The unfulfilled promise of systems management suites has become critical for organizations seeking control of the distributed enterprise. J. Art Gowan, Jr., Chris Jesse, and Richard G. Mathieu
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Installing Systems Management Suites
T
he distributed enterprise of workstations, servers, bridges, routers, hubs, and so on is critical to corporate productivity. These assets are at the core of every business process, allowing organizations to support e-commerce, make strategic business decisions, and manage mission-critical applications. In fact, business is so closely tied to technology that its ability to effectively manage the enterprise could be the dividing line between success and failure. This technology dependence attracts many organizations to systems management suites. Suites offer the promise of a single, centralized solution that performs disparate enterprise management functions, including electronic software distribution, network management, alert management, help desk, inventory management, performance monitoring, metering, and other tasks essential to maintaining enterprise productivity (see Table 1 for examples).At the same time, these suites can manage diverse enterprise components, including workstations, servers, mainframes, minicomputers, and network infrastructure devices.
Inside Defining the Survey Asking the Right Questions about Systems Management Suites Resources
32
IT Pro January ❘ February 2000
Such broad functionality sounds like enterprise nirvana, but are these suites living up to the promise? To find out, the Cameron School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington conducted a survey of IT professionals in collaboration with Chris Jesse, a recognized expert on the distributed enterprise. (See the “Defining the Survey” sidebar.) This systems management suite survey • assesses organizations’ commitment to suite technology and/or best-of-breed point solutions and their ability to implement suite technology throughout the enterprise; • examines the costs associated with suite deployment; and • identifies the essential steps and key obstacles to suite deployment and management. Although our survey found that these complex suites still left a lot to be desired, it also pointed out pitfalls some organizations were encountering along the way to early adoption.
CONSTRAINTS KEY TO MANAGED SYSTEM COMPLEXITY To implement its diverse set of tasks, a systems management suite relies on several system constraints: • Each suite application is unique and has its own set of memory,disk space,and other prerequisites. • IT people typically install applications in a com1520-9202/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
plex production environment, containing thousands of diverse workstations and servers that they regularly move, upgrade, and retire. Additionally, all applications must work together without adversely affecting the business mission of the desktop. • The suites depend on a standard, tightly controlled desktop configuration. Consequently, you may need to upgrade other applications, such as communication or emulation software, to prevent conflicts. Conflicts prevent the suite from running in your environment. Because of these constraints, users often criticize suite vendors for providing complex, costly solutions that are extremely difficult to deploy and integrate with other enterprise applications.
SUITE COMMITMENT AND OUTLOOK FOR SUCCESS
Table 1. Leading systems management suites. Vendor
Product
Computer Associates International
Unicenter TNG
Tivoli Systems
Tivoli Enterprise IT Director (for smaller organizations)
Hewlett-Packard
HP OpenView
Seagate Software
Seagate Info 7
Cabletron Systems
Spectrum Enterprise Manager
MainControl
MC/Empower
Microsoft
SMS
Platinum Technology ProVision (recently purchased by CA) Intel
LANdesk Management Suite
Novell
ZENworks, ManageWise
BMC Software
Patrol
Our survey reveals that the responding organizations have made limited progress with their suite implementation initiatives.They report problems with not having the necessary information on supported platforms, suite pre- requisites, conflicts with other applications, or their existing assets (workstations, servers, and so on). These missing pieces of information make it difficult to evaluate, plan, implement, and manage systems management suites. As a result, these organizations are not fully committed to suite technology.Instead,they are adopting or plan to adopt a combination of suite and point solutions, or point solutions exclusively, to manage their distributed enterprises: • 46 percent of respondents are committed to multiple point solutions; • 30 percent are committed to a combination of point and suite solutions; • 7 percent of respondents are undecided; and • only 17 percent are committed to a single suite solution.
YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE Suite solutions are not the enterprise panacea they appear to be for two simple reasons: One, the technology is too complex, and, two, organizations are ill-prepared to deploy this complex technology. Most organizations do not have current information on the configuration and location of every asset in the enterprise. Systems administrators usually don’t know
Defining the Survey We mailed a four-page questionnaire to 2,300 senior IT executives at Fortune-1000-level firms, government entities, and educational institutions. The survey questions were primarily close-ended (which aided response) and took approximately 15 minutes to complete. Within the data collection time allotted, we received 194 responses, a net response rate of 8.4 percent (5 percent return is the industry standard). The respondents are senior-level IT executives (chief information officers, vice presidents of information systems, and information technology managers).The majority of organizations responding (85 percent) had more than 5,000 employees, with 8 percent employing more than 50,000.Three-quarters of the respondents claimed annual revenue over $500 million. Several survey respondents did not answer every question in the survey. Therefore, we calculated the results based on the number of people who answered each question, as opposed to the total number of surveys received. The executives who indicated they are committed to point solutions exclusively were asked to skip all questions that relate to suite technology. Therefore, the results of the suite-specific questions exclude the 89 respondents who are exclusively committed to point technology.
