Those words came from Dr. Ajei S. Gopal, CA’s SVP and GM for Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) during a meeting at CA’s recent Analyst Symposium and they grabbed my attention. It is a powerful idea for several reasons, chief of which is that the Service Desk is the primary interface the IT user has with the IT support function within the enterprise. As far as the user is concerned, the Service Desk is system management, because the clever technology that manages the infrastructure and the applications is invisible.
Service Desk v Help Desk
CA does well to use the term “Service Desk” rather than “Help Desk” - although it has an axe to grind, given that its product is called CA Service Desk. Nevertheless, the term “Help Desk” is almost pejorative: the network is humming away, then suddenly user distress calls start arriving saying this application has failed, and that one is running slow, and my session appears to be hung, and the sky is falling and so on.
It implies a process that runs like this:
problem arises -> user reports problem -> problem investigated -> problem resolved
Operational management and support would be a good deal more impressive if the process was:
service level monitoring indicates possible problem -> problem is pre-empted
If you’re thinking “yeah, when man walks on Mars”, I don’t blame you. That goal is currently beyond the horizon, but it’s becoming a viable goal - and it needs to happen a lot faster than the first Mars walk.
Let’s be honest about system management. The computer industry has never really managed systems. System management software just monitors systems and delivers the bad news to the designated first responder when a calamity occurs. What follows is urgent diagnostic activity to determine which lucky support group owns the problem. Then, if the problem isn’t tossed around like a hot potato for several hours, some overworked geek will take responsibility.
In all probability, this nameless hero will discover a nest of worms and quickly cover it back up, gently pushing all the worms back into the nest. He’ll then apply a rubber band or two, wrap it up with duct tape and say a prayer to St Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases and lost causes. In the mean time the service desk will fend off callers as best it can.
While the data centers of the world have scaled up from several servers to tens of servers - to hundreds of servers - to thousands of servers - system management has hardly changed and it just doesn’t scale well. The consequence is that the support costs of the data center gradually rise, because managing the data center involves a good deal of ad-hoc semi-manual activity.
Rolling Thunder
Quite a while ago I wrote about CA, Rolling Thunder and the Integration Platform. Not much was added to that picture at the CA Analyst Symposium, although Don LeClair (SVP & GM) talked about it at length and presented what is now the official diagram of the “crown jewels.”
From the traditional system management perspective, the Integration Platform unites service management, application performance management, infrastructure management and data center automation. Of course, none of those things are neat little components - they are headings that describe broad areas of concern.
If you unite them together effectively you get a Unified Service Model, as per the diagram above. In concept that’s fine and in part that is what CA’s Integration Platform is intended to support.
Slideware, as we all know, is cheap to develop and swift to deploy, and this is just a slide. As it happens no vendor has all of the pieces to deliver the above concept in a comprehensive way, not even CA with its rich portfolio of management products. Moreover, if you take an even broader perspective and add in both IT Security and the thorny areas of Governance and Compliance (the Integration Platform is intended to support those activities too), well, CA doesn’t have a complete portfolio in those areas either.
But that’s the fundamental point of the Integration Platform; all management components, no matter which vendor they come from, are potential plugins to it. With the best will in the world, the management, security and governance problems are not going to be solved by a single vendor. Integration is the key to the door.
CA undoubtedly believes it has something powerful brewing here - there is a spring in the step of its engineers - but we’ll have to wait until it comes out of beta to see what CA’s been cooking. In the meantime, we can contemplate what such a capability might look like if it were to deliver on its ambitious promise.
I suspect it would look very much like a feature rich service desk.
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I’ve been able to make this happen. I didn’t call it a service desk. Here’s how it went down.
I’d gotten a contract in 1999 with a brokerage firm. They needed a C programmer. I did that, and they hired me. Oddly, they then asked me to fix the intranet web server, which had a bunch of perl apps which totally overloaded the machine. To make a long story short, i rewrote them in C - though i could have fixed them. But in this process, i picked the tools that would make the job happen. We had Apache on Solaris with Perl, with flat file databases. I picked C, with slightly better flat file databases. I used CVS for source control. I designed apps that could work without modification in dev or prod, and multiple web servers on a single dev box could serve all developers - one each. I wrote documentation for procedures. I trained new developers, graphics designers, etc., in everything. I was the Unix admin, the web server admin, the database designer and admin, i talked to the end users for app feedback, i was the developer, i was the source control admin. Someone else did backups.
We had a help desk, but they just knew who to pass the problems to. For my apps, there was monitoring, and mostly, i’d fix things before any calls came in. In fact, despite 2000 users who had to use these apps to get their work done, it would be two days before anyone called. This appears true everywhere i’ve been.
My system really worked. When the help desk called me, it was an exciting challenge to be nailed right away. It didn’t hang out for hours or months. And the key wasn’t some BS corporate policy - it was a senior developer with competence and internal discipline, empowered to get the job done. And, it was efficient.
In modern Java shops, there’s Java, Eclipse, Javascript, HTML, JSPs, Flash, an RDBMS, Unix, some web server, and so on, and a whole team is needed to have any chance to have at least someone who knows enough about each part. But instead of having such a team all in one spot, the modern corporate culture splits up the basic competence into a vast number of silos, with a ticket system for people to request services. So, if the permissions on a file are wrong, instead of issuing three commands and you’re done in five minutes, some seven weeks goes by. And everything has to be tested to the nth degree because if there’s an error, it’s 12 weeks to fix. Basic competence is gone. Oh, and sometimes errors get introduced somehow. Well maybe the Unix admin runs out of space and moves the data. How do the apps find where it went? The Unix admin doesn’t know, and worse, she doesn’t know which developers (assuming they’re still at the jobs) knows anything about the apps - or even which apps might care.
The really sad thing is that Fred Brooks said that this isn’t the way to go about 20 years ago. He was right about basically everything else. But the only way i’ve been able to put together a surgical team is to be every team member at the start and grow the team from there.
My manager called me Clark, for some reason. But they let me go, probably to find someone cheaper. Good luck with that one.
Thanks for this feedback. A valuable and interesting contribution. IT splits between the professionals and the rest.
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