Change the world, don't automate it

Gartner to CIOs: Change the world don't automate it

This is a great article from Search CIO. Too often we see CIOs focus on technology instead of on what IT can do to give the company a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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Mentoring - The way to freedom

Over the years I have found myself often burdened with so many tasks that I couldn't do anything effectively. How did I get in this predicament? In a large part, this was due to my failure to mentor my staff.

A simple definition of mentoring is “One who guides without leading, teaches by example, and is willing to let the mentored one experience the bumps needed for learning and growth to take a place".

What qualities make up a mentor?

• The mentoring relationship is permissive not authoritarian. Mentors need to be good communicators and spend as much time listening as guiding.

• A good mentor can apply theory into practice.

• The mentor protects the mentee, and lets them fail or struggle. A world class athlete reaches there goal by overcoming failure, if we aren't allowed to struggle we don't grow.

• The mentee perceives the world in a new light. The mentor exposes the mentee to the decision process, and helps them see the bigger picture.

Benefits for Mentors

• This process keeps your thinking fresh, you are exposed to new ideas, and you have a finger on the pulse of employee perceptions.

• You develop new leaders who can work on your behalf, and carryout a shared vision.

• You hone your leadership skills, and receive personal satisfaction.

Benefits for Mentees

• Exposure to varying management styles.

• A greater understanding of the corporate vision.

• Access to good advice.

• Growth beyond your comfort zone.

Benefits for Organizations

• A unified vision throughout the management chain.

• Continuity in leadership, resources are developed within and retention is improved.

• Continuity of corporate values.

• A trusting culture is created, increasing effectiveness while motivating staff.

Downtime can mean life or death!

When I was in grade school I read a book about Ernest Shackleton the Antartic explorer. I was fascinated by his story of survival under the most brutal of conditions. Over the years when ever I saw something concerning Shackleton and the race to the south pole it caught my attention immediately.

Shackleton's expedition was a failure, they didn't reach there goal, and nearly lost there lives. It was only through courage and shear determination that they managed to survive. When you study the Shackleton expedition you find that the crew was ill prepared, there ship the Endurance wasn't well suited for the ice and eventually was crushed and sank. The Endurance crew being stranded, was forced to sail to South Georgia Island, hundreds of miles away in open life boats. Shackleton was also probably overly optimistic, and aggressive in his plan, taking on more risk than was necessary.

Often times I think IT projects are like Shackleton's expedition, they fall short of the goal, and a massive heroic effort is required to survive. Many times I have seen a change go into production that was said to be "transparent, no one will notice", twenty four hours later, sleepy eyed technicians finally get things back to normal. The technicians are applauded for there superhuman effort, and no lessons are learned.

The best IT organizations aren't always perceived as doing much, since they don't suffer these catastrophic failures. IT failures don't have the same life and death consequences as an Antartic expedition at the turn of the 20th century, but they can mean life or death to the business.

For a life and death survival give me Shackleton. For IT survival give me good planning and careful execution.

Baby Steps

Remember the Bill Murray movie "What About Bob", and how the therepy he was using was referred to as taking baby steps ? Today's blog concerns making small changes to your environment not the huge ones that crash systems and wreak havoc on user uptime.

Moving an organization towards a Service Delivery focus is a process of "baby steps". Make continuous improvements to your processes, measure what you are doing and establish base lines. You can start in a multitude of ways, I like to start with the Service Desk/HelpDesk. Funnel all of your issues through the Service Desk, and start reporting. Your incident management tool is where the information about what is not working lives. Start picking off problem areas and measure your results. How many critical sysytem outages are you having, track these over time? How many times do new programs go into production only to fail the next day? Begin doing code reviews before applications go into production. Are servers running out of resources unexpectedly? Measure these things and take steps to correct the issue. The key thing is to start picking off these issues, over time your IT life will become more manageable.

So what is Network Monitoring???

Network Monitoring

The term network monitoring, leads one to believe that we are only monitoring the network. In today's complex IT environments it is essential to monitor many things besides the network, a server running out of disk space, or a Windows service stopping can have drastic consequences for the organization.

