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What are the challenges that ITDMs face in managing services which are diverse in nature coming from varied vendors?
The primary challenge for the senior IT managers would be to meet the business needs swiftly and effectively, using multiple services. Technology is used not just for technology sake, but used in serving business. Vendors talk about features and function of the solution, but not necessarily about how the business problem is going to get resolved and how it can help the back end.
Against this backdrop, what IT automation or automation management allows IT folks to do is to manage their IT environments without requiring armies of people. Second aspect is that it allows them to deliver a level of IT service that is more reliable, safer and much more responsive to their end users and that’s really what it is.
Most of the IT managers are sitting around with lots of small tools so they have something to monitor a network and they will have some tools to manage desktops and some tools to manage exchange servers.
“Technology has to serve business; vendors talk about features and function and don’t talk enough about how the business problem is going to get solved”
Having a holistic solution that can look at things end to end, single pane of glass and then automate some of the day-to-day basic stuff allows IT to be much more responsive to the business and that’s what it is about. It is responsiveness, agility and level of service that you can deliver to the business that we saw.
How do you think the ITDMs should do to buy in the line of business?
I think it’s a matter of understanding the business side. From ITDM’s perspective, they need to understand what businesses are asking and the conversation that they need to have is around business terms. Very often (I am a technologist by background) it is found that the IT starts talking technology before even putting a business case. For example, of the IT team puts forth the demand for the budget to be released for a cloud initiative, without even putting up a clear case around it to the CFO, it is obvious that the CFO is taken aback.
If the ITDMs articulate the need to carry the conversation from RoI perspective, they will be able to overcome these challenges better. Learning how to communicate with business folks in business language is a very important skill. This is what the IT managers need to learn.
"Learning how to communicate with business folks in business language is a very important skill for IT teams"
What are the best practices ITDMs should look for while going in for a managed services model?
There are few things that ITDMs need to be careful when going for the managed service provider. One, to understand if the managed service provider has a sound knowledge of the domain that is he associated with. Is the solution the managed service provider is suggesting address the pain point of the business.
Technological obsolescence is one challenge that the IT managers need to observe. You have vendors like IBM, CA, HP and others who are very much focused on the high end customers/very large customers. If a small business or mid-market business says ‘hey, I want to do this and the managed service provider says I will use IBM solution, I would run from it because by the time IBM solutions get implemented, this guy will be old and retired. That’s the challenge.
So, they have to make sure that the tool was designed for that market segment. If the tool was designed for the mid-market and the MSP knows what the mid-market customers needs on that’s one criterion.
Secondly, it is really critical to observe what the MSP is going to do is different than what they could do themselves. For example, if the MSP uses the tool to remotely manage devices, the IT manager should make it clear to the service provider that the problem areas are clearly identified.
The smart MSP should be in a position to add value by identifying the problem areas within no time across various functions and infrastructure layers without any one coming with the problem.
Which aspect of the IT functions compel ITDMs to go for managed services providers --availability, response time, the service or the SLAs?
I think all of them but it varies. It varies based on what is the big issue that people have. For example, the vast majority of the customers find availability most critical. That could be app availability or an underline problem could be somewhere else. The other part is the cost component. I think the ITDMs can do all of these but the big question is can the MSP do it for lesser cost. I think cost is driving quite a bit of the conversation.
How is the cost factor addressed in the whole MSP game?
We try to train our managed service providers to basically identify the problem. From a Kaseya perspective, because the product does tremendous amount of automation, the cost to deliver the service is less because the same person and the same set of resources can manage more things and that’s really what the additional value is about using the IT automation solutions and tools.
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