IT Governance, Asset Management and People-ready Metrics
Things have been heating up in metrics. Recently, both Hewlett Packard and IBM announced separate plans to purchase companies that will give their customers greater power to manage IT assets. Of particular interest was HP's plan to buy Mercury Interactive for $4.5bn. That's HP's biggest deal since it bought Compaq, and it signals big systems companies are getting serious about giving their customers the ability to manage applications at a fine-grained level. HP should be expected to integrate Mercury with tools and interfaces in its OpenView suite.
Mercury's bread and butter is gathering and analyzing data from applications, which IT teams use to tune the performance of those applications. While HP is moving in the right direction in terms of visibility and tuning, following IBM and CA, there's an important piece still missing from HP's metrics and asset management puzzle. Indeed, this piece is missing from the stories of IBM and CA.
That piece? People.
Applications are built by developers, so it would be great it companies could gain real-time, real-life insight into the way both individuals and teams are working on projects. In this scenario, metrics provide valuable insights into possible performance and resourcing issues, and let management see the implications of their decisions. This level of insight helps managers tackle specific issues and - ultimately - to define project management techniques that really work, by weeding out those that don't. This, in turn, helps bake real-world workflows and best practices.
The systems company that can provide tools that deliver real-time, real-life insight into developers on an individual and team basis, rather than relying on data gathered after the fact by traditional reporting tools, will be truly able to help customers manage their IT assets. And by assets in this case, that can mean both the developers (who are a valuable asset) as well as the applications themselves. Metrics that provide insight into what's happening among developers are working at deeper level than metrics that target only applications, and really are helping customers close the gap on knowledge and insight into their IT assets.
Previous Post:
Hackystat leader joins 6th Sense advisory board
Next Post:
Software: Art, Craft, or Business?
