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Investment Scenario Planning

B3

Understand existing capacity and identify the need for additional/new IT infrastructure to support growth of business processes.

Improvement Planning

Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)

Representative POMs are described for Investment Scenario Planning at each level of maturity.

1Initial
  • Practice
    Use percentage mappings as an approximate until procedures are developed i.e. if business volume increases 25%; increase IT by 25%.
    Outcome
    Reactive environment with minimal predictability and poor corrective actions, leading to budget overruns and/or over-investment (“sledgehammer to crack a nut”).
    Metrics
    • Number of outages
    • Total downtime
    • Variance from planned BAU cost
    • Helpdesk calls
    • MTTR
2Basic
  • Practices
    • Quickly count the IT resources and divide by business operational measures like volume, variety, complexity, etc.
    • Measure IT resources in business terms like % cost per unit or transaction.
    • Begin mapping mapping IT resources to business operational metrics.
    Outcomes
    • The unit cost of IT is understood and industry comparisons become possible.
    • A high level understanding emerges e.g. putting an extra 4-servers will allow an extra 50% volume throughput and reduce response times to sub-2-seconds.
    Metric
    Business measures per IT resources, utilized, spare capacity, lead-time to increasedecrease.
3Intermediate
  • Practice
    Undertake scenario planning using the IT Services model, identifying additional IT infrastructure requirements due to likely risk/change scenarios .
    Outcomes
    • Capacity Planning:
    • Improved IT-Business alignment
    • Improved ROI
    • Optimized cost per service
    • Scenario Planning:
    • Improved IT-Business planning
    • Reduction in risk
    • Improved business continuity plans
    • Example CP: Where should we best target part of our IT budget in order to accommodate 1200 users ?
    • Example SP: Are our remote access services capable of handling a predicted increase in usage brought about by and outbreak of avian flu?
    Metrics
    • Capacity Planning:
    • ROI
    • IT service cost per user
    • IT asset utilization
    • Stakeholder satisfaction
    • Adoption of IT service metrics by the business
    • IT service metrics
    • Storage requirements per service user (trended)
    • CPU requirements per service user (trended)
    • Bandwidth requirements
    • Scenario Planning:
    • Original predicted impact of incident vs Predicted impact following implementation of new contingency plans
    • Number of times a risk threshold is broken
4Advanced
  • Practices
    • Do capacity planning (including scenario planning/rightsizing/growth planning).
    • Quantify IT cost of achieving specific business process performance levels (or business cost of failing to meet agreed performance levels), facilitating appropriate prioritisation.
    Outcomes
    • Improved basis for prioritisation of investments
    • Optimal level of investment in order to achieve target business performance levels (as opposed to excessive overinvestment or under-investment)
    • Potential to manage risk more effectively
    • Continuous improvement in IT service levels
    • Target IT investments and effort in areas where the greatest impact can be made in terms of business process capacity
    • NOTE: This insight can also be helpful in managing change from a legacy application to a new application solution (identifying bottlenecks in its adoption).
    Metrics
    • Transactions handled per IT dollar
    • IT SLAs breached
    • Business process SLAs breached
    • Business process impact (eg additional process capacity) of service investment
    • Business process impact (eg business process hours lost from SLA breaches (ie no investment)
    • Transactions handled per IT dollar
    • Number of business process transactions (or hours) lost due to IT service/component failure
5Optimized
  • Practice
    Base decision making process on the outputs of scenario planning activities.
    Outcomes
    • Increased confidence in model
    • Improved capability to optimize IT
    Metrics
    • Variance (actual vs planned)
    • ROI (per IT dollar)