Several years ago I started monitoring ethernet interfaces on routers with a tool called MRTG (www.mrtg.org), this was so easy to configure and provided so much information that I began using it to measure other things like Windows server statistics for cpu, memory, disk space etc... MRTG is still a fine tool but it requires a lot of manual scripting and was fairly hard to get configured for things that it wasn't built for. I began looking for other tool sets that were more easily managed and could provide notifications when a measurement crossed a certain threshold, it was then I discovered Nagios ( www.nagios.org ) . Nagios is a wonderful tool for notifications and is fairly easy to configure for monitoring most anything. I have combined this with Cacti ( www.cacti.net ) to provide graphing. Together these two tools can provide a very robust look at your environment, and they are FREE. If you don't have the skill set in house to install and configure these tools there a number of organizations that can assist with this for a reasonable fee, once up an running these tools require minimum maintenance and your staff can easily be trained.

Now, what do we need to monitor? I think most organizations miss the boat here, a server, or network administrator typically sets up these tools and only "points" them at there devices. When I speak about network monitoring I am talking about a comprehensive view of your environment. I start with connectivity, any monitoring tool has to be able to "ping" the devices in your environment. I typically start with the network interfaces, then the switches, and finally servers. Identifying these devices and configuring an up down monitor will let you know at a very base level what is working in your organization. Next I work on the notifications, who needs to know when something is down. Once again the administrators that typically set these things up, don't go far enough and not everyone that needs this information is included. Make sure and include you Service Desk, they are on the front lines, when something goes down a phone call from a non functional user is not far behind.

Okay, we know what is in our environment, if it's up or down, now lets start monitoring how well these devices are performing. For network devices, let look at things like bandwidth utilization ( how much traffic is going in and out of the device). Where possible you want to identify the ports on your ethernet switch infrastructure that are connected to your servers. This is often overlooked when setting up a network tool, this is valuable information and needs to be monitored. Once again we set thresholds and notifications for example 80% utilization on an interface may be a warning and 90% utilization may require a critical alert.

After configuring the network utilization, I start on server statistics. Each server in your environment should have at least the minimum of cpu, memory, and disk space monitored. We set up thresholds and notifications on these systems as well. Many other measurements are available depending on the type of server and the function that it performs.

Once the basic server monitoring is in place, begin looking at things like application performance.
This can be one of the most difficult things to measure but some creativity can get you through this. I have measured nightly processing by checking for the creation or modification of key or flag files at certain times. I know if these files are not there by the prescribed time that "production" is running behind, and send out the appropriate notification.

To maintain an accurate monitoring system you need to make this part of the installation and de-installation of anything in your environment. Make this part of your change management process, these monitoring configurations typically only take a few minutes to put in place.

With these very basic measurements in hand, trends can be observed that lend themselves to predicting things like a maxed out cpu, or disk space about to run out. This trending analysis is invaluable in budgetary planning. In many cases I have been able to predict months in advance when a system was going to run out of resources, this advance notices allows for proper planning and corrective action.

These are some very basic steps in building a network solution, for detailed information follow the links on my Resources page. If you have more questions please send me an email and I will respond as quickly as possible, typically within 24 hours.

So you think you are running an IT help desk....

But in reality you are managing a call center, just filled with tech's and taking more time on the phone then say a catalog ordering center. Over the last 7 years that I have been running Help Desks/Service Desks and the first 10 plus years managing call centers, I have found that the people in IT don't think they have anything to do with customer service or call centers, but they are more alike then they know. Most of the metrics that I had used in the call center world will work to track the performance in your help desk. Calls per hour, ATT (average talk time), ASA (average speed answer), ACW (after call work time) are great for tracking center performance. Call monitoring is never talked about in IT, but it is an excellent way to hear how your team is handling your users. It also helps you see how well your team is documenting their tickets. The customer satisfaction numbers and solve rate are both great numbers to measure how well you are handling the users. Once you start tracking all this information you find that it will help with your staffing and scheduling, as well as give you a great over view of all of IT. Soon you will start to see problem trends you never even realized were in your center.

Richard Skinner's groundbreaking book "IT is about the Strategy" is a comprehensive guide to developing winning IT strategies for the SMB.

Most young organizations suffer from the same breakage points as they grow. Skinner shows how these milestones and there accompanying issues are a normal part of business growth, and how you can overcome each of these challenges.

I have had the pleasure of working with Richard a number of times over the years, and I know these techniques work. His book outlines common sense techniques that will take you out of firefighting and chaos. If you are looking for practical help with your IT issues, please check out this book at www.itisaboutstrategy.com