As a business consultant, I was constantly confronted with clients who had made a significant investment in a systems management framework application, such as HP OpenView or CA Unicenter, and were struggling with how to deploy the technology in order to receive the benefits of the substantial investment they had made.  In most cases, they were sold the software by a zealous software sales person without that sales person having an appreciation of what it would take to actually receive the purported benefits that he was pitching.  Too many times, vendors pitch an exaggerated value proposition for their software which has a limited chance of coming to fruition without a lot of time, resources, and money.  In the current economic state of the world right now, most firms do not have an endless supply of any of those items.

None of the systems management tools on the market today are the silver bullet.  With the appropriate amount of training, and implementation of processes, the technologies will go much further in terms of meeting your ROI expectations that were set by the vendor.

So what does this mean you say?  All of the large framework systems management applications require some sort of pre-acquisition due diligence with regard to your organization.  How mature are your current processes for IT Asset management?  How mature are your processes with the Life-cycle management of your data center environment?  Do you have an adequately trained staff and do you have enough staff to maintain the applications once the vendor’s professional services team has implemented the solution (if you are lucky enough to afford the vendor’s PS team)?  Do you have effective change and configuration management processes in place and are they documented?  These are just some of the many questions that senior leadership of any IT shop needs to ask itself before making a large purchase in a framework application suite.

If you are an IT organization that already has a lot of the traditional network and systems management tools in place, how well are those tools operated and maintained today?  If you are looking to embark on a large service management initiative, like the development of a CMDB, then you need to ensure that the systems you are going to populate the CMDB from are accurate and the integrity of the data contained in those systems is not in question.

My next several blog posts will dive deeper into the issues that surround these large scale deployments and will provide some best practices in terms of how these tools should be deployed and what changes to people, process, and technology need to take place in order to derive any sort of value from these systems management frameworks.