I have the pleasure of talking for a living. I get to talk to IT Analysts, Managers, Directors, CIOs, and the occasional CFO. The conversation generally centers on finding “stuff” (data) in System Center, and then turning it into something that is meaningful.
The great thing about each conversation is ‘meaningful’ means many things. Meaningful is information about:
• Performance, Disk space, CPU
• Application use, Governance, Compliance
• SLA attainment
• Cloud – Private and Public
• Who, Why, How
• .. and more .. and more ..
I have found consistent issues with conversations about meaningful “stuff.” Everybody wants it, but few have actually budgeted, or planned for how they are going to get it. They also may not know how to measure the cost they are incurring by dredging for this “stuff” using traditional brute force methods.
These are not new issues by any means, and should not surprise any of you.
So, why do these issues exist at all?
They exist because we – the collective we – believe that our systems management tools will be intuitively friendly; because the industry has matured during these past 25 years; because the “stuff” should just be there right on the screen in front us. Unfortunately, that’s just not how it is.
With IT tied to the financial and business goals of most organizations, planning for how you will get to the “stuff” – as well as what that the “stuff” is – is critical. That means stepping back and adding an extra step in your migration/implementation plan. You need to evaluate what is important to measure, how easy or hard is it to get at that data, who needs to see it, and then how you want to make that data meaningful and present it to the various roles in your organization. By adding that step to your plan you will be able to determine what tools you need, what to plan for in anticipated cost, who is going to own it, and when implementing that tool makes the most sense.
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As Vice President of Sales, Doland leads the Bay Dynamics sales teams. With a career spanning 25 years in sales and services, Doland is a student of building lasting professional relationships through selling. |