Walk into your office sometime and flip the light switch. If your lights do NOT come on, youll surely be unhappy, upset, frustrated and ready to chew your electric utilitys head off. Worst of all, you may be facing the loss of a serious amount of revenue. Your business can simply not carry on without electricity and lights.
Does your Information Technology (IT) share this exalted essential status? If not, youre risking serious business damage as IT has now joined electricity, heat, and air conditioning as utilities that we cannot afford to be without.
Just about everywhere, at the very least from an expectation standpoint, your network infrastructure must absolutely be up and running every minute of every day, keeping your Internet access open, your phone system reliable and clear, your fax machines ready to give and receive, and a host of other mission-critical applications functioning at peak efficiency. Should your IT systems break down, you, your company, your people and your customers cannot hope to continue functioning properly together.
CIO Magazine Editor Richard Pastore understands this new reality. He recently wrote a piece touting convergence as the new CIO buzzword, a term that replaces the previous buzz-mantra of alignment. Convergence, Pastore explains, now transcends alignment in that IT can no longer be considered a separate, side entity just trying to fit in, but instead has grown integral to every aspect, every department, and every strategic goal of your business. Networked technology is now tightly woven into the very fabric of every company.
What is the significance and breadth of this new utility mindset? For one thing, your professional workers must have high speed Internet in their homes and expect as well to seamlessly connect to the office at any time. This includes large corporations and mid- and small-size businesses alike. For another, it means your customers are never cut off from you, that technical difficulties never interrupt your services. Otherwise, calamities could be lurking, ready to strike.
Take the case of private training company whose sales depended 95% upon massive advertising campaigns conducted every weekend. Its CEO knew that his firms network of IP phones and Internet Servers had to be ready to go for the Monday morning loador else! Before he adopted the IT-as-utility model, he had to endure occasional Monday morning breakdowns, resulting in losses of $50K per HOUR!
When he finally got religion, and revamped his systems by replacing reactive procedures with pro-active monitoring, such beginning-of-the-week traumas came to an end. Now a team of experts closely monitored all his critical devices throughout each weekend so that come Sunday night he could be assured that they would be fully functioning the next morning when his customers, new and old, began calling or hitting the company website. Thats what is meant by utility service.
What does it take to make your network a continuously fully functional, expeditious, and a safe utility network? It first takes a solid commitment from the companys senior executive team. It means ending the mindset that IT is just a secondary function, that tech troubles will occur from time to time, that effective strategic management is directed toward non-technical matters (finance, product development, operations).
Second, it means investing in your firm with wisdom and confidence. Investing with wisdom means engaging a team of experts from your staff, or a consulting firm or outside vendor, to be sure that your business objectives are in line with current technologies. Someone has got to do some research in order to cut through marketing fluff and determine what is real and practical and what will drive your businesses today.
Investing with confidence means that once you have the roadmap drawn up, you have the right people designing the integration of that technology into your existing network. This design must take the utility approach in that the best products are chosen and configured for full redundancy and that every possible security risk is considered and mitigated.
Third, install a professional project manager to manage the implementation. True project management here coordinates all the necessary resources, assures timely product delivery, effectively plans and communicates necessary down time, and assures proper documentation. The project plan holds people accountable at every stage of the process to implement all necessary work for meeting the projects milestones and deadlines. It assures that they swiftly and effectively complete the implementation, then provide the necessary detailed documentation in order to facilitate both pro-active as well as reactive support.
Finally, the transition from implementation to ongoing support must be immediate and painless. Your project manager will clearly define all the necessary steps for making this transition as smooth as possible. In your firms pre-utility days, ongoing support would mean: You have a problem, go call IT. Obviously, a terribly reactive, and dismissive, frame of mind. Now, pro-active end-user training engages all users in the success of the transition.
To qualify as a utility, your IT systems must be viewed in an entirely new light.
For your network to truly become what it needs to be, traditional re-active, half-hearted support must become a thing of the past. Imagine your entire workforce, for example, waiting around to get your firms email system back up. Imagine this takes a few hours. Do a quick calculation in your head of the potential cost of all this waiting around. Without a utility frame of mind, that image of horror you come up with is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Charles L. Nault, Chairman of the Board at Atrion Networking Corporation, is recognized throughout New England for his technical consulting. He has provided training to a number of renowned companies in addition to working closely with Cisco Systems on network design, implementations and support. This article is based on his upcoming book to be published in 2008. He can be reached at 401-736-6400 ext. 111 or
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