January ❘ February 2000 IT Pro
33
SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT
Asking the Right Questions about Systems Management Suites Before committing to suite implementation, an organization should answer these fundamental questions: ➤ Which functions of the suite does your organization require to meet the demands of each department? Is each function essential, or could some departments benefit from partial functionality? ➤ What platforms are supported by the suite? ➤ What percentage of the enterprise is unsupported, and how will you manage these platforms? ➤ What are the prerequisites of each suite component, and which desktops require additional components to meet the suite’s prerequisites? ➤ What are the known conflicts that will cause the suite components to malfunction? ➤ Will the suite implementation team agree to a fixed-price contract? ➤ How many desktop visits are required to deploy the suite, and what resources can you allocate to the deployment effort? ➤ What is the true cost of the suite deployment, including prerequisite components and labor? ➤ How can you monitor and control the implementation process and ensure that the team meets anticipated time frames? ➤ Once deployed, how can the organization minimize desktop changes that will cause the suite to malfunction? You should also consider several upgrade costs, including ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤
the number of desktops requiring the suite; software upgrades; prerequisite operating system, memory, and hard-drive upgrades; labor; and lost productivity.
what desktops, servers, memory, or software they have. Moreover, they have not identified the conflicts between the suites and their current applications. As a result, they do not have a clear understanding of which desktops the suites support and what upgrades are necessary. In turn, they cannot accurately prepare budgets, upgrade desktops, or allocate the necessary resources for suite initiatives. Both parties—the suite providers and the suite consumers—share responsibility for this situation, because vendors are not providing the information that organizations need, and organizations are not asking the right questions (see the “Asking the Right Questions About Systems Management Suites” sidebar). Most companies are hedging their bets by implementing a combination of suite and point solutions or point solutions exclusively, rather than a single suite solution. Indeed, 34
IT Pro January ❘ February 2000
the survey shows that point solutions may be the only answer until suite technology becomes less complex and organizations have sufficient asset information to effectively plan and manage suite solutions.
Key obstacles to success Anyone who has installed software knows that you must have a clear picture of the target desktop before even attempting installation. You need answers to the basics, such as how much memory and disk space are available? Is the desktop running the correct operating system? This fundamental asset information is critical to suite deployment. With this information, a suite implementation team can ensure that the targeted desktops meet the suite prerequisites before installing suite components. If the desktops are lacking prerequisites, the team can order additional components beforehand and install them during suite deployment, preventing the need for multiple visits to the desktop. However, many respondents indicated they do not have current asset information: • 35 percent do not conduct asset inventories (see Figure 1), and • 28 percent conduct inventories only once a year or less frequently.
This lack of information is alarming because more than twothirds of the respondents indicated that their desktop software changes at least every six months, and their hardware changes at least once a year. Given the enterprise’s dynamic nature, annual inventories can be inadequate or misleading when planning suite implementations and managing the suite technology to avoid conflicts with other applications. Compounding the problem of inaccurate asset information—or no asset information at all—is that many organizations are trying to deploy suites without understanding the solution prerequisites and potential conflicts with other applications. For example, one organization indicated that when deploying a systems management framework, the implementation team identified a conflict between the framework and the company’s 16-bit TCP/IP communications stack.
In response, they upgraded to a newer, 32-bit TCP/IP stack, without considering the other critical systems that depended on the earlier TCP/IP configuration. Thus, after the TCP/IP upgrade, the company’s IBM 3270 mainframe emulation software would not run, which necessitated an emulation software upgrade. These cascading errors naturally led to significant productivity losses, additional costs, and framework implementation delays.
• Only 9 percent of respondents have actually completed a suite deployment; • 55 percent indicate deployment is still in progress; • 61 percent are turning to a combination of internal and external resources for the rollout; and • 38 percent still have not identified and secured the required resources to deploy the suite.
Figure 1. How often do you conduct asset inventories? One-third said, “Never!”
Costs—What you don’t know can hurt Industry analysts and trade publications have widely reported that suite solutions carry a multimillion-dollar price tag. Unfortunately, the total cost of suite implementation remains a mystery for many organizations until they actually deploy most of the suite components:
Weekly 6% Monthly 9%
• 43 percent of the respondents indicated that their suite solution costs (including implementation) were at least $100 per desktop (see Figure 2); • 49 percent do not have sufficient information on the desktops in the enterprise to request a fixed-price implementation; • 56 percent admit that the suite may not or will not be implemented within budget; and • 42 percent admit they cannot estimate the true cost of suite deployment at this time.
