Information technology enablers tend to gather a lot of data from the IT environment, mostly operational statistics. Is that because they can, or because they actually need it? More importantly, we tend to push this data out to the business. Is this because they can, or because the business actually needs it?
I have seen companies forwarding the temperature statistiscs of server rooms to the business. Why would they do this? Do they actually expect that the business is critically interested in these temperatures? On internal operational level tracking these kinds of measurements might be very valid, especially when availability of service is dependend on it. But, is a business manager interested…
I believe one of the reasons is that IT enablers tend to push operational management data to the business, is that they do not know what the business is actually interested in (and, in all honesty, often the business does not know either). And if it is known, in most cases they cannot measure that kind of information easily. Tracking the availability of an application is just much harder than tracking room temperature.
So instead of fixing this problem, IT enablers tend to forward all the data they have, and they call this “openness” or “transparency”. However, all this data does not make sense for the business. IT enablers need to understand what kind of information the business needs before “communicating”. Or even better: I would suggest that the business understands what kind of information it requires when purchasing IT services, and make the delivery of the information part of the purchasing agreement.
Leave a response below, or send a trackback from your own site.
