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December 7, 1998

Methods For Management

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Security management encompasses all activities that involve monitoring and safekeeping IT customers and technology assets from internal and external security threats by imposing constraints on the use of these resources. Some of the most critical assets to secure are PCs, applications, databases, servers, and network resources. Some of the management activities include the control of device and software logons, passwords, and user IDs.

Storage management includes all activities required to manage and track various storage media objects as they are migrated between different components of a company's storage system to optimize space.

Systems-administration management covers a variety of ongoing housekeeping chores that must be performed daily. The most common activities include file-system maintenance and network-address management.

Seven Basic Steps
There are methodologies available to streamline these management processes. Projects can be partitioned into a series of small subprojects, in accordance with a company's priorities. While the activities are described below in a linear fashion, some of them can be executed in parallel or in an iterative fashion. The methodology comprises seven basic activities:

Create cross-functional teams composed of representative participants from different IT functional groups, such as application development, database design, and computer operations. Also, include representatives from business areas when appropriate.
Identify the core set of critical systems-management processes that IT must manage with discipline to successfully support the company's business processes.
Identify the owners of each major management process and make them accountable for the entire process. Process owners might not be IT managers. IT managers are accountable for technical people along traditional lines of responsibilities, such as IT divisions. Most IT organizations use conventional hierarchical reporting structures. On the other end, process owners must assess systems-management processes horizontally, from beginning to end and across divisional boundaries. The process owner's ultimate mission is to ensure that the overall process is properly set up to satisfy customer requirements.
Identify whether the critical systems-management processes interface with one another--and where there might be dependencies among them. Question and resolve potential overlaps or duplication of work.
Map each major systems-management process, breaking it down into subprocesses. Verify how the subprocesses work with one another. For example, are there subprocesses that interfere with others? Analyze the inputs and outputs of each elementary subprocess. Streamline the process by retaining only the lower-level subprocesses that add value, and obliterate those that are superfluous. Optimize all remaining subprocesses that add value to ensure all inefficiencies, delays, and bottlenecks are eliminated from the entire workflow.
Identify possible organizational design issues, such as potential communication breakdowns across various departments. If required, realign the organizational structure along the newly streamlined systems-management process model.
Review the complete list of systems-management processes that must be implemented to achieve serviceability, performance, availability, reliability, and supportability. In preparation for a staged implementation, rank the list by order of importance to achieve the full spectrum of service. Although the priorities will vary from one IT organization to another, several IT departments realize that their first priority is to stabilize their IT production environment.

Consequently, implementing a formal change and configuration systems-management process is often an essential step. For instance, no IT organization can successfully implement formal service-level management if it cannot strictly control all the changes that affect the production environment.