Compiled by Karen J. Bannan

The CIO’s job can be a balancing act. On one side is the relentless need for growth; on the other, the vital desire to control both costs and an organization’s resources. This delicate balancing act requires CIOs who can skillfully combine technical expertise, business know-how and management skills. One way to achieve this balancing act is to compare the IT infrastructure and its alignment with the company’s goals. When they pull this off, CIOs can be said to possess a true 360-degree view of the business.

To learn more about how CIOs are managing and reducing IT complexity to create such a view, Smart Enterprise asked six IT leaders, “What steps are you taking to manage the increasing complexity of your infrastructure? Do you have new infrastructure-management initiatives in place?” Here are their answers.

ANGELO MAZZOCCO | CIO
Progressive Medical Inc.

Twelve years ago, our company was generating $1 million in revenue. This year we expect to be around the $200 million mark. This is enormous growth, and yet we’ve been able to keep our IT staffing flat this year by using more tools and technology in our IT infrastructure.

There isn’t just one thing we’re doing; we’re doing so much. For example, in the past year we’ve embraced virtualization through implementation of products that allow us efficiencies of more than 50 percent from a storage and data usage perspective. We don’t have to have a server for every application. We can share, so we have the ability to push the envelope. This has allowed us to not only make storage capacity more efficient, but also to avoid having to buy a hard drive every two seconds. We can utilize what we have and set it up in hours.

We’re also doing a lot when it comes to automatic monitoring. If you have people monitoring processes, they are wasting time that could be used on more proactive, productive things. This is why we’ve got tools in place that monitor system usage, applications and the database. That’s really key. We can see when we are going to have a problem, before it happens. For example, when testing new software, we have sometimes spotted an application problem before the users even noticed it. We took action, so their usage wasn’t affected.

It’s not just infrastructure software and hardware that helps us manage complexity. We’re now part of a fiber network. You can’t have an appreciation of the benefits of a fiber network unless you’re still working on copper. The redundant network helps us maintain the stability of the network and provides added bandwidth without increasing our costs much. For example, although our bandwidth increased tenfold, our costs rose only 1.5 times. We have also adopted VoIP [voice over IP], which simplifies things and allows for much more integration within the call center.

Finally, we created an executive committee that acts as an IT steering committee. All major initiatives are approved by this committee. This makes things simpler: There’s a single line of business, and we don’t need to get 16 approvals for a project. Progressive Medical, based in Westerville, Ohio, is a nationwide provider of workers’ compensation and automobile no-fault services.  

ProgressiveMedical, based inWesterville, Ohio, is a nationwide provider of workers’ compensation and automobile no-fault services.

GERRY COADY | VP & CIO
Frontier Airlines

The IT infrastructure is changing, but is it getting more complex? For us, the answer is both yes and no. We are in transition away from the now-legacy large server farms to a more virtualized and grid environment. We’re also moving toward thin clients on the desktop.

These environments are technically different from what we have been used to over the past 10 to 15 years. As a result, they require new and different skill sets. However, they do simplify the overall environment in the long term.

In fact, I believe that in the next three to five years, we’ll see a move away from home-owned and home-grown IT infrastructures to infrastructures operated by managed services companies. This will allow the IT organization to focus more on the value of its applications and information. For example, we’re moving back-office applications to a managed services company — up to and including the operating system. We’ve also launched a virtualization project to consolidate our servers, and we are implementing an ITIL® approach to service delivery. These strategies give us a more consistent approach to alignment with the business, better and more consistent operating procedures, and faster responses to customers. They also reduce any duplicate IT processes and resources and provide data for better root-cause analysis.

Longer term — say, five-plus years — we’ll see Software as a Service (SaaS) getting a foothold in our organization, with transactional applications provided on a pay-as-you-use basis.

Frontier Airlines is a passenger airline serving the U.S., Mexico and Canada. It serves 24 of the top 25 U.S. destinations from its hub in Denver, Colo.  

JOHN VON STEIN | EXECUTIVE VP & CIO
The Options Clearing Corp.

We have recently completed a project in our Unix environment to standardize and consolidate the many makes, models and configurations of Unix. What we had prior to this project worked pretty well. But now that everything is standardized, the amount of effort required to keep all of our servers up to snuff is significantly reduced. We also were able to save some money by consolidating servers and eliminating redundant software licenses.

Many organizations routinely undertake server consolidation initiatives. The funny thing about server consolidation projects is that the main benefit you get is the image standardization—more so than the resulting fewer number of servers. Server farms tend to grow over time, so the actual version and service pack release for each can be different, resulting in different system profiles on each box. Hardware vendors also change internal components in the same model line over time, which— especially with Intel-type servers—results in a unique configuration for each unique hardware assembly. Even if your shop follows a solid system management discipline (such as ITIL), these variations are difficult to eliminate. That’s why it’s good to do a server refreshment or consolidation project every three years or so; it gives you the opportunity to get a clean start.

Another evolving technology starting to yield benefits in our infrastructure is server virtualization. This trick has existed for decades in the mainframe world, and many organizations make good use of it. Although virtualization helps to reduce the number of physical servers (and power / cooling needed to run them), the complexity of managing the sum of physical and virtual servers remains the same. Actually, running massively virtualized servers in Wintel and Unix environments is a relatively recent phenomenon, so there are some challenges that will be resolved as these technologies mature; there’s no free lunch in technology these days!

As such, on the application architecture side, we plan to reduce the number of unique technologies we deploy in our production systems. Like our Unix environment, everything works very well today. But fewer technologies are easier to support, change, control and upgrade.

