Peters offers three best practices to help IT through its consolidation planning:

Be strategic - Because consolidation typical requires large upfront investments and can effect short-term disruptions, it must be treated as a strategic initiative with proper planning, said Peters. The consolidation plan should ideally involve a five-step approach: defining the purpose of consolidation, capturing and evaluating business needs and perceptions, assessing IT capabilities to support these needs, developing your consolidation strategy, and planning for change.

Use a model - "The most useful model starts with using the business-visible services that business gets value from as a window into the IT capabilities that underlie them," said Peters. Having a model that begins from a services perspective, enables you to align your consolidation strategy with business demand, he said.

IT's a transformation - Peters recommends IT managers should manage consolidation as an IT transformation project. As consolidation begins to affect the way people work, the most critical step is preparing for organizational changes. "IT execs must anticipate and identify all activities and resources required in the transition and refine the consolidation strategy into a realistic and workable transition plan," said Peters.