There is a shift brewing at the CIO levels of many companies.  They are figuring out that IT and Business Alignment is a nirvana that many do not reach, so what they are looking for is agility.  An inescapable factor in today's business environment is the constancy of change.  Enterprises must adapt to new economic imperatives or wither and die; enterprises mastering the art of business agility can gain substantial and sustainable advantage.

The complexity of the today's modern enterprise - its business and IT components, and its linkages with other enterprises - increases the difficulty of implementing changes.  Different elements change at different rates, but the pressure to change is always there.

I've always said that change is often disruptive and expensive, and few organizations are prepared to take advantage consistently of the opportunities that change presents.  The challenge with taking advantage of these opportunities is that IT is often a roadblock to business agility.  Which is somewhat ironic because new information technology should be a key part of the solution.  But IT innovation causes so much change, that it is difficult to reap the benefits of this innovation.

The way to take advantage of the opportunities that change presents to you is to have IT systems that are not monolithic and highly customized, 'one-offs'.  The ability to have an infrastructure that can change quickly and adapt to the "fickle mind" of today's business world will provide a way for you to make change into a competitive weapon.

It is a well known fact in the IT industry that standards and consistency in IT infrastructure is key to maintaining a stable environment.  Most companies today still struggle with this and aren't quite sure how to remedy it.  visionapp recently launched their latest offering, OpsQuick and made it official by revealing the product in Chicago at BriForum this week.

OpsQuick is a product that gives you the ability to create a change-friendly infrastructure.  The great part here is that visionapp has taken an innovative way to pricing this product.  It's priced per administrator instead of by node.  Eureka!! someone finally got the understanding of giving more value in a product for less money.  OpsQuick  can grow with your company, but not cost you an arm and a leg to use as your environment scales up due to rapidly changing business needs.  So when change does impact IT, you can maintain standards and consistency throughout your enterprise by having a reproducible build that is automated, thereby reducing the need to touch every single machine in your environment and use that manual "cookbook" to reproduce a new server.  One of the ways to help companies move to a more standardized IT model, such as ITIL is to create a repeatable build library.  By using OpsQuick (and other tools) you can create a library of repeatable builds.  To accomplish this, you must define build mechanisms, create system images and establish documentation.  This is exactly what you get with OpsQuick.  The results of this is that repeatable process for building infrastructure from "bare metal".
 

As I stated above, Change Control and Change Management are critical to success in maintaining consistency and standards in your environment.  I recently spoke to a client who was very change control and change management oriented.  They are struggling with really getting a handle on maintaining consistency and standards in these processes.  With OpsQuick they have the ability to have a running log of changes, settings, and creation and deployment activities.  This was something that really struck a chord with them.  OpsQuick easily helps with ITIL activities such as Change Control and Change Management.  I shared with this client some of the top 5 indicators of poor change management and one of those where OpsQuick can help is the unauthorized changes issue.  By using the running log of who makes changes and when, you can also use the roles-based management capabilities where multiple administrators can be defined for deployment, management and/or reporting tasks, thereby ensuring that whomever makes the change has the right privileges to do so.  There is more, of course, that goes into Change Management and Change Control, but OpsQuick gives you a good start in the right direction.

I've stated many times in the past that I live by four design principles:

• Standardization
• Simplification
• Integration
• Modularity 

OpsQuick can help any size environment really drive these principles in your environment.  By creating a repeatable build library you are satisfying the "standardization" principle.  By it's very nature, OpsQuick gives you an automated way to deploy sytems, thereby satisfying the "simplification" principle.  By leveraging the power of WDS, you can easily integrate with your existing Windows enterprise.  We can also satisfy the "modularity" principle with one of the greatest features of visionapp products and that is if there is a component in an OS that needs to be changed or swapped out, you can easily make the change and redeploy.

visionapp has a winner here with OpsQuick and I highly recommend you test drive this product for yourself.  You can get it

.