those patterns. The secret sauce in this is the right mix of conversations to make that process work effectively.

Your organization can benefit from a simple alignment of the business needs to platform capabilities. Join us at http://www.platformvision.com to understand how this can be applied to your business.

Advaiya has been focusing on developing business optimization frameworks that illustrate how you can bridge the gap between business requirements and IT. The goal is to communicate the value that an integrated platform can deliver to an organization and help IT become a strategic asset.

Need for an Integrated Platform Approach
From our experiences developing business/IT frameworks for organizations in different horizontal and vertical industries, we’ve realized that IT is often  unable to deliver on its mission of enabling business agility by making IT adaptive to ever-changing needs. In reality, IT is usually a cost center for most businesses.

Why is this happening? The problem lies with the current approach and methodology that businesses adopt towards IT. IT-related decisions are generally more reactive than proactive, and this results in adopting point solutions that address only immediate needs. This siloed approach of building individual solutions for different business needs produces redundancy and short-term investments in products and vendors—but not a cohesive platform. As businesses grow, integrating siloed solutions becomes a daunting task for IT and creates a need for additional IT budget. The results are increased Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), decreased business agility, and unnecessary pressure on IT.

An Integrated Platform Approach
In times of economic crunch, when every penny counts, businesses are looking to optimize IT in a way that justifies investments and requires minimum resources to deliver new solutions. To convey and demonstrate the value of the Platform Vision model through our business optimization frameworks, we leverage two approaches: The first involves looking at IT as an interconnected infrastructure rather than a series of siloed solutions. The second focuses on how infrastructure can provide cost-effective business benefits by optimizing technology, users, and processes, helping business and IT to:

• Develop a solution roadmap that has multiple deployment phases and provides a coherent view of the solution vision and deployment approach, which results in minimizing risks
• Deliver cost-effective solutions that integrate with the existing IT investments and infrastructure
• Deploy a rich, capability-based platform that is integrated and converged and is easier to plan, build, operate, and evolve
• Leverage a platform that already has capabilities like security, collaboration, and communication built in, which makes it easier to create solutions around business drivers

Here’s an example. Working closely with organizations in the banking industry (financial sector), we found that one common need is to effectively communicate and manage a client portfolio across different services. To satisfy this need, the organizations require applications for portfolio management, real-time communications, and collaboration among the workforce. Our research and analysis for various institutions in this sector revealed that most financial institutions have custom applications or applications from different vendors that work on different platforms.

But the problem arises when all these different applications need to be integrated. Eventually, companies realize that a portfolio management solution works in isolation from the portal environment. In addition, real-time communication solutions add to the list of siloed applications operating on an entirely different platform. This all results in manual intervention when companies need to exchange information and leads to delayed responses, customer dissatisfaction, and hence loss of business.

After analyzing similar challenges in different horizontal and vertical scenarios and considering unique needs, we recommend that companies establish a shared and integrated platform approach. The Platform Vision model delivers a solution roadmap that illustrates how to deploy all the solutions on an integrated platform. As a result, not only do these solutions perfectly gel together, but this approach also minimizes IT efforts in managing different vendor relations and contracts. The benefits become much more evident as the existing solutions need to be enhanced or more solutions need to be developed to meet the ever-changing business needs. Since additional solutions leverage the integrated platform, the IT infrastructure neither requires a technology shift nor presents barriers to integration.

If you have any ideas/suggestions/feedback, please comment or send me an email at gaurav.bhasin@advaiya.com. Thank you!

Today, IT managers are working to improve their software development processes to bring applications to market faster, reduce re-working of code, improve efficiency, and increase product quality. Specifically, organizations are targeting two areas for improvement: team collaboration and development process or methodology. Businesses are evaluating the transition from design and construction to maintenance and operations and how they can make the entire process faster and easier.

In this context, Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) is often referred to as a way to turn business ideas into software while transforming IT from a cost center into a valuable business asset. But before you start thinking about how ALM can help synchronize business goals with IT investment priorities, the question that needs some thought is, what is Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM)?

To some, ALM is an extension of the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC). But ALM is much more than SDLC. In fact, it is the entire life-cycle of an application, from the initial idea of an application to the end of the application's life. And just like the human life-cycle has different stages, so does an application's life-cycle. Once an application is created, the next step is to deploy the application. Then just as a human body under goes changes, so does an application; applications are often modified and updated to suit changing business requirements. Finally the application reaches its end-of-life. From this stage, the application is either reused to create a related application, or it is removed from service.

In “The State of Application Development in Enterprises and SMBs, ” Forrester Research examines the relationship between ALM solutions and an application’s life-cycle: "ALM solutions are integrated tool sets that support and unite the following life-cycle activities: requirements management, design and modeling, development, software configuration management (SCM), and testing.”

To effectively support such life-cycle activities, ALM needs to take the entire IT infrastructure into account. The Platform Vision model can help you identify the application’s intersection and interaction points throughout your IT infrastructure.  Understanding the IT platform ensures that applications can be designed to be manageable and secure within the existing infrastructure. Approaching application development from a platform perspective can also help you identify incompatibilities and areas that will require additional investment to make the new application efficient. The Platform Vision model helps ensure applications that are more dynamic and extensible to adapt to changing business needs. By using a centralized server and a common platform across an organization, ALM improves team communication and collaboration between developers, architects, testers, business analysts, designers, IT ops, and more. ALM helps to make IT projects more visible to the business, so that businesses can better align IT with their business goals and establish IT as a strategic business asset. Effectively executed Application Life-Cycle Management will help IT managers establish and retain a role of “strategic enabler” within their organizations.

