Reader Question: What is "Collaborative IT Operations Management"?

Third Sky Expert Answer:

Kai Holthaus, Director of Consulting, Third Sky

If we look at today’s IT environments, it becomes clear that everything is very much a team effort. Take email, for instance. Email is a communication service used by millions of people every day. In a typical corporation, email is enabled by the provision of hardware and software. The responsibilities for the different components going into email are split it into various teams – one team maintains the servers in a data center, another maintains the network and its various segments, while a third maintains storage arrays. For really large corporations, this will probably include multiple locations, such as data centers in various countries around the world.

When Email becomes unavailable, the search for the solution most likely will involve multiple resources, which need to be coordinated. Regular maintenance has the same requirement. It would be unwise to schedule a replacement of storage racks during the same time as a firmware upgrade on all network routers of a certain kind.

Add to this the fact that IT is a very fluid environment to begin with, it becomes increasingly hard to coordinate all these resources and make current information available to the right people at the right time. Doing so is what we describe as “Collaborative Operations Management”.

Why is Collaborative Operations Management important?

Collaborative Operations Management can help solve complex problems, by providing information across the board. More information means more knowledge, and that knowledge will help you address the problems that occur in your environment. It also helps by coordinating activities between the various groups, ensuring that they don’t step on each other’s toes, or that no group repeats something that another group has already tried. Finally, Collaborative Operations Management provides visibility into the activities of other groups, which will again provide additional information when problems are being solved.

Learn More

View a short, on-demand webinar on this topic as part of Third Sky's IT Process Automation Boot Camp.