IT on automatic pilot
HERE'S A SHOCKER: IT departments are using software to automate -- themselves. It helped Walter Weir get a handle on IT projects at the University of Nebraska. Cheri Tell says Eaton figured out which programmers were doing a good job. And Bob Gupta says Esco saved $250,000 a year by automating software code changes.
These IT departments are improving their efficiency, turning around projects faster, measuring programmer effectiveness better, and saving money with new software tagged "technology chain automation" or TCA. Some users say TCA helps measure project progress, eliminate development bottlenecks, and rank project priority, all in a more proactive way than traditional project management software.
TCA tools are still new enough that their track record is scanty, says Colleen Niven, vice president of enabling technologies at Boston-based AMR Research. Niven believes that TCA' s big contribution is that it helps IT departments do a better job of controlling workflow than do other methods.
Niven also says that TCA software from companies such as Kintana of Sunnyvale, Calif., IntelliCorp of Mountain View, Calif., and ProSight of Portland, Ore., helps automate the business processes of an IT department's daily work. Components are as simple as generating automatic e-mails to a supervisor when approval is needed. Other parts are complicated and subjective, such as assigning comparative values to different IT projects for prioritization and then dividing projects into groups -- such as high and low complexity -- to be monitored separately.
When automation drives project management, IT managers need to "take care that they don't invest more in the tool and feeding the tool than the value of the tool's feedback," says Stan Johnson, associate executive director of Information System Associates at the UCLA Anderson School, in Los Angeles.
No more screaming
Walter Weir, the CIO of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, has used ProSight's eIT-Enabler product for a year, keeping track of about 300 projects handled by his 100-employee IT department. "When someone says a project is going to be late, the software makes sure we all define late in the same way,"
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