Did you know that software problems found late in the application life-cycle increase costs from 10 to as much as 100 times the cost of finding and fixing the defect during the initial unit test?

As with any poorly managed business investment, an unmanaged application life cycle will negatively impact the bottom line of a business over the life of an application due to unchecked development and maintenance costs. To be able to use ALM, to transform IT from a cost center into a valuable business asset, it is important to assess the current state of your application lifestyle. An ALM assessment helps you compare your infrastructure against industry best practices, and it helps you measure the effectiveness of your infrastructure in platform-agnostic terms. You can then use these results to prioritize your IT investments. ALM minimizes project complexities using instrumented and interoperable suite of tools, that help businesses automatically gather project metrics, increase reporting efficiency and accuracy and improve project analytics while providing project transparency to stakeholders. ALM is thus a method of managing software development and IT infrastructure initiatives by automating the process from end-to-end.

ALM helps to increase synchronization between IT and your business to deliver improved business value to your customers and to provide an additional competitive advantage. For example, ALM promotes cross-functional team collaboration, which makes it possible to respond faster to change with integrated process and methodology tools. With the help of tools and built-in processes, ALM enables you to more effectively manage projects, track project progress, manage requirements, streamline team collaboration, design and develop systems, ensure quality, manage releases, and maintain software. Because the process improvements of ALM solutions can be measured by ROI (by reducing development costs, streamlining maintenance and operations, enhancing usability, and raising availability), ALM represents a large growth opportunity for your development tools to grow into ALM solutions. The tangible business benefits that you can realize with ALM include increased ROI from IT initiatives and improved compliance with IT regulations.

Do you think this information was of some help to you? Please tell us what you think and if you would like to know more about, how ALM can help improve the effectiveness of IT and business. Give us suggestions for improvements, changes, or additions — anything that will add value to the IT community. You can send us an e-mail message at PlatformVision@advaiya.com

One of my ongoing pet peeves when working with IT organizations is the confusion between “adoption” vs. “deployment.”  To help pinpoint the confusion, let me start with an example.  If you have Microsoft InfoPath installed on your laptop, by my definition, InfoPath is deployed. InfoPath is a great tool for creating forms, connecting them to data sources to capture data and perform business workflows. The issue is that you never use it.  So although you’ve deployed InfoPath, because you are not actually using it, you haven’t adopted it.

What do deployment and adoption have to do with platform?  Value! 

Your organization has incurred the cost of InfoPath and it fits into the overall platform that you have deployed. However, unless you drive adoption, the benefit to the business is approximately zero, and probably negative.  To put this in financial terms, you have incurred all the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) part of the equation with none of the Return on Investment (ROI). Now suppose your finance department, in an effort to automate the financial systems, gives you a new InfoPath expense form.  They connect it to your accounting system to gather charge data, use the data to drive a financial scorecard, and house the completed forms in a SharePoint site. This is, of course, possible because there is a solid, deployed, and adopted IT infrastructure platform to build upon. This platform means that security is in place to validate you, the data is accessible, and workflow exists to move the form for the appropriate approvals.

The new form is going to move InfoPath from being deployed to being adopted because it is going to change your behavior and get you using InfoPath.  Additionally, the new form is going to drive lots of business value by saving time, creating financial visibility , and increasing accuracy in expense reports-- no more data hidden on paper forms; you won’t have to stalk your boss for approvals; and project expense reports will take seconds.  

Having an integrated platform in place allows for adoption scenarios like the InfoPath expense form because you can use the platform model to see how your applications and infrastructure fit together to improve information flow.  With an integrated platform, connecting a forms tool across multiple line of business (LOB) applications increases ROI because it promotes adoption and therefore brings higher business value for your entire infrastructure.  Solutions built upon an integrated platform have a lower cost (TCO) due to the reduced complexity, easier development and simplified maintenance.

On the business value side of the equation, the ability to mash together parts of an integrated platform (forms, workflow, security, LOB Data) demonstrates the business value of an integrated platform because the adoption of the whole solution is greater than the sum of the parts.  In our example, the business value of InfoPath certainly went up because the user went from having a purchased but unused (i.e., deployed) piece of software to something they would use on a regular basis (i.e., adopted), saving users time on manual financial tasks. The financial system’s (LOB) business value went up simply by taking existing data and surfacing it into the expense form, which reduces data entry and approval time and increases accuracy of the data.  

When talking about your platform, keep your “deployment” and “adoption” definitions clear.  Remember deployment is only half the battle and the adoption you can drive with an integrated platform is where you will get the highest ROI and business value.

What has your experience been with deployment vs. adoption?  Where are you getting the most business value from your platform? Comment here or email me at rich.gleeson@advaiya.com.

Rich Gleeson
Director of IT and TDM Strategy
Advaiya, Inc.