* Reasons IT organizations are expanding or not expanding NOCs
The last two newsletters discussed some recently completed market research regarding the changing role of the Network Operations Center. As part of that market research we surveyed 176 IT professionals and conducted interviews with 7 of them. In the last newsletter we pointed out that over a quarter of the survey respondents stated that senior IT management believes that the NOC does not meet the organization’s current needs. In this newsletter we will detail the specific factors that are driving and inhibiting the changes that IT organizations are trying to make to their NOCs in order to overcome this perception.
We asked the survey respondents to indicate what factors would drive change in their NOCs over the next 12 months. At the top of the list was placing greater emphasis on ensuring acceptable performance for key applications. The factor that came in fourth was the need for better visibility into the applications that are running on the network and how their usage is changing. These factors being so important to network managers is further evidence that the role of the NOC is expanding. In particular, the role of the NOC used to focus on the availability of networks. While that is still important, NOC personnel currently have a wide range of responsibilities including managing application performance.
The factors that came in second and third in the survey were the desire for more effective processes and the need to have more effective communications, both within the NOC and between the NOC and other groups such as network engineering. We believe that this is totally in line with the interest in IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) that we wrote about in a recent newsletter.
It can’t be a surprise to anyone that the top two factors that inhibit IT organizations from being able to make changes to their NOCs are the lack of personnel and the lack of funding. What was a bit surprising, however, is that the lack of management vision was virtually tied with lack of funding as the second most important factor inhibiting change.
A network management systems manager that we interviewed put the importance of these factors into perspective. She stated that her organization monitors network availability, but does not monitor network performance. She added that her organization would like to monitor performance, but “It is a resource issue. The only way we can monitor performance is if we get more people.” She also commented that due to relatively constant turnover in personnel, “Management vision changes every couple of years. Some managers have been open to monitoring performance while others have not believed in the importance of managing network performance.”
As mentioned, the next newsletter will be the last one for a while that focuses on the changing role of the network manager. In the mean time, more information on this topic can be found here.
