"This is the essence of business service management," Williams says. "Many companies have lots of information telling them
something bad is going to happen, but they don't know which of those things will truly impact their business. They end up
spending time chasing down things that aren't really a problem."
At Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, Calif., CIO Bill Vass sits in front of a custom dashboard monitoring the health of his
"canaries" -- dummy users that log in to internal Sun systems across the globe every 15 minutes -- gauging response times,
availability, and performance. When a system goes red, techs are automatically dispatched by pager to deal with the problem.
In addition to obtaining real-time information, Vass and his team regularly comb detailed reports containing every conceivable
metric, from code compliance to customer satisfaction -- the customers in this case being Sun employees.
"One of my rules is you manage what you measure," Vass says.
But Sun has taken performance monitoring a step further by assigning a dollar value to every potential outage -- essentially
marrying system performance directly to ROI.
"At the end of every outage, we have a thing called 'estimated cost to Sun,' " Vass explains. "It took us eight months to
determine the formula for that, and I had to get it blessed by finance before anyone would believe it. But now I can walk
in and say, 'We need to upgrade network switches on this campus because if they fail, it will cost us $500,000 a month in
downtime. New switches will cost $3 mil, but they'll pay for themselves in six months.' "
Perception is reality
One of the big challenges IT managers face is that of starting out in the hole -- with management and users anticipating the
worst. Even if a project hits all its marks, it can be perceived as a failure.
"The problem with the word 'IT' is that it's almost always preceded by 'goddamned,' " says Ken Rau, senior consultant at Cutter
Consortium in Wallace, N.C. "I've talked with CIOs who deliver 80 to 90 percent of their projects on budget and on time, but
to their users it's, 'What have you done for me lately?' It's a communications and perception problem."
Vass agrees that bad tech experiences tend to linger longer than good ones. "One day on my morning commute there was an accident
and it took me three hours to get to work. That happened five years ago, but I still remember it. People are like that with
IT systems. They remember the one day in three years when the mail was down and they had to give a presentation. That's why
we keep stats on things like system availability. So when they say, 'Your availability sucks,' we can show them the numbers
that say we're up 99.999 percent of the time."
But many tech pros have only themselves to blame because they lack the necessary communications skills to promote themselves
and their successes, says J. LeRoy Ward, executive vice president at ESI International, which provides training in project
management and business analysis for the global Fortune 500.
"I don't think IT professionals do enough to sell themselves or their projects inside the organization," Ward says. "They
tend to have very poor diplomatic skills and don't do a good enough job of relationship building."
Ward says a growing part of ESI's curriculum is teaching project managers how to act more like consultants, give good presentations,
and hone their personal communication skills.
A key metric is how IT managers respond to a crisis and inform users. Both BMC and Sun measure how quickly tech managers communicate
after a significant event and periodically poll user communities about their levels of satisfaction -- or lack thereof.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
