The IO Model Part 2 – Inner Workings

 

The IO Model Part 2 – Inner Workings

Note : IO = (Infrastructure Optimization)

I recently wrote about the new IO worksheet that was recently released in its updated form. For today's look at the Inner Workings of the IO Model, we’ll use the spreadsheet version, although there is the online version and of course we have an internal application :)

So let’s take a look at the worksheet.  It is an Excel workbook that can be downloaded from the www.microsoftio.com website (or directly using this link).

When you start the workbook, it should open to the Intro tab.  If it doesn’t start there.

As you can see, in addition to the Intro tab which has instructions and quick links, there are separate tabs for the Core, Business Productivity and Application Platform Parts.  Then there is a Results tab and also a nice Projects tab which auto-populates based on your answers.

The new workbook has a much cleaner interface with radio buttons instead of drop down lists as well as a much simplified look and feel.   

The Previous workbook:

The New workbook:

So, the idea is that you fill in the answers that are appropriate for your organisation.  It is unlikely that one person will have all the answers (unless you are a small company) so you will probably need either a few people in a room together to do it all at once, or canvas round a few people individually.  I prefer to get all relevant people in a room together, as this tends to lead to some robust discussions and often reveals that not everyone is on the same page with regards to what the organisations needs are, or what the current state is.

Most of the questions are vendor agnostic, however there are a few where Microsoft products are named explicitly (Active Directory and Office for example).

So for this example, I have gone through an answered the questions for the organisation:

Once all the questions are answered, I can change to the Results tab to see how I rated:

As you can see, based on the answers I gave, I was rated Standardized for I&A, Overall Basic for DDSM (although in one sub-capability I was Standardized), Basic for Security & Networking and Standardized for Data Protection and Recovery.

In this set of answers,  also completed the question on my security processes and our ITIL practices.

On the Projects tab, the workbook has auto-populated a set of projects that are suggested to be beneficial based on my current state:

You can rate your level of importance to these projects, along with the type of business benefit the completion of the project will bring to your organisation.  You can then populate this list with the expected costs (not auto-populated as this is very much organisational specific).

And there you have it, you’ve completed a maturity assessment for your organisation, and have a pretty useful selection of projects to look into to improve the effectiveness of your technology infrastructure.

As you move up the maturity model, your costs decrease and your agility and responsiveness increase.

In Part 3 of this series, I’ll run you through some ‘real world’ examples that I am aware of where organisations are using the IO Model.

Published 26 January 09 05:44 by adhall

The IO Guy : The IO Model Part 2 – Inner Workings