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For more than two decades, IT departments have focused on improved software toolkits as their primary strategy for ensuring effective management of technology infrastructure and services. The prevailing belief was that given the right software and hardware, network and system management teams could effectively monitor and troubleshoot even the most complex computing and communications environments.
A variety of factors, however, are causing IT managers to question this tool-centric approach. E-business environments now encompass a growing range of hardware, software and networking elements, as well as infrastructure, application and content support from third-party providers. This complexity makes it difficult for IT departments to construct the right management tools for the job. The acquisition of new tools often winds up creating serious implementation and training issues for IT staffs. As a result, most management teams have found that they don't necessarily become more effective or productive just because they acquire more software tools.
Another issue is the changing nature of the IT team itself. With limited personnel budgets and often-conflicting technology priorities, IT managers can no longer depend on having more technicians on hand to integrate and operate their expanding management toolkits. The addition of more tools to the management toolkit can therefore have the counter-productive effect of adding to the workload of already overburdened staffs.
The objectives of management teams have changed as well. In the early days of mainframe and distributed computing, the goal of the management team was to ensure the health of each of the constituent components of a relatively stable computing environment. This objective lent itself to the use of component-specific management tools by highly task-specific management teams.
Today, on the other hand, IT staffs must pursue more sophisticated management goals to achieve requisite end-to-end service levels. These goals include the pro-active, cross-disciplinary troubleshooting of potential performance problems before they affect revenue-generating services and the rapid, error-free implementation of changes in order to respond quickly to evolving customer and market requirements.
New management tools alone - no matter how sophisticated - cannot enable IT teams to meet these growing challenges. Instead, IT departments must begin refining their management processes and practices to cope with complexity, change, and the need for an end-to-end perspective of service level monitoring.
To support this transition...