How to nip IT problems in the bud

Senior executives often assume that the IT investment risks they take can be broadly measured in terms of critical outcomes such as sales growth, cheaper transactions or improved productivity. However, despite the scale or cost of these investments, many IT directors - consumed by workloads or perhaps too trusting of technology vendors’ promises - seem reluctant to provide effective and regular insight into their IT infrastructure’s performance and how it will meet the needs of the business as it evolves.

So how can CIOs and IT managers check that their technology systems are in a healthy state and find a way to pick up the warning signs without impeding their daily operations?

Ultimately, monitoring the IT infrastructure and application performance will provide the insight necessary to keep business systems running in an optimal state. Many businesses rely on their users notifying them of a problem, but monitoring allows the identification and resolution of issues before business services are adversely affected.

On a performance level, monitoring ensures that IT systems are in good working order and helps to identify states that could undermine service levels provided to the end user. But the ability to analyse historical trends and enhance the understanding of how the system is really being utilised over time gives businesses the invaluable evidence on which they can base forward-planning - using factual data and avoiding the “finger-in-the-air” guesswork that sometimes accompanies new IT investments.

IT departments need to ask themselves the following key questions to minimise risk from ongoing technology investments:

• Does your business have documented customer service expectations and minimum service levels that support them?

• Do you have regular meetings to review customer satisfaction levels, processes and technology assets?

• Can your outsourced IT provider deliver performance metrics that show the contribution of their systems to your business?

• Do you have cross-platform monitoring tools in place that can provide externally-oriented, business-focused multiple-level metrics that help the board assess the health of technology assets and provide early warning of potential issues associated with them?

If the answer to any of these, but especially the last question, is no, then your business could be struggling to detect early warnings of system capacity issues or plan the way your IT infrastructure supports the board’s vision for core business operations.

Monitoring your investment is the way to start managing risk and providing the much-hyped agile IT operation.