Recently in Console Consolidation Category

Sometimes ingenuity leads to alternative uses of new products in ways the original designer never imagined. The classic business school example is 3M’s Post-It note which was originally conceived as pressure sensitive adhesive – a novel idea with few practical uses until someone slapped the adhesive on a piece of paper and found utility in a reusable bookmark. 

Sometimes people learn to live with pain. The pain may be real, enduring and chronic but people choose to ignore the pain -- which isn't the same thing as making it go away.

I was speaking with a prospect recently about our BSM solution, and though after listening carefully to our presentation this person’s first reaction was "we just don’t have the pain" to drive this sort of initiative. However, as conversation evolved, we began to uncover that not only was this organization living with pain -- the pain was in fact excruciating and had a direct impact on the highest levels of IT leadership. They had in effect, chosen to ignore the pain. Here’s the story as conveyed:

We have a heterogeneous IT management environment. Our tools report silos of information that must be manually correlated to understand the overall health of the IT infrastructure. As such our users usually provide IT with the first indication that there is a slowdown or outage. For example, a user in California will call the helpdesk in New York to report that an application is running slow.

Upon receiving the call, IT looks at their tools, but the screens are all reflecting green: IT can’t see the problem. Frustrated their issue isn’t being resolved, the users begin to assume IT isn’t worth their salt, and consequently stop calling to report incidents or problems.

Later our CIO goes on a company-wide townhall tour, to visit users and better understand how IT can support the business. He’s taken aback when he gets blasted by users during a meeting (ambush?) at the California office because the PeopleSoft application has been running slow for weeks.

Determined to get to the bottom of this issue the CIO returns to the office with this anecdote and thoroughly questions his staff. "Why wasn’t this problem addressed?" he demands, noting how critical the application is to the business. "No one reported the incident," is the response.

This is a quintessential business case for BSM if I’ve ever heard one. By integrating those existing IT management tools, BSM can consolidate those silos of information and link the underlying infrastructure components to the service being provided (in this case a PeopleSoft application). The benefit of doing this has been proven time and time again: IT will be able to rapidly determine root cause of incidents and problems, often before their customers are even aware, and dramatically reduce the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). This supports the overall organization’s maturity to move from a reactive to a proactive IT organization. Why not eliminate chronic pain instead of learning to live with it?

As for my prospect, well, we have a second meeting soon and the CIO will be involved.

- Randy

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