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A Hidden Gold Mine in Every Business (cont'd)
In many companies, most of the company
seems to operate by a completely different set of rules and
communicate in a different language than those the IT or computer
services sector of the business. This division is somewhat
artificial and partially maintained by the IT people themselves
because of a certain culture technical people have about their
specialized knowledge and application areas. But at heart, those
strange people down in IT have the same goals as every other business
person which is to succeed both personally and corporately in shared
projects.
But those of us on the business side of
the corporate landscape depend on the computer folks to let us know
how things are going with that highly valuable asset that we have in
our IT systems, hardware and software. Most medium to large
businesses run very high capacity computers or multitudes of
computers connected through a network and those systems must perform
at top capacity each day to accomplish the goals of the business.
The upgrade and maintenance budgets for
the computers that run your business no doubt represents a fairly
sizable percentage of the corporate budget each year. But because
those systems are what make you competitive in the marketplace, that
investment is worth the money to assure that the mission critical
jobs those powerful systems do get done on time each week and month.
When a computer begins to show signs of
straining under the load of work, we are giving it, that can be a
cause of significant concern for a business. If your business
paradigm dictates that the load of traffic or system resources could
be pushed to beyond what the computers can do with their existing
computing power, that weakness in the IT infrastructure represents a
significant risk to the company should the system become overloaded
when there is a large body of work to be done by these machines.
What not every business person knows is
that there may be a hidden goldmine of computing capacity already
resident in your IT resources that simply is not being tapped to its
fullest. You know that it isn’t uncommon for your IT professionals
to report that your systems are at 80-90% capacity and must be
upgraded to handle the next big increase in business.
That hidden goldmine is a discipline
that has actually been around for quite sometime but is infrequently
tapped in the modern business world. That discipline is called
“capacity planning”. By implementing a capacity planning office
and monitoring function, you can put the tools and the talent in
place to precisely measure scientifically if your computer systems
are at capacity of if there is just a need for system tuning or
realignment of computing schedules to get more out of the systems you
already own.
Recently a large oil company in the
Midwest noted that many of its mission critical functions were being
delayed in processing, seemingly because the computer systems were
overloaded and in dire need of an expensive and time consuming
upgrade. Capacity planning measurements were taken and the system
was diagnosed to determine what the real problem was and it was found
that job priorities of new functions were not tuned to the load of
the system at critical time frames. The adjustments were made by
talented systems administrators and the IT infrastructure continued
to perform at top-notch capacity and the delays were eliminated with
no additional hardware or upgrades needed.
By utilizing capacity planning software
tools and enabling your IT team to take advantage of this highly
scientific computer measurement and prediction method, the business
can get the most out of its computer resources and use its corporate
resources to further the business objectives of the company. And
that benefits everyone.
October 2007
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