Departments cling on to their own servers

Server consolidation projects are hampered by control hungry departments

IT chiefs' attempts to drive through server consolidation projects are being hampered by a reluctance amongst different departments to share computing capacity and poor awareness of the savings consolidation can generate, according to a new report out today.

The survey of 100 IT managers from IT services firm Morse found that almost 60 percent did not share IT capacity across the business with over half blaming individual departments' refusal to relinquish control of their servers for the problem and a third claiming there was little perceived savings in sharing resources.

The report also found that almost half of IT managers would allow equipment to be purchased on a department by department basis, without any central control from the IT department. A further 13 percent would let a department with urgent additional storage or server needs purchase its own devices if it came out of its own budget.

Scott Reynolds, a consultant at Morse, said that this failure to take a business wide procurement strategy had contributed to the complexity of many firms' IT estates and was making it far harder for firms to optimise their IT operations. "Firms end up with each application running on dedicated servers and storage which creates additional pressure in terms of operational costs, space and energy," he said.

Reynolds said that the only way to tackle this problem is for senior management to give control of the entire IT procurement budget to the IT department and take decisions away from other department heads. "It may not be welcomed by everyone," he admitted. "But someone at the top of the business needs to give IT control and then they can develop standards, ensure efficiencies are delivered, and move towards a service oriented on-demand structure where capacity is assigned as departments require it."

There is a risk that such an approach could hamper the flexibility and responsiveness many departments gain when they have their own IT budgets to draw upon, but Reynolds maintained it is a risk worth taking. "Separate budgets may deliver some flexibility but it doesn’t address the underlying problem of widespread inefficiency," he argued. "It is better to have a single procurement budget and then ensure IT works closely with the rest of the business in order to ensure different departments' needs are met."