Forget about IT Problems

Published Monday, 6 July 2009 | Category: Operations | Posted by Maxwell Ramutla

it-problems

Whenever I think about what organisations and people have to endure in providing technology services, a single word comes to mind, and that is to FORGET.

A few years ago, I led a team of talented folk in an IT division which at the time was responsible for providing email services to some 11,000 IT users that were geographically distributed. The IT division was responsible for 6 Data Centres, 400 Servers, 320 branch offices, about 90 Business Applications and a total IT staff compliment of 130 people. The team dynamics were extremely diverse with varying levels of enterprise systems architecture and support skills to application and desktop user support teams all running from a central location.

Keeping the systems running was an interesting challenge. Very many challenges existed but this was one challenge I looked forward to, oddly enough. Sunday nights were in fact the best times as I used to prepare to take on the dreaded Monday morning rush that somehow used to be buzzing with anticipation for anything that may go wrong. All this without monitoring tools that told a little more than Server UP or Server Down.

So what could have gone wrong you may ask, here are some of the possibilities... the SAP ERP system backups may have failed as a result at least one of the servers may not have started as they should have, or network links to the central government HR and Procurement Management may have failed and Telkom would not be aware, or a Microsoft OS vulnerability may just have been exploited by an internet based worm and some of our servers would not have had the required patch installed or simply one of the executives may be overseas and was unable to access their email, or quite simple a major email server was not available or some had deleted an important email by mistake... Monday mornings were awesome, full of nothing surprise.

It is then than I decided to go on a campaign with the entire team, a campaign to forget about potential problems in the services we were responsible for. This is not to say that we wanted to ignore the problems but rather that we wanted to make certain that none of the problems had any impact on our operations and in fact that these problems created even more opportunities for us to improve service levels.

A group of related projects were kicked-off, these were designed to help IT work better and ultimately, FORGET. To do this we looked at the amount and type of skills we needed, this being public service we did not have the best ability to retain specialised skilled people, so we invested in a group of hand-picked contractors that would help meet the current needs but also provide a growth path for internal staff to follow. This was linked to systems monitoring projects and an IT Service Management project at the core, with other IT driven projects that would enhance IT service levels. Most of the projects were put in place with key measurable and success was achieved in a short time enabling the environment to sustain itself with minimal resources.

That was then. In hind sight, the core of our problem at the time, may have been found in the infrastructure and the strategies associated with the Technology Architecture, Investment decisions and the availability of resources in totality.

Perhaps a question to be asked is whether or not we would have taken a different approach given available technologies today. This is including cloud computing, grid computing and software as a service.

My answer would be a definite Yes, given the risk, costs and benefits the above technologies would be of key interest in limiting the impact of infrastructure downtime on the services IT provides. Given the same set of scenarios together with the above technologies, I would have made completely different decisions in driving our endeavours to FORGET.
This is a lesson that I share with every CIO I interact with.

I believe that the future operations model of all enterprise IT organisations is a mix of on-premise and hosted services that together create an innovative platform for any business to operate while firmly implanting IT services as utility services that can be depended upon 24x7x365. Therefore making it possible for Business Executives, IT Managers, CIOs, and everyone to FORGET about IT outages, availability, capacity, and scalability issues in core IT services such as collaboration services.

Collaboration services include email, calendar, ERP, CRM and document management systems that form the core of business operations today. All these solutions are available in the form of a service that is significantly cheaper than operating your own in-house systems but also offer all the required business benefits every business requires.

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