Tags Growth, Collaboration, Know-how, Data management

Something to watch over you

Getting all of your IT systems to work together can be tricky, especially in a growing business. Duncan Shores of Orb Data Ltd talks with John Hutchinson about the need for guardian angels.

Quick question for anyone whose organisation is growing: how many times have you, your customers or stakeholders heard the following: “Sorry about this, the system’s been slow all day”; “There’s a problem with the system – I think the IT people are probably looking at it” or “Maybe the server’s down again”?

If these seem all too familiar, chances are that your organisation, or the organisation you’re dealing with, is going through classic growing pains. The symptoms are depressingly familiar. As any organisation grows and changes, so their bigger and more sophisticated IT systems need to be kept available; ensuring that staff can continue to collaborate effectively and stay in touch with customers and suppliers.

“Organisations need to get the balance right between employing IT people or service providers to fix problems manually, and providing them with the tools that will make them much more effective at keeping systems running efficiently,” says Duncan Shores of Orb Data, the Windsor-based IBM premier business partner.

As Shores points out, during periods of expansion and reorganisation, businesses typically acquire multiple IT systems to do specific jobs, from financial accounting to ecommerce. But they don’t always work in harmony and each of them still needs managing and maintaining; often by a reducing number of IT staff.

One regional brewery recently confessed that it had no fewer than 36 different business applications in place. Instead of working as a team to serve customers and grow the business, their IT professionals were spending most of their time resolving performance and interoperability issues. And as systems grow, there are more things to go wrong, so problems become more difficult to isolate and take longer to fix. Result: hacked off customers and suppliers, demoralized staff, lost orders and long-term damage to your reputation.

The knee-jerk reaction is to throw more money at the IT department and hire more troubleshooting techs. Or, if you don’t have an in-house IT team, sign more arduous service contracts with suppliers who will ride to your rescue. Both options can become very expensive indeed – especially if you need problems fixing fast, any time of the day or night. But, Shores points out, pouring more people in to fill the breaches has its downsides. For example: they rather inconveniently need recruiting, training, paying and looking after. They also have an annoying habit of going home at night, getting sick, taking holidays and leaving unexpectedly.

The answer, according to Shores, is to automate the management and maintenance of as many administrative IT processes as possible. The aim is to free up people to get on with working together productively and running things at the sharp end of the business; to halt the inexorable increase in resources devoted to IT; and to reduce the time and cost involved in identifying and solving system problems. Automation is not necessarily a matter of getting rid of IT people, however; it’s about using smarter tools to enable those already in place to be more productive.

Public sector and commercial organisations face many of the same problems, as illustrated by a recent project completed by Orb Data for a county council. Like many businesses, the council saw the need to improve service to its stakeholders, in this case via a call centre strategy.

From now on, there would be one contact phone number and one Web address for all customer enquiries, whether they were for housing and planning, or libraries and social services.

Shores explains: “For this approach to work, call centre staff need high-availability of a single customer service application interface. By implementing application monitoring and diagnostic tools, we can ensure that any service issues are identified, and often resolved, before the caller realises there’s a problem.

In addition, the reporting that the monitoring suite provides also helps the council demonstrate adherence to their new SLA agreements with their customers.”

The core of Orb Data’s solution is IBM’s Tivoli suite, which has been developed continuously since the eighties and, most importantly, has been recently re-engineered to make it deployable and affordable within much smaller organisations. The key is to take an enterprise-wide view of all sorts of systems within any organisation – from PCs, applications and databases to networks and servers – and automatically monitor their performance; detecting problems that are already causing or will cause future) loss of performance or service. Any weaknesses in systems should be identified and, where possible, an automated service management response should be configured to repair the problem without the need to trouble a human operator.

“And most of the Tivoli solutions we supply work on the Pareto Principle; that by applying 20 per cent of the tools available, we can solve 80 per cent of the problems in a system,” Shores says. “That makes it an extremely good return on investment.”

For Orb Data’s council client, having an automated service management system in place represents a guardian angel, watching over each of the authority’s systems and providing the IT department with an accurate and constantly updated picture of how they are performing: “The Tivoli suite has allowed the council to cherry-pick the most appropriate components for a complete and focused IT automation solution,” Shores says. “This lets them deploy manpower resources with maximum effect, to ensure high levels of service where it really matters – to improve the business of collaboration with their customers.”

Automating the management of IT systems is certainly a way of saving money in the short to medium-term but the long-term return on investment is potentially far more important. As IT systems increasingly provide automated collaboration within and between companies, so their availability and performance must be more effectively managed. Those organisations that ignore this aspect of their IT investment risk ever higher stakes in the competitive, service-led arena of modern business.

Orb Data: In Brief

Orb Data was founded in 1998 by a team of three IBM consultants specialising in Tivoli solutions. It is the UK’s leading supplier of solutions for managing the complexity of IT infrastructure. As IT plays an increasingly pivotal role in business activities with customers and suppliers, it’s essential for the IT infrastructure to operate in a timely, reliable and secure fashion.

Orb Data offers solutions that involve people, process and technology. With a substantial number of years experience working with large and small companies, Orb Data has gained a reputation for excellence in project delivery. Its mission is “to serve our customers in order to help them maximise the value and benefit of their IT computing infrastructures.”

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