What about twelve questions as a last check in before the final countdown?
1. What are the key applications for the enterprise? This is usually a question that IT managers can answer easily: ERP (SAP, Oracle…), voice and tele-presence, collaborative tools (like Sharepoint or Notes…) and a few others. If the list is too long (say more than 10), there is a flaw: as everything is critical, there is a fair chance that none are truly important…
2. What are the different application delivery models? For example: is desktop virtualization (Citrix, VMware…) rolled out? To which extent are the data centers consolidated? Delivery models may differ for each application; they are important as they impact operations and responsibilities in the enterprise.
3. What does ‘performance’ mean for the business? While both are fundamental for the business, a transactional application that’s intensively used by employees probably has different requirements from email and corporate collaborative tools.
B) The operations model is very much driven by the enterprise’s culture, organization and evolution strategy. It is obviously related to a WAN Governance implementation:
4. Is IT and network management centralized or decentralized? Is the corporate team empowered to make global decisions, or does the enterprise work in a more collective consensus-driven mode with the Business Units and territories? What is today’s situation and is the enterprise willing to change it?
5. Is the company culture about outsourcing or insourcing? Some enterprises will decide to subcontract all non core-business activities as much as possible; others will prefer to keep in-house operations.
6. What is the preferred run model? Self-management (where all the work and responsibilities associated with WAN Governance remain within the enterprise), co-management (technical work is performed by a service provider but control is kept at the enterprise level) or even full management by a third party?
C) Money talks: financial aspects – surprise surprise – have a strong impact on IT and Network managers’ strategy for application delivery over the WAN:
7. Capex versus Opex. Depending on the company financial structure and policy, the CFO’s preference to minimize Capex or keep Opex as low as possible has to be considered.
8. What is the desired economic impact? Is the company’s primary requirement to reduce IT and network costs(Yin-face of the economic impact) or is it first looking to improve productivity (Yang-face)?
9. How are expenses allocated? Will costs be broken down between Business Units? Per Application delivered across the network? Per site, region or subsidiary? Will they be credited centrally? The way network expenses are shared is probably the most meaningful clue to how the WAN is managed.
D) Organization of the Governance is the next important issue to be decided. While it will be awkward to set-up complex processes, some aspects must be clearly defined in order to obtain the blessing of the company management and, finally, the sustainable benefits that are looking for:
10. Who are the sponsors? It is really useful to set-up a Steering Committee that involves the key stakeholders like the CIO and the CFO, and why not some representative people from Business Units (after all, they are the ones you care about). Frequency or meetings must not be too high – quarterly or even bi-annual meetings and/or reports is probably sufficient.
11. Who’s in charge? Do not expect the Steering Committee to do the job – it is responsible for setting goals and guidelines and discussing achievements, no more, no less. Thus someone else, probably working in the IT organization, has to be clearly empowered to animate the WAN Governance process.
12. What are the KPIs? These are not so easy to define, Key Performance Indicators have to be kept as a minimum, simple to understand for non-technical people and relevant to objectives.
While I do would not begin to suggest that answering these 12 questions will guarantee your success, they may be useful guidelines for a first journey into WAN Governance-land. So, ready to go? 3… 2… 1…
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