Chapter 3. Migration Planning: Business and Technical

The first step in a successful migration is to develop a migration plan. The first step in developing a migration plan is to develop a business plan. Any time a company expends capital, it's accompanied by a responsibility to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of the expense. That responsibility is incumbent upon the technical staff as well as those in executive and financial positions .

As technologists, we often (intentionally or unintentionally) ignore the business side of technical integration. We prefer to dig into the technical aspects and spend time trying to keep up on a technology that has a lifecycle roughly equivalent to a fruit fly before another version or a new edition of the product evolves. Thus, we tend to focus on technical reasons and justifications for upgrading to new versions of software or hardware, implementing process change, or purchasing equipment.

The Gartner Group coined the term Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ) several years ago to describe a holistic approach to cost justification; that is, looking at the entire enterprise to determine not only the cost of a project or change, but also the cost and impact to all facets of the organization. The fundamental principal of calculating TCO is looking at the total impact to the entire enterprise. Technology types often think of the total enterprise as including security, networking, directory services, and so on. In reality, those entities are part of the business. The TCO of a migration or deployment of Windows Server 2003 is to evaluate the impact of the migration to the entire business.

An unknown author once said that when implementations of technology fail, it's usually due to a "poorly scoped implementation or the failure of the organization to implement technology into the process." In other words, it doesn't matter how good the technology is or how productive the benefits are, if the technology is implemented poorly, the project will fail. Implementation depends on developing and following well- tested procedures and processes, and following best practices developed by those who have experience. Windows migrations are not unfamiliar, so take advantage of the experience that is available. This book provides you with a great deal of that information and points you to other resources for additional insights.

In this and the next four chapters, I discuss developing the business and technical aspects of the migration plan, the assessment of the enterprise, the logical and physical design of the enterprise, and server deployment. In addition to an explanation of new technology, I provide a number of examples and case studies so you can benefit from the tangible experience of others.

note

A migration from Windows NT to Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 requires considerable design, testing, and deployment. If you already are running Windows 2000, you likely won't need to make any design changes unless your current implementation needs repair. Nevertheless, a migration from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 still has costs and risk associated with it that you should analyze and plan for.