各工作组要指定一名人员承担信息报送工作，负责搜集和整理本组及相关成员单位的各类信息，经组长审核把关后及时报综合组，每周至少报送一条工程进展信息，每季度报送工作总结。Managing next-generation IT infrastructureThe days of building to order are over. The time is ripe for an industrial revolution.James M. Kaplan, Markus Lffler, and Roger P. RobertsThe McKinsey Quarterly, Web exclusive, February 2005In recent years, companies have worked hard to reduce the cost of the IT infrastructurethe data centers, networks, databases, and software tools that support businesses. These efforts to consolidate, standardize, and streamline assets, technologies, and processes have delivered major savings. Yet even the most effective cost-cutting program eventually hits a wall: the complexity of the infrastructure itself.The root cause of this complexity is the build-to-order mind-set traditional in most IT organizations. The typical infrastructure may seem to be high tech but actually resembles an old-fashioned automobile: handmade by an expert craftsperson and customized to the specifications of an individual customer. Today an application developer typically specifies the exact server configuration for each application and the infrastructure group fulfills that request. The result: thousands of application silos, each with its own custom-configured hardware, and a jumble of often incompatible assets that greatly limit a companys flexibility and time to market. Since each server may be configured to meet an applications peak demand, which is rarely attained, vast amounts of expensive capacity sit unused across the infrastructure at any given time. Moreover, applications are tightly linked to individual servers and storage devices, so the excess capacity cant be shared.Now, however, technological advancescombined with new skills and management practicesallow companies to shed this build-to-order approach. A decade into the challenging transition to distributed computing, infrastructure groups are managing client-server and Web-centered architectures with growing authority. Companies are adopting standardized application platforms and development languages. And todays high-performance processors, storage units, and networks ensure that infrastructure elements rarely need hand-tuning to meet the requirements of applications.In response to these changes, some leading companies are beginning to adopt an entirely new model of infrastructure managementmore off-the-shelf than build-to-order. Instead of specifying the hardware and the configuration needed for a business application (I need this particular maker, model, and configuration for my network-attached storage box . . .), developers specify a service requirement (I need storage with high-speed scalability . . .); rather than building systems to order, infrastructure groups create portfolios of productized, reusable services. Streamlined, automated processes and technologies create a factory that delivers these products in optimal fashion (Exhibit 1). As product orders roll in, a factory manager monitors the infrastructure for capacity-planning and sourcing purposes.With this model, filling an IT requirement is rather like shopping by catalog. A developer who needs a storage product, for instance, chooses from a portfolio of options, each described by service level (such as speed, capacity, or availability) and priced according to the infrastructure assets consumed (say, $7 a month for a gigabyte of managed storage). The systems transparency helps business users understand how demand drives the consumption and cost of resources.Companies that make the transition gain big business benefits. By reducing complexity, eliminating redundant activity, and boosting the utilization of assets, they can make their infrastructure 20 to 30 percent more productiveon top of the benefit from previous efficiency effortsthereby providing far greater output and flexibility. Even larger savings can be achieved by using low-cost, commodity assets when possible. Developers no longer must specify an applications technical underpinnings and can therefore focus on work that delivers greater business value; the new model improves times to market for new applications.Nevertheless, making this transition calls for major organizational changes. Application developers must become adept at forecasting and managing demand so that, in turn, infrastructure groups can manage capacity more tightly. Infrastructure groups must develop new capabilities in product management and pricing as well as introduce new technologies such as grid computing and virtualization.1 As for CIOs, they must put in place a new model of governance to manage the new infrastructure organization.The road forwardDeutsche Telekom knows firsthand the challenges involved: over 18 months, hoping to balance IT supply and demand, it implemented this new infrastructure-management model at two divisions (see sidebar, Next-generation infrastructure at Deutsche Telekom). In t