InformationWeek

While any CIO can make such a statement, Lazarine has embarked on a handful of ambitious initiatives to back it up. In the past year, he's managed the merger of the Plano, Texas, company's network and systems administration groups, the construction of a central network operations center, and the broadening of Alcatel's internal service-level agreement (SLA) program to monitor end-to-end performance rather than individual devices.

Upon completion, these projects should give managers at the U.S. arm of Alcatel SA, a $23 billion French company, a clear picture of the performance of its systems and enterprise network, which supports 12,000 users in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, and India. "The key to managing systems resources effectively today is having the ability to view performance in a cohesive manner rather than focus on individual components," Lazarine says.

Alcatel purchases various monitoring tools to determine how specific routers, switches, servers, and applications are performing. Armed with that data, the IT department negotiates written SLAs with various business units that establish goals, such as limiting network downtime, fixing devices in a timely manner, and providing rapid application response time.

To really make these objectives work, IT department managers'raises and bonuses are tied to how close they come to meeting the goals. Each Monday, IT managers receive reports that outline their groups' performance the previous week. Alcatel publishes that information on its intranet for all to see.

Perhaps because internal SLAs are "a difficult process that requires a lot of work from the business units and the IT department," they are rare at most companies," says David Passmore, research director at market-research firm Burton Group.

But at Alcatel, where many customers are carriers, the company has firsthand knowledge of the growing importance of SLAs in the business world. Lazarine sees these agreements as a vehicle to run IT operations in a more businesslike fashion. In addition, Lazarine, a veteran of EDS, is influenced by practices used at his former employer to gauge the effectiveness of its outsourcing services.

Improvements, however, are still needed because Alcatel's service-level agreements aren't in a format that users desire. Traditionally, IT departments track their service delivery piecemeal, and focus on issues such as router uptime and the volume of data processed on central servers.

Users aren't very interested in whether a router attained 99.99% uptime or whether a server completed 500,000 transactions per hour. Instead, they evaluate performance on an end-to-end basis--what happens from the time they start a transaction to when it's completed--and they don't care whether the needed data is stored on a departmental server or on a Web page in the company's Paris office.

Consequently, the IT department is changing its outlook on performance monitoring and moving away from device performance to application availability. But this is a difficult, complex transition that's expected to take Alcatel until fall 2001 to complete.

Until recently, Alcatel--like most companies--had separate network-and systems-management groups and couldn't provide an end-to-end view of performance, because neither its organization nor its management tools were structured that way.

Such disconnects are common. Network and systems management require sophisticated skill sets and tools. Determining whether a router is functioning properly is very different from determining how much data an I/O system is processing. Also, management tools are designed to examine distinct components rather than monitor end-to-end performance.

A couple of dozen tools examine both computer and network performance. However, deploying such tools requires that companies reorganize their existing support staffs--something that can be difficult to accomplish. "In a large corporation, putting application-level SLAs in place is a complex process, because it means having a lot of people who haven't worked closely together before reach a consensus," says Reinhard Pfaffinger, a senior network engineer at Alcatel USA.

Currently, the company has one group of 15 employees working with network monitoring tools. They rely on eHealth from Concord Communications Inc. to produce performance reports; Netcool from Micromuse Inc. to corre-late various perform-ance messages; and Spectrum from Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. to collect performance information from various devices.

The systems group, which consists of about 150 employees, has a broad range of tools since Alcatel USA revamped its application infrastructure and moved away from Novell NetWare and Netscape SuiteSpot to Microsoft Windows NT and Lotus Development's Domino. The systems group works with Novell management utilities, Compaq's Insight Manager, Microsoft Systems Management Server, and Unix shell scripts, which are operating-system management utilities.

Such distinct groups can hinder rather than help the performance monitoring process. "When companies have separate network and systems groups, technicians can spend a lot of time trying to determine which group owns a problem rather than actually trying to fix it," says Burton Group's Passmore. Melding the two groups can help eliminate the fingerpointing and speed problem resolution.

However, dramatic changes in support responsibilities can alarm technicians, who may resist working together. To foster unity, Alcatel has established an IT Program Management Office, which acts as an internal mediator and also performs services, such as examining the cost/ benefit analysis on all IT projects.

Alcatel plans to have the network and systems staffs link their monitoring tools, even though the groups favor different approaches. The network staff wants to expand the use of Concord's eHealth, especially since Concord earlier this year acquired FirstSense Software Inc., which develops software to monitor application performance. The systems staffers feel more comfortable using IBM's Tivoli Management Environment for such tasks. One possible solution is to have Tivoli feed usage data into Netcool. If the two groups can't reach a compromise by month's end, when both groups move into the new network operations center, the IT Program Management Office will make a recommendation to Lazarine, who'll make the final decision.

The company's rapidly changing business sidetracked the initiative as well. To increase its data-networking product line, Its parent, Alcatel SA in Paris, acquired Xylan Inc. and Packet Engines Inc. in 1999 and put them under the Alcatel USA aegis.

The company spent a lot of time examining its different business units' IT infrastructures and developing a common model so information could be easily exchanged.

Alcatel USA freed up 1,200 square feet with a building in Plano, which has become home to the new operations center--a project so important that Pfaffinger was hired last fall to oversee it. By the middle of this month, the company expects to install all the necessary wiring and mount a series of large monitors, so technicians can quickly determine what's happening on the corporate network.

When the new Network Operations Center is complete, Alcatel will need to take several steps before it finishes its SLA overhaul. The network and systems monitoring tools have to be integrated so the technicians can examine end-to-end performance. Once that occurs, the IT department managers will meet with their business units' counterparts to determine how to structure the new SLAs. "The new SLAs should help us temper users' expectations," Pfaffinger says. "While departments never want their networks and systems to go down, reliability improvements come from capital investments. With these reports, we should be able to better illustrate the cost/benefits associated with improved system and network performance."

Once the new objectives are established, the company will create new incentives to get the IT department to meet them.

In addition to revamping its SLAs, the IT department will assimilate two recently acquired companies--Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. and Newbridge Networks Corp.--into Alcatel's network and systems. Once those moves are complete, Alcatel USA will provide system and network service to 20,000 employees. Balancing such a wide range of initiatives can be difficult. "Many large companies have shied away from implementing internal SLAs because they require significant time and resource investments from IT departments that are often understaffed," says Burton Group's Passmore.

However, Alcatel sees the correlation between system and network performance and meeting business objectives--and will do something about it. Says Lazarine, "We're willing to make the investments needed to ensure our resources can support our business."