Ilm

Introduction

The goal of the Change Management process is to ensure that standardised methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all Changes, in order to minimise the impact of Change-related Incidents upon service quality, and consequently to improve the day-to-day operations of the organisation.

In this report I have outline EMC’s main reasons for implementing the Information lifecycle management (ILM) project, the problems associated with implementing the project and possible ways to overcome these issues.

In the main body of the report I will give an account of the years leading up to the implementation of the ILM project. This is an important factor as the industry was in a recession at the time and it is necessary to see how EMC was able to put itself in a position to take on such a large, time consuming and costly project.

In the interventions section I will explain ILM and all of the reasons for implementing the software in the interventions section as well as giving a detailed account of Information lifecycle management and all of its attributes.

In the next section I will outline all of the problems associated with implementing a project of this scale. I will give best practice approaches to change management and detail EMC’s approaches then I will compare and contrast to two.

I will conclude the paper by giving expected outcomes to all of the problems detailed in the other sections.

Overview:

For this project, our group decided to use EMC Corporation as an example of an organization implementing change. EMC is a multinational company based in Massachusetts USA. Its main function is the manufacturing of systems for information storage. I did my 3rd year work placement in Westborough, Massachusetts about 3 miles from the head quarters in Hopkinton. This was an advantage as I was able to contact members of staff to gain information on ILM and get an insight into the ongoing implementation process.

For the body of this report, I am going to explain the problems EMC had with this expansion of storage and how they decided to overcome it.

Problem

Back in 2004, our raw storage of approximately 1 Petabyte was made up of 93% Symmetrix storage and 7% CLARiiON storage, and there were 63 separate SAN fabrics.

Much of the Symmetrix storage was older, lower density devices; management of the storage was a manual, labour intensive and inaccurate process, with the average storage administrator handling about 80 Terabytes. Growth in the demand for storage, both for organic growth and new project initiatives was consuming elements of our physical data centres at a rate far greater than forecast…space, power and A/C.

Essentially, EMC had very expensive storage architecture and the anticipated growth in that architecture could not be sustained in its then current form without major capital investments in the overall data centre infrastructure and significant staff augmentation.

From the downturn technology sector until early 2003 EMC was a company in transition. It had to change its business model from one that was highly dependant on a fierce direct-sales force making million dollar deals on its top-line Symmetrix subsystems to one that engaged the channel more and expanded its low-to-midrange product offering. As well as make drastic cost cuts in labour, inventory expenses and marketing, totalling $204 million.

In my view it is impossible to describe EMC’s transition to the ILM market without first outlining the problems they face prior to the transition. From the downturn technology sector until 2003 EMC was a company in transition. It had to change its business model from one that was highly dependant on a fierce direct-sales force making million dollar deals on its top-line Symmetrix subsystems to one that engaged the channel more and expanded its low-to-midrange product offering. As well as make drastic cost cuts in labour, inventory expenses and marketing, totalling $204 million.

EMC handled the downturn in the technology sector extremely well, by scaling down operations. Before the downturn EMC was capable of making million dollar deals, after the downturn the market for such deals simply did not exist. “While certain surveys show IT spending growing, I believe most companies will be extremely cautious in increasing their IT spending during 2003, I do believe there's a bias toward the positive, but no one's willing to commit to increased spending before they see how the year develops.”

The larger companies in the market where not prepared to make such big deals at that time, so EMC targeted the smaller companies in the market. “Two important factors to consider when selecting a target market segment are the attractiveness of the segment and the fit between the segment and the firm's objectives, resources, and capabilities.”

EMC still expects to invest $1 billion in research and development during 2001, and is investing heavily in its internal information technology infrastructure and looking for areas where it can build talent in several strategic areas.

Due to the steps taken above, EMC was perfectly placed to progress in the market. They had built a sold base during the dot-com shakeout without neglecting key resources such are R & D, this was the best decision made by top management during the shake-out years. Although money was tight, top management knew the importance of R & D if were to grow into the future. This decision has aided EMC’s move to ILM a great deal.

"I honestly believe the storage market place will change in the next three years more than it has in the last 10 years," said EMC CEO Joe Tucci.

Intervention to solve problem:

In the year 2003, EMC made 3 major software acquisitions within 6 months. In July, EMC announced it acquired Legato Software, a backup and recovery software company, in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. Then in October, EMC came through with another merger. This time it purchased Documentum, a documents-management software company, in a deal valued at $1.7 billion. By acquiring these 2 mergers, it helped EMC to build up its idea of Information life-cycle Management (ILM) strategy. This is a new trend in storage that demands storage technology become more