The Creation of Relevance
On a recent client engagement we were trying to find out what was blocking the more widespread use of one of our System Center products, Operations Manager (SCOM). Driving product adoption throughout our customer base and responding to customer feedback are some of the indirect goals, beyond executing successfully on projects, here at Microsoft Consulting. During one of our discovery sessions, one of the systems administrators proposed that SCOM should seamlessly identify issues in the environment, verify their root cause and then promptly fix them. Part of me thought this is what dynamic IT is all about – the golden standard where systems are self-diagnosing and self-healing. Another part of me thought that is what IT folks do– they bridge that gap that exists between the constant chatter in the datacenter and proactive, actionable, intelligence that enables dynamic IT. Reality lies somewhere in the middle.
Data only becomes information when it is relevant. And it only becomes relevant when someone, in this case knowledge workers, process and eventually consume the data for a particular end. This brings us to a fundamental problem that needs to be solved by information technology and a key activity of all consultants: the creation of relevance.
Let’s look at an example with our SCOM product. A system, such as an email server, can generate quite a bit of of performance data: IOPS per seconds, growth of the datastore, number emails coming in/going out, email time to delivery to client, mailbox and email sizes etc… Even though some of this data may not be completely raw it still needs to be put in context. Whether that context is capacity management for infrastructure planning, a more proactive activity, to problem resolution, a more reactive activity, data has to be contextualized and presented in the appropriate way. Front line technicians require immediate alerts once thresholds are met, on disks that are filling up for example, while planners may require appropriate long term data points to forecast storage purchases.
Through a proper mix of process and use of technology an IT information worker should be able to deliver relevant and actionable information to the business. SCOM is a tool that can add those extra arrows in your quiver, helping you establish baselines, metrics and heuristic markers. This massaged data then can be wrapped up in a range of processes: problem triage, change management,remediation, reporting and so on. Although these processes can be semi-automated, they can only be formalized and executed on by people who understand the business as well as the technology. Only when both people and processes are working in simpatico can SCOM, or any tool for that matter, provide for a dynamic IT state that every organization should strive for.
It must be made clear from the onset of any project that operational centric products, such as SCOM, need to be wrapped up in well defined processes with trained technologist in order to be successful. There’s just no easy way around it.
