* The organizational dynamics between the networking and apps development groups
In recent newsletters we have described some of the dynamics that exist between the network organization and other components of the IT function (see the links below). Today, we’ll look at trends in the relationship between the NOC and the application development team. More information on this topic can be found here.
To put this discussion in a broad context, we recently surveyed 288 IT professionals and asked them how they would characterize the current relationship between their company’s application development team and the NOC. The good news is that no one indicated that the relationship was highly adversarial. The bad news is that only 4% indicated that it was highly cooperative, and that a quarter of the respondents indicated that the relationship was either slightly or moderately adversarial.
We also asked the survey respondents to indicate how the relationship between the two teams has changed over the last six months. Over half of the respondents indicated no change. However, more than 40% indicated that the relationship had become more cooperative.
We talked to the assistant director of network communications for a medical organization who stated that his organization had the ability to do end-to-end monitoring of the performance of the network. He described the relationship between the application development groups and the network organization as currently being “semi-cooperative” and getting a little bit better over time. He credited the improvement in the relationship to his group’s ability to provide the application development team with credible information on application performance.
We also talked to a project leader for a company in the transportation industry who said the relationship between his organization and the application group was ‘cordial’. He added that the more information his group brought to the application teams, the more those groups trust the network organization. The project leader highlighted some of the technical difficulties associated with developing the kind of information that is helpful to the application development groups when he noted that although they have acquired tools to help them plan for the deployment of new applications, they are limited in their ability to use these tools because “nobody accurately knows what the inputs to those tools should be.”
We would like to hear from you relative to what you have done to improve the relationship between the network organization and the application development team. In particular, we would like to hear about your experiences with tools to model the deployment of new applications. Are these tools helpful or do they require so much information that they are relatively useless?
Further reading:
The AHA’s IT group benefits from working collaboratively
How one network exec persuaded coworkers that the network is not always to blame
When apps are slow, net managers are wrong until proven right
