Taxonomies used by the NIMM

Continuing on from my description of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM), this post describes the categories that make up the Business and Technology aspects of IT Infrastructure as defined in the NIMM.

Business Scope in the NIMM

There are 6 classes in the Business taxonomy of the NIMM.  These focus on the non-technical aspects of IT infrastructure and cover the following:
1. Governance – how well is the IT infrastructure governed? How does this fit into the overall governance structure for IT? Are recognised IT governance frameworks such as COBIT  being used?
2. Business Alignment – how well is the alignment between the business needs and the IT infrastructure? How are stakeholders from the business represented in the needs analysis for developing new infrastructure services? What processes are in place to measure how well IT infrastructure is aligned to the business needs?
3. Procurement – How effective is the procurement of infrastructure products & services? How well are suppliers managed?
4. People & Skills – Do the people delivering and supporting infrastructure services have the right skills? Is staff involved in delivering and supporting infrastructure services used in the most effective way? How well is the impact of change on people anticipated and managed?
5. Value Management – How is the business value of IT infrastructure evaluated? Are there disciplines in place to ensure that the realisation of benefits is managed? Are business cases developed for infrastructure investment?
6. Processes & Automation – What administrative processes are in place to support the delivery of infrastructure services? To what extent are processes automated to reduce costs and improve quality? Is process effectiveness measured and improved when needed?

Technology Scope in the Model

There are 7 classes in the Technology taxonomy of the NIMM, these classes form the basis of a simplified IT infrastructure model used throughout the NIMM.

1. Patterns & Practices – The Principles, Standards, Procedures & Guidelines (PSPG) used to create and deliver infrastructure services.
2. IT Security & Information Governance – Technology, relating to authentication and access control to both systems and information.
3. End User Devices – Devices used by end users to access infrastructure services, this will include PC, peripheral devices, PDAs etc.
4. Common Applications & Services – Shared applications provided by the infrastructure which is used by end users or other infrastructure components, this includes electronic mail, collaboration platforms, directory services, common desktop applications such and browsers, word processors etc.
5. Operating Systems – Software platforms including PC operating systems, server operating systems and appliance operating systems etc.
6. Infrastructure Hardware Platforms – Hardware platforms used to deliver shared infrastructure services.
7. Network Devices & Services – Devices and services that provide networking capabilities.

Two key points to note about the Technology Classes are:

1. IT Security & Information underpins all of the technical classes (Network, Hardware, Operating System, Common Services and User Devices). Although IT Security & Information Governance is shown as a separate technology class, elements of this class will appear in all NIMM classes.
2. Patterns & Practices is a foundation class for standardising and optimising the way the infrastructure is delivered. Re-using proven best practices avoids “re-inventing the wheel” and improves quality through the sharing of knowledge.

Architecting Knowledge Flow Systems

In order for any system that stores or manipulates large amounts of unstructured data and concepts you need to have some for of structure, framework or meta-data in place. For information flow systems, you need to consider a Taxonomy or Ontology, for those not familiar with these terms, below is the definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia – Taxonomy “is the practice and science of classification”, Ontology “is the study of being or existence. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework.” Without some consistency, structure or framework organising, storing and searching knowledge in simple systems (I am a great fan of keeping things as simple as possible) becomes very difficult and may result in inconsistent or unexpected results search results. Tools that help people collaborate are very powerful agents of change, this change can however be negative making these tools quite disruptive to an organisation.

It is absolutely critical to take an architectural approach to knowledge flow systems, by doing so you will go through certain thought and planning processes that will ensure that the systems that get created actually deliver value and minimise the risk of simply “shifting the problem” from individual based knowledge silos to network based knowledge silos.

Very often when I see how people are using collaboration technology, I come across organisations that have allowed this kind of technology to proliferate in an ad-hoc and un-managed way. This proliferation is often fuelled by the easy way in which these systems can be deployed and the low cost availability of servers and network bandwidth. What I often see is dozens of systems deployed that have little or no architecture; they are very often isolated from each other even though they are based on the same server platform. The value of these systems is questionable and very often I see a peak of use at the beginning when these systems are launched, then people revert back to their old ways of working because these systems while functionally rich are poorly architected and don’t actually fit into people ways of working.

NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model – Introduction

NHS Needs from an Infrastructure Maturity Model

Maturity modelling is a useful approach used in many different contexts (software development, process optimisation, operations etc) where there s a need to benchmark and improve capabilities. My work at NHS Connecting for Health recognises the important role that Maturity Models (and associated best practice) can play in introducing a consistent baselined approach to benchmarking as-is capabilities and evaluating what the required to-be capabilities need to be to achieve the desired outcomes.

A number of modelling techniques were considered along with two popular infrastructure maturity models from Gartner and Microsoft. None of the models considered were ideally suited to the needs of the NHS, so it was decided to develop an NHS specific infrastructure maturity model that included to most appropriated elements from the models reviewed.

In this blog I will post entries on different aspects of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (“NIMM“), hopefully providing a useful insight to those working in the area of infrastructure, especially in large complex organisations (such as the NHS) where IT infrastructure plays a key part in delivering services to the end users (patients, clinicians, support staff etc).

Some of the high level design goals driving the development of the NIMM are that it should:

1. be simple and intuitive to use written in “plain English”
2. be calibrated to be most relevant for the NHS
3. be technology and vendor independent
4. consider both technical and management aspects of IT infrastructure provision
5. take into account of any significant dependencies between infrastructure capabilities to highlight what the primary & secondary effects of change may be
6. have clear ownership and be easily maintainable by the NHS as it’s needs and priorities change
7. be modular in the use of maturity levels, recognising that an organisations IT infrastructure capabilities will be at different levels of maturity
8. be easily customisable to allow deployment groups to use the model to create profiles of capabilities needed for different services to be deployed
9. usable in a descriptive and prescriptive mode to accelerate adoption
10. recognise that it will constantly evolve and business needs change and technology evolves

Do IT and the business speak the same language?

Much of my career was spent working on messaging and collaboration (or groupware as they used to be called) systems. One problem that I used to see all too often is that IT departments act as the unilateral trigger for acquiring new technology instead of the business needing a solution and going to IT for the answer. Groupware was a classic example of this, easy to deploy with little up-front planning and high initial excitement (mainly in the IT department) in what it can do. Often there seems to be a disconnect between the business leaders and IT, it’s almost that they speak different languages. Aligning IT to the business has been a long standing challenge and much has been written about this subject which I won’t repeat here. I think at the heart of this challenge there is the need for some key cultural “people” changes to happen before we ever achieve the “holy grail” of IT strategy actually embedded and supporting the business strategy.IT managers and business managers must learn to speak the same language. IT folk are often seen as always talking in techie gobbledygook or talking about the very latest bleeding edge products and it seems to the CFO that they only ever go to the business when they need more money. Business leaders are often seen by IT as not knowing what they want, or not being able to clearly articulate what they need to IT. They change their mind frequently and they sometimes appear to go out of their way to exclude IT from their plans until right at the very end when they demand a system to be deployed the very next day.Any of this sound familiar? So how to begin bridging the divide:

1. IT folk, please learn the business your organisation is in. Be very clear where the next pay check comes from and be passionate about helping the business compete and succeed. Learn how to do basic financial management and understand how to create a business case for IT.
2. Business folk should find ways to embed themselves into IT so that there is a natural cross pollination of ideas and understanding. IT can make a big difference to your success so don’t take IT for granted – work with your IT department and treat them like an internal services organisation. Be a good customer to the IT department and they will be good to you.

Software Asset Management – Dry or Hot Subject

Software Asset Management (SAM) is the entire infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control and protection of the software assets within an organisation, throughout all stages of their life cycle, from acquisition through to disposal/de-install.

On the face of it, this can seem as a very dry “rear view mirror” approach to satisfy an accounting need. Actually, I view SAM as a more pro-active capability that’s pretty important in helping an IT department get the most value from what it has acquired (or is about to).

Having an effective SAM capability in your organisation means that you can :

• Get legal AND stay legal
• Understand what you actually have compared to what you use which means that you can start paying for what you use not what you have
• Have more meaningful conversations with software vendors when it comes to negotiating licenses. Having real information about what you use means that you can re-shape licensing deals to more accurately reflect what your organisation needs
• Save money be reallocating licenses away from “dormant” installations to people that actually need specific software, ultimately this may allow you to release licenses for software you do not use
• Have a much better visibility of what you users are doing
• Spotting unusual pockets of software, one organisation I worked for on an engagement where we were shocked to discover that one part of the organisation had 2000 copies of a software development suite installed on end user PCs – what were those people developing!