Companies can define infrastructure differently, but most include hardware, operating systems, middleware, telecommunications and all data-center facilities. Some companies consider the database to be part of the infrastructure. However you define it, the key to helping manage the complexity of the infrastructure is standardization and configuration management.

The Options Clearing Corp., based in Chicago, is the world’s largest derivatives clearing organization. It provides clearing and settlement services to all six U.S. options exchanges and three futures exchanges.    

TRACY STEWART | VP OF IT
Regent University

It is important for our IT department to recognize that Regent University is in the business of higher education, not the business of technology. We utilize technology to deliver high-quality education to our student community and also to run our back-end business operations. We continually need to step back and review our infrastructure, to see which parts of it provide the highest value to the university. We also want to determine which parts we should manage directly and which parts of our infrastructure would be better managed by an application service provider (ASP).

Much of the complexity within an operation is the result of making change for change’s sake—or just because there’s some new buzz in the industry. High on my list is the courage to buck these trends. We expend resources to ensure that the right investment is being made up front. Then we maximize the effectiveness of the investment with continued streamlining and monitoring.

To improve our IT delivery, we have either started, or are in the process of starting, several initiatives. For example, we’re working on backup management, which includes self-service and alternatives to pure tape-based backups. We’ve also started upgrading our existing messaging solution. This upgrade replaces numerous disparate communication systems with a single, unified messaging solution. On the back end, disaster recovery capability has become a part of our base architecture requirements, as have load balancing and infrastructure redundancy within our delivery architectures to improve application availability and single points of failure. Finally, we’ve implemented virtual servers to support all this.

Also, we’re continuing development of and upgrades to our Web-based portal for students, faculty and staff. For example, we’re adding single sign-on to our enterprise systems. This reduces application-landscape complexity by creating a single location for application access and authentication.

From a resource perspective, we’ve outsourced Application management and hosting services to an ASP whenever and wherever it is the best technical and financial option for the university. This frees the infrastructure staff from having to manage the server hardware, application upgrades, backups, OS management, system security, capacity planning and disaster recovery. It also significantly reduces the complexity of our operation.

Some of these efforts may seem to increase the complexity of the infrastructure. But the ability to work on infrastructure equipment, or replace failed equipment, without affecting ongoing operations is a significant benefit to both the IT department and the university.

Founded in 1978, Regent University has more than 4,200 students. Its students study online or at the school’s Virginia Beach, Va., location.  

TOM PECK | SENIOR VP & CIO
MGM MIRAGE

Resorts never sleep, and the MGM MIRAGE’s transaction-intensive casino, hotel, restaurant, retail and entertainment solutions must work 24x7. The ever increasing demands of upselling, cross-selling and guest cross-resort charging put further demands on the infrastructure. So does our international expansion. Additionally, CIOs have increasingly more pressure as stewards of corporate resources while continually trying to educate management on the importance of infrastructure investments.

How can we do it all? We are bringing Six Sigma to the rescue. Six Sigma, a data-driven process discipline best known in manufacturing, is helping us prioritize efforts, identify failure modes ahead of time to ensure appropriate monitoring and alerting, and communicate risk to our management.

To help, we have rolled out a tool that inventories all potential failures within a system, including its application code, the infrastructure components and user behavior. These failures—down to the minutest detail — are then ranked across three categories: business impact of the failure, our ability to detect the failure, and the likelihood of that failure occurring. We then use this ranking to prioritize our resource alignment and to help the CFO’s office prioritize its investments.

As fixes are deployed, risk changes, and so do the rankings. For example, an infrastructure change might lower the likelihood of problems. There is one final component to this system: The ability to tie risk to service-desk tools. This way, we can calculate mean time to resolve (MTTR) and mean time between failure (MTBF) for our various systems.

In total, this gives us accountability, prioritization and communication. It’s a simple set of tools that help us manage our IT complexity.

Las Vegas-based MGM MIRAGE is a development company with significant holdings in gaming, hospitality and entertainment.

STEPHEN BOZZO | SENIOR VP & CIO
1-800-Flowers.com Inc.

We are aggressively upgrading our infrastructure to meet our ever-growing bandwidth requirements and to also offer specific performance SLAs [Service Level Agreements] to our internal customers. For example, we recently completed migrating a portion of our wide area network [WAN] to MPLS [multiprotocol label switching]. This will enable us to provide performance SLAs across the WAN based on the “profile” of the traffic. Our applications that require customized SLAs include messaging to keep distributed systems in synch, video — webcasts, video conferencing, etc.—and the introduction of VoIP across our enterprise.

We also deployed a network behavior analysis tool so we can “see” what is on our networks. In this way, potential problems are spotted before they affect our service. We also monitor our Web site using a variety of tools. For example, synthetic transactions that record performance measurements for various components of the Web site can also alert us to any deviations. We use these measurements extensively, along with internal monitoring tools for systems, databases, network and voice, to pinpoint issues and isolate them quickly.

We have also defined our SOA [service-oriented architecture] strategy and started our walk toward SOA maturity. SOA demands that data be in the right place, at the time it’s needed. Finally, an ESB [enterprise service bus] that we’re now building should help in this endeavor.

The IT mandate is to become fully ITIL-compliant over the next three years. We expect this journey will help us define IT in terms of services rather than systems. It should also help IT to more easily adjust as business opportunities arise and directions change. Finally, we believe ITIL will help us improve productivity, letting us do more with less.

Based in Carle Place, N.Y., 1-800- Flowers.com sells flowers, plants and gift baskets both online and via a network of more than 9,000 local shops.

Karen J. Bannan is the Executive Editor of Smart Enterprise.

ITIL ® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.