Ever had a conversation with someone where you are sharing your viewpoints and it seems the other person is just not getting it? They seem to be stuck on the facts, but not getting the overall big picture or the spirit of what you’re trying to convey. Do you really know whether IT is having that lopsided conversation within your firm, whereby the firm is trying to tell a story and IT is just not getting it?
IT captures many data points from threshold alerts, critical indicators, monitoring tools, activity reports, logs, logs, and more logs. We are awash in data points, but are we getting the big picture? So bandwidth utilization crested at 90% and has slowed access to network resources for attorneys and staff. Alerts are sent, so off we go to find the culprit. Is it a defective appliance, are there issues with the ISP, are large file transfers in progress, streaming, maybe Internet downloads, what? Okay so we found the issue, fixed it and all is well, back to work.
Is all really well? What’s the likelihood this will happen again? Why did it occur? When did it occur? Where was the breakdown? How can we prevent, or at least minimize a reoccurrence? What did we learn from the issue? Are we seeing a trend when such issues occur? Does that trend tell us anything about how our attorneys and staff work and patterns of usage? Can we apply any information gleaned from this issue to other parts of how we serve up technology to those we support? These questions of how, what, where, when, why should be asked and answered for many issues we are presented with. It is not sufficient to stop at collecting data points, applying fixes and on to the next issue. We must pause for analysis and use the answers to align the technology in support of the business.
We spend many busy hours maintaining our technology environment, responding to and resolving issues, but we must build in time to analyze the data points and put together the lessons learned from post-mortem reviews to see the full story as it relates to the business and its needs. There is much talk about IT and business alignment, yet we tend to stop at the collection of data points and technical fixes. The monitoring tools can help us quickly identify anomalies in our network environment, but we as IT professionals must answer the questions that will help us determine the implications to the business and those we support and make adjustments accordingly.
Karen Campbell