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September 13, 1999

Bottom-Line Management

Companies seek a business-oriented view of their enterprise information systems

By Alan S. Kay

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ne of the challenges for IT managers responsible for systems management is that the word management is a moving target. Years ago, systems management meant availability--ensuring that systems and networks were available for use. More recently, systems management meant delivering acceptable response times.

The key system-management issue for IT managers today is how well the systems are serving the company's bottom line. For many, that's a tough question to answer. Neither uptime nor response time translates easily into customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, or profitability. What's needed, analysts say, is a new approach--a business-oriented view of an enterprise's information systems that can translate traditional IS metrics into yardsticks that are meaningful to a company's senior executives.

This approach raises fundamental questions about the nature and value of information technology. It forces IT managers to focus on their contributions to the company and how to measure and report those contributions, says Rich Ptak, VP of systems and applications management at the Hurwitz Group.

That observation is echoed on the front lines. "The biggest problem we have about reporting is that a lot of the packages out there will give you a lot of the bits and bytes, but you can't turn around and give that to executives at the top of the house because they don't know what those devices are," says Dave Routsis, network support group manager at utility company Boston Edison Co. "They're concerned with the business itself--how it's performing, what its capacities are. They're looking for a higher view."

That view is a picture of how well the customer--internal or external--is being served. For example, Glaxo Wellcome plc, a London pharmaceutical company with U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is trying to adopt a philosophy of service management rather than component management, says Tom Revak, senior manager of systems and network management. "The user cares that something happens in the fashion they expect and require, so you'd better be able to know what the critical factors are affecting that performance," he says.

That's why Len Tanner, CIO at Hewitt Associates, a Lincolnshire, Ill., human-resources consulting firm and outsourcer, jokes about creating a "Len Tanner button"--something that users can push to alert IT managers that a business process isn't running the way it should so staffers can correlate system events with service delivery problems.

System-management tools have long been available to monitor the performance of network and systems components. But as companies grew, platforms multiplied, and systems were decentralized, management tools multiplied as well--to the point where the many consoles, monitoring devices, and reporting styles made it difficult to obtain a sense of a company's overall health.

That led to the development of system-management frameworks such as Enterprise from IBM's Tivoli Systems and Unicenter TNG from Computer Associates, which are used to centrally manage a heterogeneous, distributed IT environment. Frameworks promise what Tanner wants: the ability for a single employee in front of a master terminal to monitor and manage every system in an enterprise.

Earl Newsome Photo by Larry Linkous System-management frameworks still have a ways to go to fulfill that promise. They are costly, can take a long time to deploy fully, and may encompass an uneven array of individual tools. Gartner Group VP Ray Paquet likens a framework to a fruit basket containing some fruit that's fresh and some that's rotten. "You're not going to get from a single vendor best-of-breed functionality across the board." Instead, he says, framework systems sell integration for integration's sake.

"Frameworks are oversold," says Earl Newsome, VP and CIO of Owens-Illinois Inc., a Toledo, Ohio, packaging company. Newsome says he cares far more about the quality of the tools he has available than about the framework they constitute. So he has assembled an array of best-of-breed products and uses an integration console, FirstSense Enterprise, to give him the end-user response metrics he needs. He acknowledges that he gives up a degree of centralization. "Sure, we could be better with integration," he says, "but at what cost?"

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