When I recently bought an industrial grade instant read thermometer for my grilling endeavors, I wasn’t just thinking about the upcoming birthday party for my husband. I was also thinking about the hundreds of family meals and dinner parties that would follow. I was thinking long-term and I was acting strategically.

Data center decision-makers need to take a similar approach when deploying a DCIM solution. Yes, DCIM can deliver rapid results in the short-term, but it really turns up the heat with the realization of long-term benefits. In order to unlock these benefits, organizations need a clear strategy from the outset.

All too often, DCIM is seen as a tactical IT or facilities solution, not a strategic business program. As a result, the people responsible for making DCIM investments a success remain focused on operational goals, such as reducing a data center’s PUE, rather than enabling broader organizational goals, for example increasing sales revenue.

Leveraging DCIM to drive improvements in data center performance, availability, capacity and sustainability doesn’t just benefit the IT budget. It benefits every facet of the business.

The marketing manager can launch a new customer app faster and deliver a better user experience knowing there is sufficient compute capacity.

The product manager can embrace the Internet of Things, collecting and analyzing the data streaming in from connected products, knowing there won’t be an outage.

And the CEO can expand into a new territory, knowing there is sufficient power, space and cooling to support more servers, more customers and more business.

Yet scenarios like these rarely appear in a DCIM business case. Instead they focus on the bits and bytes of running the data center, and overcoming the operational challenges of today rather than supporting the strategic opportunities of tomorrow.

The bigger picture

To secure investment for DCIM, IT and facilities professionals need to look beyond the doors of the data center. They need to look to the business units, the business users and the end customers. How will DCIM help accelerate growth? How will DCIM help people work faster and smarter? How will DCIM help boost customer satisfaction? How can we measure the impacts of DCIM in relation to our business KPIs?

With many organizations taking a phased approach to deploying DCIM, being able to articulate – and measure – such business benefits will be key to unlocking investment both at the outset and on an ongoing basis.

Best-of-breed DCIM vendors can help with this measurement process by carrying out projected and post-deployment ROI studies that look at both the tangible and intangible outcomes.

UK IT service provider Logicalis undertook such a study after deploying DCIM in its Tier III-plus data center. As well as achieving a 159 percent ROI and 11-month payback, the study revealed that Logicalis can now offer more compelling services to its customers resulting in increased top-line business revenue.

Quantify the benefits

To maximize the full business value of DCIM, organizations need to sign up for the long-term. A common starting point is tracking data center energy consumption to improve energy efficiency or manage power capacity, but that’s just the beginning. It can safeguard app availability by identifying aisle hotspots. It can support analytics and new business launches by freeing up capacity. It can mitigate significant capital costs by enabling more informed investment decisions.

All of these benefits and more can be quantified by taking a rigorous approach to DCIM business case development, combining industry-backed benchmark data with an organization’s specific metrics and goals.

Organizations can also benefit from the lessons learned by their early-adoptive peers. There is a wealth of practical advice on DCIM implementation and benefit realization both from end users and vendors, which will help organizations refine their requirements and define rock solid business cases.

Building on this experience can make the difference between stopping at short-term results and driving long-term success.

Change the conversation

To establish a long-term DCIM strategy, organizations also need to define the IT and business goals they want to achieve. These goals must be both realistic and relevant. Does James in sales care about the data center’s ITEE or ITEU? Unlikely. But he does care about whether there’s sufficient compute and power capacity to cope with the spike in customer demand following a new product launch.

In the most successful cases that I’ve seen, DCIM strategy has been a key component of overall data center strategy. Identifying and prioritizing how the organization will strategically invest in their data centers must be linked to the business – and the obstacles it needs to overcome and the opportunities it wants to leverage.

Organizations with a strategic data center plan will be able to not only validate their DCIM investments but also other key investments – from professional training to vendor partnerships – against consistent measurements.

Optimizing data center performance is the first step towards optimizing business performance. As an industry, we need to help change the DCIM conversation: from operational to strategic; from short-term to long-term; and from IT improvements to business outcomes.

The post DCIM: it’s the business for long-term planning appeared first on Highlight.