In my last article – I explored how firms might get all members of their management team (from the Technical Geeks to the Business Execs) to basically communicate more effectively and hence make smarter, more intelligent decisions.
Coincidence – Correlation – Causation – which is it???
When looking into what’s going on ‘under the hood’ of a mainframe (or indeed any server) – it’s very important to distinguish what’s really going on.
We, humans, are prone to many kinds of psychological biases and it’s all too easy for us to fall into the trap(s) of not being able to properly identify the differences between pure coincidence (especially when that would support our theories) – and also, to further distinguish between (mere) correlation and actual causation.
Such distinctions are very important if a company is to avoid overly paying for Computing time/similar – and to really get to the root cause(s) of what is truly causing unnecessary and unwanted bottlenecks as far as efficient processing of (say) critical batch routines is concerned.
In order to really focus on what’s actually going on with your systems, the toolset I mentioned in the previous article – namely “ITBI” from the Danish company SMT Data – truly excels at sorting the wheat from the chaff in these respects.
Their front-end enables its users to clearly identify exactly what is going on behind the scenes and to further allow users to change the “Geek_type” labels into more meaningful/business-exec type language and/or show relative cost amounts so that everybody across the company can get a handle on what’s really going on.
As the opening lines of their recent Press Release states:
“Large IT installations have a wealth of data about capacity and performance but often struggle to create value from this data. Successful optimisation requires tools that create transparency – combined with people and processes focused on cost-hunting. A flexible data warehouse to manage the data and result in oriented reporting and analysis tools are a must. It may also be important to enrich the technical data with cost and organisational information in order to understand ‘who is using what and for how much’. SMT Data’s IT Business Intelligence (ITBITM) solution is built for this…”
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Think about that for a moment.
Imagine that you can capture “Actionable Insights” about where the true costs are occurring and further, that you can accurately distribute the costs across the relevant Business Units to determine more accurately just how profitable (or maybe not) they really are.
To those of you out there who are involved with Mainframes and/or x84 distributed systems – I thoroughly recommend that you take a look for yourselves at just what the SMT Data “ITBI” toolset could do for you/your organisations.
Similarly, as mentioned in previous articles – be sure to also check out the Consultancy/Optimisation Services that are available from DataKinetics – a company that has been around specialising in the optimisation of Mainframes for over 40 years – and counts many of the top Fortune 500 companies as longstanding customers.
And ‘yes’ – they even employ people there who can speak “COBOL” too! Ergo – if instead of an expensive (and potentially very risky) system re-write – all you really need are some strategically applied “tweaks” – then these are the kind of folks who can advise you as to your options.
So – whether you’re looking to upgrade, add more capacity etc., – before committing, perhaps your time could well be spent first having a chat with DataKinetics to determine if all you really need to do is simply optimise what you already have.
In other words, if every day you find that your staff are always somehow bogged down, fighting the same fires, and forever “mopping the wet floors” – maybe the toolsets and expertise that’s out there could help you instead – find and fix the leaking faucet!