The myth of the expensive bearded man
We're not talking about Santa Claus here, even though it's the season, but about persistent stereotypes and a very incomplete vision of IT services by non-technical people, whether they are your customers or internal business contacts.
Like insurance, IT service is always too expensive, ... until the day you really need it.
As the backbone of the organization and a production tool, the IS is the focus of all attention. The same must be true for the men and women who ensure its proper functioning on a daily basis.
The need to promote actions that are often not very visible
As the person responsible for internal tools or a customer service department, it is essential to value your actions so that they are recognised and appreciated.
We will talk about internal marketingThis is the first step in the development of a new approach to internal communication, aimed at giving visibility to the proactive and corrective actions of an IT department. Application managers, SDM and general management will be the first recipients of these actions, closely followed by end users.
On the side customer communicationIn order to achieve this, the communication should be directed towards the general management, the business departments and the purchasing managers. This communication should insist on the associated ROI, based on factual and measurable data.
Supervision: just a technical tool?
Effective, comprehensive and proactive supervision is :
- monitoring of the lower layers (hardware, CPU, RAM, Disk, ...)
- monitoring of applications (application scenarios, log control, URL response time, ...)
- an aggregation of these elements into macro and non-technical indicators: service weather forecasts
- of dashboards adapted
At this stage, the service provided is qualitative, and avoids many unavailabilities.
However, the main beneficiaries of this information must be informed: the users of the IS.
A supervisory tool oriented towards communication as ServiceNav must allow you to :
- produce reports factual information to support your steering/management committees, in order to :
- to evaluate the quality of the service provided over a period of time, by analysing the measured availability rates
- justify investments
- detect projects for the coming months (e.g.: migration of an infrastructure that has become limited)
- optimize the use of resources (human and infra)
- proactively communicate with users, through
- sharing of service weather with comments in case of service degradation (via webservices or Sharepoint portal)
- dashboards in read only without authentication
To conclude
A good monitoring tool must monitor your park at all times, alerting you as soon as possible to risks or problems that have been identified.
With a little time and a good setting, it will be quickly the case, if it is not already.
All you have to do is to use this data as a support for your meetings.
Reports can also become a powerful tool for the Service Delivery Manager, who will appreciate being able to prove to his customer the quality of the service provided, on a measurable basis, by analysing the data presented with him.
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