* Is your IT organizational structure holding your company back?
The role of network manager has evolved over the years I have been covering the technology area, and it seems to us at Network World that that changing role is part of a larger evolution. We are noticing more and more the trend of IT organizations adapting their structure to support emerging technologies that in turn better support today’s businesses.
The role of network manager has evolved over the years I have been covering the technology area, and it seems to us at Network World that changing role is part of a larger evolution. We are noticing more and more the trend of IT organizations adapting their structure to support emerging technologies that in turn better support today’s businesses.
Data center consolidation efforts, virtualization deployments, VoIP adoption, service-oriented architecture (SOA) application modernizations — all these things shift the focus of the IT organization responsible for the care and feeding of the systems and infrastructure supporting the business. In terms of network management, I’ve been noticing two distinct areas of convergence: operations teams incorporating security tasks into their day-to-day responsibilities; and network teams better understanding applications to support VoIP rollouts, application delivery to branch office users, and application performance down to the end-user experience.
For one, network managers have been called upon more and more to use monitoring technologies to safeguard their networks. The convergence of management and security started a few years back with the appearance of security event or information management products that collected security events from device logs, aggregated them in one console and applied algorithms and the like to analyze the disparate data. These tools mimicked the architecture of management software with a central console and distributed probes or appliances gathering data across a large enterprise network.
Next up was network behavior analysis technology. This tool emerged as a security offering to monitor traffic to learn normal behavior and then alert on anomalous behavior. The technology taps standard flow protocols such as Cisco’s NetFlow to spot misbehaving endpoints and unauthorized access attempts, but also provided insight into network performance. Its role in IT shops has shifted a bit over the past couple of years to also be used by operations teams for network flow analysis.
On the application side, network managers are no longer just responsible for dissecting which element — the network, systems or application — are responsible for slowdowns, but they are also being called up to help application developers build better apps. Using emulation tools from the likes of Shunra and Itheon Networks, network managers are able to model likely network scenarios for application developers — that until recently created apps in test labs with little insight into the actual operating behavior on the network.
These are just a few examples of how I’ve seen the role of network manager evolving, but we are hoping to also tap your insight into the changes you are experiencing within your IT organization beyond network and systems management to the entire structure of IT. Please send me your thoughts and insight on this topic.
Editor’s Note: Is your IT organizational structure holding your company back?
We’re assembling a package of stories to be published in Network World looking at the IT organizational structure of the future and we need your help:News Editor Bob Brown
* If your company has recently reorganized in light of new business and technology challenges and opportunities, can you send along “before” and “after” org charts? (Feel free to strip out the names, we’re really just looking for titles. But give us a sense of the size of your IT organization/business.) Can you tell us how the reorganization has worked out?
* If your company is in need of an IT org makeover, what areas are currently most dysfunctional?
* Any advice on what your peers can do to improve their IT organizations right now?
We’re looking to tap into our readership through a technique some call “crowdsourcing.” Knowing we don’t have all the answers, but that our audience probably has a lot of them, we’re hoping to help you help each other.
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