- Ten Commandments for Building a "World-Class" Infrastructure
- Thou shalt measure customer satisfaction.
- Thou shalt structure and mentor thy organization to focus on Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS).
- Senior IT management must focus at least 50% of their time, resource, and budget on organization, people, and process initiatives.
- Honor thy mainframe disciplines, and keep them holy—but keep out the bureaucracy!
- Keep all production systems equal in the eyes of the IT staff.
- Thou shalt maintain centralized control for infrastructure standards and processes.
- Thou shalt design the infrastructure as an internal XSP.
- Thou shalt build an attractive, cost-effective, and flexible IT infrastructure and thy customers will come.
- Measure all; verily, you cannot manage what you do not measure.
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
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X. Measure all; verily, you cannot manage what you do not measure.
Think back to the legacy environment and how they were able to measure every aspect of the infrastructure. These are some of the metrics:
Online system availability
Network availability
Number of trouble calls
Number of application amendments
Application response times
Percentage of trouble calls resolved within specified time periods (two hours, four hours, etc.)
MIS executives from the 1970s and 1980s will proudly tell you that they provided systems availability of 99.5%, 99.8%, and so on. Yes, it takes energy to establish metrics. It took time—a lot of time—to collect these uptime statistics in the mainframe era, but it was one of the reasons that the legacy world was so reliable. We knew the numbers. We managed because we measured. Crunch your uptime numbers, hold people accountable, and your people will somehow find a way to run your shop more efficiently.