"When something big goes wrong, the operations centre staff look like gophers popping out their holes in the desert - each support engineer either claiming they think they see the root cause of the problem or denying that it's his or her problem to solve. We need to get out of our silos and manage things better." Anonymous.
Almost every business should know by now the danger of a silo mentality! In any industry you hear the same warnings; interrupted communications, lost productivity and inter-departmental friction. Departmental barriers, in technology terms, mean the critical operational problems that arise and become almost impossible to isolate and solve, resulting in the disruption to workflow and business continuity, which can be devastating to any organisation, no matter what size!
How do multi-platform elements fall prey to silo processes? Either poor organisational or departmental leadership, resulting in inappropriate decisions around what tools the business really needs, which then becomes the catalyst for the second cause, the fundamental misuse of the infrastructure library (ITIL). It's so easy to add elements to networks and platforms because they've been sold as "convenient" or potentially "essential", but after closer inspection, these tools usually turn out to be totally irrelevant and/or unnecessary in the process management or actual business needs of the organisation.
"ITIL provides a framework in terms of how companies should approach getting an overall picture, including monitoring and reporting. However, achieving compliance and maturity of a monitoring system relies on effective integration of the many different tools that businesses use, and while organisations realise these things need to be integrated, many get stuck. Then they have to re-think their entire integration strategy in order to get a central view. With integration, the business can get additional views and insights on the reporting level. Although a lot of tools can mean there are a lot of different dashboards, an integrated approach will allow an audit trail of infrastructure over time. This offers more effective SLA reporting, root cause analysis reporting, business reporting, and an understanding of the impact of IT systems on the business," explains Sintrex's Emile Biagio.
"A good system will ensure the required levels of uptime needed to support today's networked applications, and should be designed to meet several key goals. Firstly, aggregation or central continuous monitoring of all critical elements in the complete network. Secondly, isolation or the capability to quickly pinpoint any network issues as they happen and identify fault locations across the entire network. Thirdly, resolution, or the ability to directly integrate with technical staff and structures in place to guarantee notification, response and follow-up in a timely manner," Biagio says.
"In order to meet best practices, organisations must move from a situation where the CIO has no overall view of what's going on, and IT has no standard for measurement, with some companies measuring reachability, others availability, and others uptime, to one where they are no longer using point solutions, which put a strain on resources, don't integrate, and don't help with maturity. Integration is not just a business imperative, but is foundational for meeting ITIL standards," he concludes.
As a result, organisations have spent a lot of time and money to ensure the stability of their networks, using multiple tool sets for network monitoring and suchlike. Networked communications have become crucial to the success of every business and government organisation around the world. Networks and networked applications have brought fantastic benefits, including improved performance, the connection of offices around the world, and the ability for employees to be joined into seamless teams. They also allow for the real-time integration and aggregation of the business' most important data, which it needs to act on instantly.
Sintrex simplifies IT and enables business.
Share
Editorial contacts