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"Data Center Essentials” will provide a road map for executives, drawing upon the real-world experience of industry-leading companies like eBay and Google. The course is designed to help transform enterprise IT into a cost-reducing profit center by mapping the costs and performance of IT in terms of business KPIs.
To register or get more information, go to: https://www.heatspring.com/courses/data-center-essentials-for-executives. The seven-week course starts Feb. 9, 2015. This is a unique opportunity to spend five weeks learning from Jonathan Koomey, one of the foremost international experts on data center energy use, efficiency, organization, and management and a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University. He will be available to answer all of your questions as you work through the course.
Executives in this course will gain access to templates and best practices used by leaders in enterprise IT. You’ll use these templates to complete a Capstone Project, in which you will propose management changes for your organization to help increase business agility, reduce costs, and move your internal IT organization from being a cost center to a profit center.
Koomey, a leading thinker on data center technology and optimization, is the author or co-author of nine books and has written more than 200 articles and reports on energy efficiency and supply-side power technologies, energy economics, energy policy, environmental externalities, and global climate change.
He has also held visiting professorships at Yale, Stanford, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. For more than 11 years he led the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s End-Use Forecasting group, which analyzes markets for efficient products and technologies for improving the energy and environmental aspects of those products. The group developed recommendations for policymakers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy on ways to promote energy efficiency and prevent pollution.
Koomey holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Energy and Resources Group at UC-Berkeley and a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard.
This course is self-paced, so you don’t need to be logged in at any specific time. Expect to dedicate an average of five hours per week, but you can work ahead or catch up if you fall behind. Keep in mind that the instructor will be there to answer your questions and help you learn for the duration of the course. He will not be on duty outside the course dates, so ask all of your questions while the course is in session. You will have access to all of the online materials for a full year.
If you have questions, contact student advocate Tom McCormack. Please review the following orientation materials and introduce yourself on the discussion board.
• Week 1 - Enterprise IT: Cost Center or Profit Center?
We'll get to the point very quickly in week 1: All modern enterprises are driven by IT. If you think IT is a cost center, as most organizations do, you’ve already lost the battle. IT should be a cost-reducing profit center. Transforming IT can transform your business, and we'll continue to explore how by examining the basics of energy, power, and costs in enterprise data centers. Power and energy drive costs in modern data centers, and most equipment in enterprise data centers has very low (5 to 15 percent) use.
• Week 2 - Metrics, Measurement, and Decision Making
In week 2 we present solutions and strategies to transform the organization. We'll provide a foundation in the science of measurement. What to measure, how to do it? We'll tie technical metrics to business KPIs.
• Week 3 - Mapping IT Costs and Performance onto the Business
This week we will begin to assess costs and effectiveness at the business unit and project level to allow for accountability and more rapid learning. We'll make the case to move from "sit down" to "buffet style" provisioning of computing to reduce needless variability in hardware, keep standard server configurations on the shelf, and improve lead time from months to weeks.
• Week 4 - Moving Internal Computing Needs to an Internal Cloud + Managing Existing Facilities
In Week 4 we will provide more strategies and techniques to transform Enterprise IT into a profit center. Developing an internal cloud means using standardized hardware, can improve lead time from weeks to seconds, and represents a key step for increasing business agility. Simply measuring technical aspects of your existing facilities isn’t enough. We advocate and explain the need to model data centers throughout their life cycle, using sophisticated computer tools to simulate the effects of proposed changes on costs, reliability, and energy use.
• Week 5 - Importance of Organizational Structure and Incentives + Approaching Organizational Transformation
The course closes with tangible next steps. Most organizations have split incentives (IT buys computers, facilities pay electric bills). Most organizations have split authority (separate bosses for IT and facilities), so nobody thinks about the whole system, and the company suffers for it. For substantive improvements to take hold, organizations need high-level management buy in and a champion to organize enterprise IT under one leader, consolidate budgets, and bring teams together so they always consider effects of changes on the whole system.
• After the course - Continued Networking and Support
You'll continue to have access to all of the course materials for at least one year after the course is over.
Dr. Koomey is excited to maintain an ongoing conversation and help provide research and support to help make sustained improvements on data center profitability.
