Too many cooks? Better collaboration is necessary for managing today's multicomponent e-business services - The Bottom Line

Communications News, Jan, 2002 by Lenny Liebmann

Web applications and services have become more critical than ever to business success. Whether you're letting customers check their orders online or doing digital supply-chain management, you need your Web systems to perform reliably and snappily.

There are all kinds of nifty tools for doing this. Outside-the-firewall services like Keynote and Porivo, for example, will monitor your site from an end-user perspective. This is useful for tracking the current and historical performance of your online services. Then there are the "traditional" network and systems management tools that monitor the infrastructure supporting your online apps. These are good for avoiding component failures. Also new are inside-the-firewall tools designed to track the service levels and pinpoint application bottlenecks.

All these tools, however, are only of limited value if you're missing one critical piece of the puzzle: effective collaboration.

Collaboration is critical because of all the various technologies--and therefore technicians--needed to support today's complex Web services. If an outside-the-firewall monitoring service alerts you to a performance problem, you then have to initiate a troubleshooting process that can include database administrators, application experts, Web server gurus, network managers and more. How do you get all those people working together?

More importantly, how are they going to work together when they work at different companies?

In addition to being supported by more complex infrastructure than ever, today's Web services are more likely to be supported by multiple organizations. There are developers and database administrators at the company itself. There are system specialists at a Web-hosting service. Many sites now also use third-party providers for news feeds, maps or credit authorization. Then there are the ISPs who carry the traffic.

Getting all these folks to work together effectively has become a significant obstacle to rapid resolution of performance problems--as well as to the proactive elimination of potential problems.

Many corporate tech teams have tried help-desk and trouble-ticket systems with varying degrees of success. Usually, such systems are useful primarily for tracking end-user support calls and documenting support staff response times. Such systems, however, aren't as useful for managing the bulk of an IT team's daily workload. One reason for this is that determining when to open a "work ticket" for an event is difficult. Most management tools generate so many alerts that keeping up with them is almost impossible. Much of their expertise is devoted to quickly assessing which alerts don't require a response; automatically generating a ticket for every alert is impractical. Manual ticket generation is problematic for the same reason. At what point do you generate a ticket? And do busy techs really want to add manual ticket management to their already complex lives?

Now add the complications of an interorganizational system. How do you determine exactly who gets notification of an event? How do you maintain the security of the system as users in different companies are added and deleted over time? How willing will outside parties be to get involved in such systems? After all, hosts and content providers won't want to support multiple collaborative ticketing systems for their multiple clients.

Perhaps what's needed is some kind of independent online trouble-ticketing resource. A few application service providers are offering collaborative services that can manage technical workflow between organizations, but it's not clear that any of them are suited to the particular challenges of troubleshooting Web services.

The issues of cross-organization management, however, aren't just technical. They also require process discipline. In fact, some companies are doing well right now just by using pagers and e-mail. The key to their success has more to do with codification of who should contact whom and under what conditions--as well as who is authorized to do what. Such codification is essential for accelerating problem-resolution processes and maintaining effective management even as infrastructure and personnel change.

Have you encountered difficulties getting your multiple internal technology teams and outside partners to work together? Do you think you have a good system for multiorganizational management? Write me and let me know about it. It's a growing issue for Communications News readers, and we'd like to share your insights with your peers.

Liebmann is an independent consultant specializing in the application of networking technologies to strategic business challenges. Send comments to liebmann@comnews.com.