Never 35%
Quarterly 10%
Semi-annually 12% 7% Annually 21% Less frequently
Since most organizations lack both a clear understanding of the suite prerequisites and a current inventory of their desktops, their estimates cannot accurately reflect all of the implementation costs. Further, many organizations are not including prerequisite components or labor in their calculations. In these cases, organizations are likely to face significant budget overruns, which can lead to further deployment delays.
Figure 2. The cost of systems suites is difficult to pin down.
Deployment strategies and time frames $750 Can’t estimate 0
10 20 30 40 Respondents (percentage)
50
January ❘ February 2000 IT Pro
35
SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT
Figure 3. How long will deployment take? Over half say, “More than a year.”
N/A 13%
1-6 months 10%
7-12 months 20%
>24 months 18%
19-24 months 13%
13-18 months 26%
Suite vendors have recognized customers’ frustrations with the deployment process. In response, many of them offer comprehensive implementation services, including project planning, on-site installation, deployment management, and postinstallation administration. These services are typically performed on a time-andmaterials basis, rather than for a fixed price, because vendors are reluctant to offer package deals when they don’t know the extent of problems they will encounter. While vendor-provided services decrease the burden on organizations’ internal resources, they come with a steep price tag both in terms of project management responsibilities and overall project cost. In fact, implementation costs alone can reach the multimillion-dollar mark in complex enterprises with tens of thousands of desktops. Many respondents recognize their deployment problems: • 57 percent believe the deployment will take more than a year (see Figure 3); • 58 percent indicated that the suite technology may not or will not be implemented on time; and • 41 percent indicated that they are dissatisfied with the implementation process.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SUCCESS
edge your IT
Sharpen
Read about knowledge management programming for the Web e-commerce technologies protecting critical infrastructure networking information visualization In this year’s issues of IT Pro Technology Solutions for the Enterprise
computer.org/itpro/ 36
IT Pro January ❘ February 2000
The survey results make two points perfectly clear: Organizations are not ready to realize—and suite providers are not ready to deliver—the promise of suite technology. Simply stated, suites are still too complex, and organizations are not prepared for their deployment. A logical conclusion of the survey would be to implement individual functions one department at a time, based on each department’s needs.This would allow the deployment team to carefully test each application’s effect on individual groups, while ensuring that the requirements of each business function are met. For instance, an organization might decide to begin the project by testing the software distribution function in finance since this group requires frequent accountingapplication updates.The deployment team would have a chance to identify potential conflicts early and limit the organization’s exposure to problems. The team could then add another application to the scenario, such as network management. Once again, this would provide ample opportunity for testing and troubleshooting, without negatively impacting the entire enterprise. After the team has thoroughly reviewed the implications of the suite deployment on a single department, they can repeat the same process, one department at a time.
U
ntil issues raised by this survey are addressed satisfactorily, enterprise suite deployment will remain a thorny and frustrating undertaking, making point solutions a more viable option for enterprise management.
When organizations have fundamental enterprise information in hand and when the suite technology matures, business leaders will be ready to pursue the promise of systems management suites. ■
J. Art Gowan Jr. is an associate professor in the Cameron School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Contact him at gowanj@uncwil. edu. Chris Jesse is the president and CEO of Tangram Enterprise Solutions Inc. in Cary, North Carolina. Contact him at
[email protected]. Richard G. Mathieu is an associate professor in the School of Business and Administration at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. Contact him at
[email protected].
Resources Articles ➤ Caryn Gillooly,“Mismanaged,” Information Week, 16 Feb., 1998. This article explores frustrations IS managers have endured during the suite implementation and management process. ➤ Cameron Sturdevant,“Suites Rein in Enterprise Systems: LAN-based Management Packages Know Who Has What and Where, But Don’t Yield Data Without a Fight,” PC Week, 18 Apr., 1999. PC Week tested suites provided by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft.The results highlight the value offered by these suite solutions, but reveal that obtaining a return on investment is “no easy task.”
Book ➤ Chris Jesse, A Journey Through Oz: The Business Leaders’ Road Map to Tracking Information Technology Assets, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., Dubuque, Iowa, 1996. This book provides a road map for organizations that are trying to gain control of the distributed enterprise. It explores the promise and failure of systems management suites, offering a variety of do’s and don’ts to maximize the success of suite technology.
How will it all connect? Find out in The MIS and LAN Managers Guide to Advanced Telecommunications $40 for Computer Society members
Now available from CS Press
computer.org/cspress/ January ❘ February 2000 IT Pro
37
