Monday, July 11, 2011
Right information to the right level
There is a big misunderstanding when providing dashboards and reports to Sr. IT management and this practice makes it difficult for an organization to understand the value of these solutions. Starting from alerts in the monitoring systems, false alarms go to technical administrators and they ignore them. Technical detail information goes to a Sr. Director or a CIO and they do not have much use for it. What will a CIO do with a report of that says a disk filesystem was full last Thursday or that the CPU was 100% at some point on Friday. The Sr. management of an IT organization deals with the business and at the end of the day the data they need is the current status of the IT service and a report as to how it performed in the past 7 or 30 days or so. Just like a CFO the first thing he needs is money produced and money spend, similarly the CIO needs to know if the service is available and the performance of the service is decent. The historical report should also incorporate the business requirements for these IT services. What is the point of stating to a Telco CIO that a POS at a store was unavailable outside the business hours? Planned downtimes need to be mentioned in the report and finally if available the business expectations for the service should be reflected in the report. If there was an agreement, more of an SLA or an OLA that a service will have 99.9% availability for example then there must have been an investment for high availability of this service that the ROI of the business related to this investment is providing this availability. High availability does not happen by magic or wishful thinking of the business unit, therefore these business requirements should be formalized and if needed spend money to be able to provide this level of service. The report of the CIO for the IT services should reflect that. When an IT service is failing, then this is the point when the detailed technical information from the events along with incident information from Service Manager need to come into the picture to figure out why the service is failing the expectations. Just like if a company is loosing money, the CFO and CIO will dig into the detail financials of the expenses to find out what went wrong and make adjustments to improve the results, but imagine if they tried to fix a problem without the data in there hands... it's a he said she said situation and the best or sometimes dirtiest politician wins. When the executive IT reporting is left to the hands of the technical administrators without clear guidelines as to what the upper IT management is looking for, then the technical admins are looking for ways to 'impress' and a meaningless report with beautiful colours comes out and it will not do the job. If you want to impress get fireworks, this is a business report that should have the right info for the CIO level.
Etisalat Service Level Management solution in the news
The Etisalat SLM solution that will provide the ability to offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the corporate data network customers is about to go live in July 2011. The solution, implemented by Parallon, as appeared in the UAE press due to the HP EMEA award to Etisalat as BTO champion:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)