Integration simplifies complexity and CIO dashboards

In his eye-catching article, Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard, Michael Biddick rightly indicates that “ …a CIO dashboard is one of those transformative projects that comes along only rarely and can make or break an IT organization.”

And yet, as he also points out, “If there's so much pent-up demand [for CIO Dashboards], why the lag in supply? In a word, complexity… implementation and integration will be difficult, and customization is inevitable.”

Virtually all Global 2000 companies today have acquired – through either growth or acquisition – disparate multi-vendor IT management tools for network, systems and application management – and integrating these tools together into a CIO dashboard can be very difficult, if not approached correctly, with the right technology: “The technical challenge of providing hooks into several vendors' reporting tools is huge, requiring SOAP or XML bridges.”

You see, each IT management tool creates its own data silo – consisting of availability, performance, or other IT information – and the Big 4 software vendors (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM) are very protective of their silos. As a consequence, without a number of consultants integrating, normalizing and correlating data across multiple tools from the Big 4 vendors is problematic and expensive, to say the least.

But there’s an easier way – whether you’re looking to build a CIO dashboard, or implement a CMDB, or start a BSM initiative, you should place heavy emphasis on a software vendor’s capacity to integrate your existing multi-vendor data. By selecting a vendor that takes an agnostic approach to data integration – at an API level – you gain three important advantages:
-- You can leverage your existing investments in IT management tools – no need to throw away what you already have or migrate to a single IT platform.
-- You can more quickly build the CIO dashboards your executives require – garnering you big points on the ROI curve.
-- You can build CIO dashboards that can actually interact with the IT environment – not just monitor it.
 
So, to make building your CIO dashboard a reality, be sure to select a vendor that can prove its mettle by integrating all of your existing silos of IT management data – perhaps through a proof-of-concept – only that way can you be 100% sure you’re making the right investment.

–  Dustin McNabb