Managing IT for Business Value

spend a lot of time talking with Microsoft customers around the world, and one thing I consistently hear is that the growing complexity of today's computing systems is driving up costs and limiting the potential of information technology to work on the toughest business problems. In fact, a study by the consulting firm Accenture reported that IT professionals spend up to 70 percent of their time maintaining existing systems.

The IT world of today is dramatically different than it was just a decade ago. IT systems are much more complex, with computers and software distributed throughout the organization and often around the world. Employees rely on laptops, mobile phones and smart handheld devices to stay in touch with the people and information they care about. Security technologies and policies are required to keep company data safe and ensure that critical systems can run without disruption. Partners and suppliers use powerful Web services to connect their business processes and work more efficiently. And customers have come to expect real-time information about inventory, billing and shipping delivered securely over the Web.

As computing has rapidly extended beyond the "back office," it has added significant value across organizations--from information insight to sophisticated business analysis. Yet, with this vast new capability has come increased complexity. Today, many business customers try and cope with this through IT outsourcing and additional layers of management software, which often add complexity and inflexibility.

I believe our industry has a responsibility, and an opportunity, to dramatically simplify the computing environment by seamlessly weaving together all of the devices, services and multiple layers of software into a coherent, efficiently managed technology framework.

By designing computing systems that can be managed much more easily--or even manage themselves--we can vastly increase efficiency, reduce business overhead, and empower IT managers to spend more time making computers really work for their company--connecting business processes, empowering employees and creating real business value.

Dynamic Systems Initiative

Over the past several years, Microsoft, in partnership with other IT industry leaders, has been making significant investments in an effort we call the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). The goal is to build a comprehensive set of solutions for the Windows platform that can help automate the design and management of the increasingly complex and distributed computing systems that customers need today. Doing this will free up valuable IT resources to work on higher-value projects, and make computing simpler and more cost-effective for organizations large and small.

Specifically, DSI is about doing three things really well:
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Building software development tools that help IT managers and software-development teams design computing systems that are inherently simple and inexpensive to manage. We call this "design for operations."
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Enhancing the Windows operating system platform with powerful management technologies suited for complex and constantly-changing IT environments, such as automated deployment, configuration and monitoring.
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Building easy-to-use, scalable solutions that cover every aspect of the management experience, with real-time feedback on system performance and a high level of automation.

Windows Server 2003 is at the core of DSI, and is already helping customers become much more productive and efficient by solving basic manageability problems.

Building on this foundation, we have developed technologies and services that further simplify deployment, management and security. One of our most important manageability solutions, Systems Management Server 2003, helps companies efficiently deploy and manage their software in a systematic way, so they no longer have to individually ensure that every server and PC has the right set of applications. Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 improves performance and streamlines management by identifying "IT health" issues automatically--so IT teams can identify problems and solve them quickly and efficiently.

We are also working to create a continuous feedback loop of information between developers, IT administrators and end-users, so that software developers get real-time information on the performance of their applications, allowing them to more accurately identify problems and solve them faster. We have built this kind of error-reporting technology into many of our major products, and it has driven tremendous improvements in our own software quality. With our Corporate Error Reporting tool, for example, large companies can now put the same technology to work on their own custom-built applications.

For software developers, we are building technologies that help them work more closely with IT managers to envision and design applications that work well in today's distributed and complex computing environments. We are designing the Visual Studio 2005 system of development tools to make it easier to build management into applications from the ground up, ensuring that they are simple and inexpensive to operate after they are deployed.

Through the Microsoft Operations Framework, we are offering guidance that helps organizations develop an optimal management strategy. And we are offering a series of services and solutions built on our management technologies through a program called Microsoft Solutions for Management.

Customers like Motorola are realizing significant benefits from these technologies. By using Windows Server 2003 and these powerful management solutions, Motorola estimates it saved 247,000 hours and $11 million in annual software deployments in 2003. Motorola was able to significantly consolidate and simplify its computing network and increase performance and efficiency of its Web servers. Software updates that previously took months to roll out can now be completed in less than a week.

Partnering for Management

The success of the Dynamic Systems Initiative requires a collaborative effort among Microsoft, our partners and standards organizations, to ensure that we are meeting customers' diverse needs. We are building our management solutions so they can integrate more easily with the diverse platforms, applications and tools that IT managers use today. For instance, we have created a framework that enables customers to use the capabilities of Microsoft Operations Manager to ensure the health and performance of their Windows computers, while continuing to use existing management systems.

We are working with partners to make it possible for Microsoft customers to manage UNIX, Linux and Mac computers in conjunction with Systems Management Server 2003, and to manage hardware devices such as desktops and servers through solutions that update hardware-based software components using the same familiar interfaces that an administrator would use to update software applications.

We are collaborating with partners to make existing business applications easier to manage on the Windows platform. For example, we're collaborating with Siebel Systems to make it possible to manage their eBusiness applications using Microsoft Operations Manager.

We are also engaging across the industry to learn how we can continue to evolve and further improve our management solutions. At last month's DSI Design Preview in Silicon Valley, a wide range of customers and partners gave us valuable feedback that is helping shape future generations of our management platform.

The Management Roadmap

Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative is fundamentally about helping customers optimize their IT investments, while simplifying, and lowering total cost of ownership. We are committed to delivering value through smart software that enables customers to manage their own environments--creating the strength and flexibility that helps them optimize their IT investments.

Over the next few years, we will continue to deliver advanced solutions, such as System Center 2005, which bring our existing management tools together and add enhancements that simplify and optimize basic IT management tasks. With the next version of Visual Studio, we are giving IT managers and developers the tools they need to create and collaborate on software and services that are simple to manage. We are continuing to evolve the Windows Server System with cutting-edge advances in manageability, reliability and security, making it the best foundation for an efficient IT infrastructure.

While there's still a lot of work to be done, I believe we are making great progress, working with partners to simplify and automate the way customers can design, deploy and operate distributed systems. And we're committed to continuing to deliver improvements in our platform that will help customers do even more with less. These management improvements will help us address the issues customers face in this new era of IT--delivering the value companies want without the complexity they fear.

More information on the Dynamic Systems Initiative, including customer case studies, is available at www.microsoft.com/dsi.

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