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|Overview | | |“The Core Infrastructure Optimization assessment opened our eyes as to how we should do things to |
|Country or Region: United States | | |make IT a maximum contributor to our business success.” |
|Industry: Financial services | | |Joe Simpson, Infrastructure Architect, Quicken Loans |
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|Customer Profile | | | |
|Quicken Loans, based in Livonia, Michigan, is| | | |
|the United States’ largest online mortgage | | | |
|lender, originating U.S.$19 billion in home | | | |
|loans for clients nationwide in 2007. | | | |
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|Business Situation | | | |
|Quicken Loans had experienced rapid growth | | | |
|and wanted to ensure that its core technology| | | |
|infrastructure was fine-tuned to support the | | | |
|company’s continued growth. | | | |
| | | | |
|Solution | | | |
|The company engaged in a Core Infrastructure | | | |
|Optimization assessment that evaluated the | | | |
|maturity level of its core technology | | | |
|components and included recommendations for | | | |
|enhancement. | | | |
| | | | |
|Benefits | | | |
|Assesses IT status | | | |
|Identifies areas to strengthen | | | |
|Provides plan for future review | | | |
| | | |When your business relies on the Internet, it’s crucial that you make the best possible use of |
| | | |technology. Quicken Loans, the top online mortgage lender, needed to know if its core technology |
| | | |infrastructure was optimized to support its business and its rapid growth. To do so, it turned to BT,|
| | | |a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, for a Core Infrastructure Optimization (IO) assessment based on |
| | | |the Microsoft IO maturity model. BT confirmed the company’s current technology strengths—and |
| | | |identified IT governance, system monitoring, and periodic reviews as ways to formalize current |
| | | |procedures, standardize practices to boost consistency throughout the enterprise, and help ensure |
| | | |that technology knowledge was maintained even as staff members retired. Quicken Loans says it is now |
| | | |confident that its enhanced infrastructure will provide the support needed for continued growth. |
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Situation
When you hear “Quicken Loans,” you might think of the top online lender for home mortgages. After all, the company originated more than U.S.$19 billion in home loans in 2007 alone.
But ask Joe Simpson, and you’ll get a slightly different answer. “We’ve always thought of ourselves as an IT company that provides mortgages,” says Simpson, Infrastructure Architect at Quicken Loans.
And with good reason. Quicken Loans has a massive and rapidly growing technology infrastructure. Over the last eight years, the number of computer servers supporting the infrastructure has grown from 50 to 750, not including support for storage-area network devices or general networking. The number of personal computers in the company has mushroomed from 500 to 5,000. Correspondingly, the IT team has grown from 20 people to more than 200 team members. That growth has an upside and a downside, according to Simpson.
The upside is that the company has hired capable people who add competitive advantage to its operations. “The downside,” says Simpson, “is that different people tend to do things a bit differently. The directors on each team had slightly different philosophies and were using different technologies, including the Microsoft® .NET Framework, PHP, Java, and others.”
The differences in technologies and philosophies, in turn, led to complications in managing the infrastructure. “The biggest challenge was monitoring our systems and our processes, to ensure that we were working in an up-to-date way,” Simpson continues. “Was our infrastructure optimized to support the business as much as possible? We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
Simpson and his colleagues wanted to know both how the Quicken Loans infrastructure was performing on an absolute basis, and how it was performing relative to other organizations in its industry. These questions became urgent when the company’s Volume Licensing Agreement with Microsoft came up for renewal. Was it making the best use of the technologies covered by that licensing agreement? Quicken Loans had no objective way to know.
Solution
To get the answers to these questions, Quicken Loans turned to Microsoft, which proposed that company engage in a Core Infrastructure Optimization (IO) assessment, including the analysis of its underlying technology infrastructure that Quicken Loans wanted. The assessment is based on an IO maturity model that covers a broad range of technology elements and processes, and that identifies how well they contribute to an organization’s strategic direction.
Quicken Loans engaged BT Professional Services, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner to conduct the assessment of its core infrastructure. The process was carried out over a month in the spring of 2008. The assessment began by identifying the workloads managed by the core infrastructure, such as identity and access management; desktop, server, and device management; security and networking; data protection and recovery; and IT and security processes.
BT then conducted interviews with the Quicken Loan employees who deal with these workloads, from the ‘in-the-trenches’ managers, who interact with them daily, to the senior executives responsible for setting policy for the workloads. In addition, BT conducted interviews with the company’s thought leaders and tactical personnel.
BT analyzed the results of the interviews based on the IO maturity model, including where the company’s technologies and practices fit within that model, the portfolio of IT projects underway to enhance core infrastructure, industry-standard practices, and optimal technologies available for the core infrastructure. Specific components of the Quicken Loans core infrastructure were identified as “cost center,” “effective,” “enabling,” or “strategic.” The results were presented to Quicken Loans, summarizing the consulting firm’s assessment, observations, and recommendations.
“Quicken Loans was a very unusual Core IO assessment for us,” says Steven Smith, Senior Consultant, BT Professional Services. “They have a very distinctive culture. It’s highly collaborative, with everyone, regardless of role, marching in the same direction and with the same sense of urgency. There’s a sense of camaraderie, and the leadership style was refreshing. The IT personnel have a sense of ownership over their areas of concern, and they’re very smart and great at what they do.”
