My organization is growing quickly and we have deployed email, database, and user file solutions. We are enjoying the flexibility and success of the environments, but the systems are divergent in their requirements and our IT team is challenged to deliver information management services to our growing organization. Are there any solutions that can help my team gauge our performance, help us improve, and provide feedback to the customers and the management team?
QUESTION POSED ON: 06 NOV 2006
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Brett Cooper
Thank you for your question. You are grappling with a challenge that many IT organizations share -- managing your IT solutions from a goals perspective versus a break-fix perspective -- aligning the information management processes around the goals of the business. I worked with a customer several years ago that approved a proposal from the vendor that I worked with -- they told us that they could not understand how our solution, which was in the millions of dollars, could provide a tangible, measurable return on their investment. I worked with the sales team to convert the cost of sale into a meaningful number for the customer -- taking the cost and equating it into something that the customer could understand. The product that this customer produced was toothpaste, for each tube of toothpaste produced we calculated that their current system was costing them $.07/tube produced each year. We did the financial summary of our solution and concluded that our solution would cost $.04/tube produced, saving the customer $.03/tube produced. This not only convinced the customer to go with our solution, a win for the company that I was at, but showed them a new way to look at their IT solutions. The CIO started to look at financial justifications in terms of the real world cost to the company's core business.
Back to your question -- are their any solutions that can measure activity and provide dashboards across diverse systems in terms of quality of information management? The answer is "Yes!" Several companies, including IBM, HP, CA, BMC, and others provide solutions that not only measure the information management environment from a quality of service perspective, but deliver suggestions for corrective actions within the environment to improve quality of service. You are probably asking yourself, "how is this possible since the goals for each organization are different" and you would be right. For the most part, some 80% of solutions manage the physical and logical infrastructure and provide a dashboard of what is going on within the environment, but to achieve the final 20% of solutions services and consulting are required to tune the solution to your environment -- usually through a services arrangement.
Let me know if my answer helped you with your challenge. Thank you.
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