Below is a sample set of goals or critical success factors (which can easily be turned into KPIs) for an organisation to aim for when establishing a SAM capability:

• Records should exist for for all software that is purchased, these should be held centrally in one integrated asset management system.
• There should be an enforceable policy for defining who can buy software and how with direct accountability for business unit managers to ensure that this policy is followed.
• Executive level accountability should exist for maintaining accurate records of software purchases. The performance (including accuracy and completeness) of this role is measured monthly.
• Technology (or an outsourced service) should be in place to audit which software is installed on equipment the organisation is responsible for. This should be integrated into other management capabilities covering the entire estate. Outputs from this should be automatically included as KPIs in the corporate performance dashboards used by the board.
• Mature and proven process should be in place for the monthly auditing of licensing position. This should be a fully automated process covering the entire estate. KPI data from this licensing audit is consolidated and included in the core management KPI reports.

Ultimately, there should be confidence that the organisation can demonstrate license compliance level and have proactive activities and measures in place to manage this position and get the most value from software assets!

Unified Communications or Unified Confusion?

I am currently working on a project to define a strategy and road map for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Part of this involves creating a set of guidelines for Unified Communications (UC) initiatives so that definitions, blueprints and an architecture can be developed.

As I start this piece of work with my client, it is soon clear to me that there is a lot of confusion and inconsistency as to what UC actually is. Sitting in a room with suppliers and IT Architects it soon strikes me that everyone has morphed UC into something that they want it to be given their own preferences and agendas. Now I don’t have a problem with this, as such, but when trying to define a set of consistent standards and guidelines, the start point has to be a clear and shared understanding of the UC domain. What it is, and as important what it is not.

I have asked the team I am working with to spend some up-front time creating a vision (in business terms) of what UC is and more importantly what UC will enable.

If you Google UC you get “about” 8,840,000 hits, so not much point in me defining or re-defining it here. What I will share here is my “starter-for-ten” vision for UC and what this might actually mean for a user (remember them!!)

Unified Communications provides me with a set of capabilities that enable me to communicate in a secure and trusted way with the people I want to in a way that I want to when I want to. It provides me with a number of choices that make communications convenient and usefully given my role and the responsibilities and obligations I have.

Unified Communications enables me to be more responsive and engaged with my colleagues improving my effectiveness and my contribution to my organisation.

Now that we have this out of the way, the techies can start arguing about products, technologies, SaaS, presence, identity management, transport protocols, VoIP, integration, universal inbox, web conferencing etc….

Infrastructure Maturity Model

According to many respected analysts, a typical organisation will spend around 70% of it’s IT budget on “running the organisation” (defined as applications maintenance & infrastructure), leaving 30% of the budget for initiatives that change or “improve the organisation”.

With so much resource allocated to infrastructure it is surprising that the potential impact that IT infrastructure is often not fully appreciated or even planned. Infrastructure tends to be viewed as those transparent services and capabilities that we all take for granted.

If you now set this in the context of the total IT budget being typically being somewhere in the region of 3%-5% of revenue (depending on sector), it soon becomes clear that having a mature and effective infrastructure can reduce costs, business manage risks and act as an enabler for improving the way any organisation does business.

Maturity modelling is a useful approach used in many different contexts (software development, process optimisation, operations etc) where there s a need to benchmark and improve capabilities.

Organisations should consider the role that an Infrastructure Maturity Model can play in introducing a consistent approach to benchmarking as-is infrastructure capabilities and evaluating what the target capabilities need to be so that their infrastructure can support the business needs and generate the required ROI.

Knowledge Management or Knowledge Flow?

Can an organisation really manage knowledge? should it even try to? Putting a strong emphasis on the “management” of knowledge can lead to very well managed “silos” of knowledge which I think misses the fundamental point.

I prefer to use the term “knowledge flow” when describing a core capability that organisations should try to enable.

Consider the Wikipedia definition of knowledge management:

“Knowledge Management refers to a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organisations”

The main reason I prefer to use the term knowledge flow instead of knowledge management is that I feel that the emphasis should be on recognising the importance of enabling the movement, flow, transference, accessibility and “absorption” of knowledge rather then emphasising the need to “control” or “manage” knowledge like many more traditional fixed assets. Often I have come across what I refer to as “knowledge stealth” situations, by this I mean situations where knowledge or expertise is hidden – not deliberately – but by the virtue of it being fixed in one place and not visible on the corporate or social radar. It’s only when knowledge flow is enable that you can actually begin to detect it’s existence and then find ways to tap into it.