Smith says that his firm’s Core IO analysis of Quicken Loans showed that the company has a highly strategic, or dynamic, use of technology, across the board. “They are taking advantage of virtually every available Microsoft technology to the fullest extent possible, and that is a clear contributor to the company’s success.”
Benefits
“The Core Infrastructure Optimization assessment opened our eyes as to how we should do things to make IT a maximum contributor to our business success,” says Simpson. That included confirming the company’s current use of technology and making recommendations for greater IT governance, monitoring, and periodic review.
Assesses IT Status
The first benefit of the Core IO assessment was to give Simpson and his colleagues the independent verification of their IT status that they sought.
“Having this outside analysis to confirm the validity of our core infrastructure was tremendously reassuring, both to IT and to senior leadership overall,” says Simpson. “It gave us added confidence that IT was already a strategic contributor to the company’s success. Knowing that we were on the right path made it easier and faster for us to continue to move in that direction.”
Identifies Areas to Strengthen
Beyond confirming the advanced status of the company’s core infrastructure, the assessment also identified a key area for the company’s continued improvement: the IT governance policies it uses to implement and maintain that infrastructure. BT developed specific recommendations for Quicken Loans around IT governance issues such as architecture, development, and life-cycle management. The standardization of these issues has many benefits. For example, the company can maintain consistent, and thus more cost-effective, IT practices throughout the enterprise. With such practices, Quicken Loans is less likely to lose valuable system knowledge as IT personnel retire or otherwise leave the company.
“Quicken Loans was very sophisticated in its use of technology, but it had gotten to that point through the use of largely informal and undocumented IT processes that had served the company well when it was smaller,” says Smith. “Now, Quicken Loans is ready for a greater degree of IT governance—for explicit IT processes and metrics to measure the success of those processes.”
The recommendations flowing from that assessment included the development of service-level agreements (SLAs) for response to business units, and greater monitoring and asset management. The recommendations made intuitive sense to Simpson and his colleagues.
“We had resisted SLAs in the past because we just felt it was our responsibility to keep everyone up 24x7,” says Simpson. “We still do—but we see that, as our infrastructure has grown both larger and more complex, it’s crucial to have IT priorities that match the priorities of the business.”
As a result, Quicken Loans has engaged in a business continuity planning study that assessed the business needs of each business unit system. This review covered the purpose of each system and the business impact of its potential slowdown or outage. The leaders conducting the study then categorized the results according to whether each system needed to be restored in less than one hour, one to two hours, one to three hours, or two to four hours. The categorization was conducted with the participation of senior leadership throughout the company and endorsed by the company’s Chief Executive Officer. It is now in the process of implementation.
“The Core IO assessment showed us how to consolidate our current IT status for the long-term benefit of the company,” says Simpson. Similarly, Quicken Loans is now developing a formal disaster recovery plan and both simplifying and expanding its backup management solution.
Provides Plan for Future Review
The Core Infrastructure Optimization assessment also identified the desirability for Quicken Loans to have a comprehensive infrastructure monitoring system and a regular, periodic way to evaluate progress on core infrastructure optimization.
To achieve the former goal, Quicken Loans is in the process of expanding the monitoring and management of its infrastructure—both hardware and software. “After the IO assessment, we’re definitely planning to maintain a more detailed asset inventory both on our hardware and applications,” says Simpson. “Knowing exactly what’s in the environment makes it easier for us to trace and resolve problems in that environment.” For example, Simpson points to the ability to trace a failure in a point-of-service application to a storage-area network device holding data needed by that application.
Simpson has created a configuration manager database into which he and his colleagues are entering all datacenter hardware and software—and, eventually, all hardware and software across the enterprise. Quicken Loans uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the health of the infrastructure’s server operating system, fax system, Microsoft .NET-based applications, database, and e-mail system. It is now considering expanding its use of Operations Manager Management Packs to provide in-depth monitoring of more of its enterprise.
Infrastructure optimization is a continuing process, not a one-time event. Therefore, a key recommendation from BT was that Quicken Loans implement quarterly reviews of its infrastructure—both to address new issues, and to measure the progress in addressing existing issues.
“We have an amazingly effective IT infrastructure,” says Simpson. “The Core Infrastructure Optimization process is helping to ensure that we keep it that way.”
Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
With infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.
For more information about Microsoft infrastructure optimization, go to:
io
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| |Software and Services
■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
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“The Core IO assessment showed us how to consolidate our current IT status for the long-term benefit of the company.”
Joe Simpson, Infrastructure Architect, Quicken Loans
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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published June 2009 | | |
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For more information about Quicken Loans products and services, call (800) 863-4332 or visit the Web site at:
“Having this outside analysis to confirm the validity of our core infrastructure was tremendously reassuring, both to IT and to senior leadership overall.”
Joe Simpson, Infrastructure Architect, Quicken Loans
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“Was our infrastructure optimized to support the business as much as possible? We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
Joe Simpson, Infrastructure Architect, Quicken Loans
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