This flow of knowledge has been an area of interest to me since the early nineties when the emergence of “Groupware” products signalled a change in the way people viewed collaboration and started the think about the less obvious and deeper value that this kind of technology could bring to an organisation. In order to understand what the potential benefits from knowledge enabling technologies might be, one needs to consider how knowledge changes state and flows in and around an organisation, the paths it takes, the impact it has on individuals and how knowledge and information increases in “potential” value.

Do NHS top 10 tips apply to you?

In his recent speech during the 60th birthday celebrations of the NHS, President and CEO Institute for Healthcare Improvement USA Don Berwick offered 10 tips for the NHS to get even better.

I have chosen one of his top ten tips and changed references from patient and healthcare to customer and service, could this apply to your business?

First, put the customer at the center – at the absolute center of your business. Put the customer at the center for everything that you do. In its most helpful and authentic form, this rule is bold; it is subversive. It feels very risky to both managers and thye board, especially at first. It is not focus groups or surveys or token representation. It is the active presence of customers, partners and stakeholders in the design, management, assessment, and improvement of the products and services you provide. It means customizing your products and services literally to the level of the individual customer needs. It means asking, “How would you like this done?” It means equipping every customer for self-service as much as each wants. It means total transparency – broad daylight. It means that customers have their own profiles, and that any barriers to serving customers are eliminated. It means, “Nothing about me without me.” It means that we who offer products and services stop acting like we have a captive market and a right to sell, and start acting like stakeholders in their value chain. For professionals made anxious by this extreme image, let me simply remind you how you probably begin every encounter when you are following your best instincts; you ask, “How can I help you?” and then you fall silent and you listen.

Here is the complete list, could his be usefully applied to your business?

1. First, put the patient at the center – at the absolute center of your system of care.
2. Second, stop restructuring
3. Third, strengthen the local health care systems – community care systems – as a whole.
4. Fourth, to help do that, reinvest in general practice and primary care.
5. Fifth, please don’t put your faith in market forces.
6. Sixth, avoid supply-driven care like the plague.
7. Seventh, develop an integrated approach to the assessment, assurance, and improvement of quality.
8. Eighth, heal the divide among the professions, the managers, and the government.
9. Ninth, train your health care workforce for the future, not the past.
10. Tenth, and finally, aim for health.

To access the full transcript of Don’s speech click on the following link:
http://www.wales.nhs.uk/sites3/page.cfm?orgId=781&pid=32953

Do you know your TCO?

As part of my job I get to meet IT managers and directors from a number of different organisations. One of the areas I discuss is how well IT managers understand the finances for the IT services that they provide to the business. One question that often highlights this is “Do you know what the TCO for a typical desktop PC is?”. For those few that have attempted to calculate this, I ask what that value is, then finally I ask how they calculate the TCO figure.

Needless to say only a very small percentage of IT managers that I meet actually know their infrastructure TCO, and for those few that have calculated their desktop TCO, the figures I hear vary greatly, anywhere from a £200 per device per year to £2000.

At the heart of this variation is the inconsistency in what people understand TCO to be and then the mechanics of how they actually calculate it.

When thinking about TCO, consider:

• What costs do you include?
• Initial purchase or leasing costs?
• What about software, maintenance, apportioned support costs?
• What about hidden support costs?
• How do you depreciate a PC?
• What is the useful life of a desktop PC?
• What about any in-life upgrades to extend the useful life?
• What is the real cost of lets say adding 2 GB of RAM 2 years into the ownership of a PC? Is it actually worth upgrading a PC when you consider the cost of acquireingthe extra memory, shipping, installation, disruption to the users etc…

My view is that you should develop at TCO model that suits your business and its profile, or adopt and tailor an existing TCO model. One you have this basic TCO model and chart of IT accounts standardise its use across the organisation. Driving a common TCO model will mean that when you get different locations using the same TCO model, you can then start to do internal benchmarking of your TCO so that you can start to compare the performance of different groups/locations across the enterprise. This benchmarking will stimulate competition to get most value out of assets and drive IT infrastructure maturity by enabling meaningful conversations between good and bad performers on how they manager and deliver their desktop.