One of the industry developments we have been investigating recently is something vendors and pundits are calling ‘unified management’. This is basically about breaking down the traditional lines of demarcation between the teams managing servers, storage, networking and other specialist areas. Rather than each of these teams having tools and processes unique to their specific domain (which is typical at the moment), the idea is to adopt a more integrated approach allowing IT infrastructure to be managed holistically.

Some work that my colleague Andy was doing earlier in the year, however, highlights the value of going one step further and actually bringing ops teams together. He uncovered a strong correlation between the presence of a coherent multi-disciplinary team structure and the overall level of responsiveness and performance of IT. This is understandable when you consider that hand-offs, power games and finger pointing between teams is a frequent cause of wasted time and effort, which in turn impacts the quality of service delivered by IT.

For many large IT shops, merging operations teams wholesale is not something that’s going  to happen overnight, or even at all. However, we are increasingly seeing multi-disciplinary teams springing up out of necessity in more advanced VMware shops to deal with the dependencies of a highly virtualised environment, and early private cloud adopters frequently talk about forming an initial project team from their best server, storage and networking specialists.

So, something to think about for those trying to take a more joined up approach to IT and delivery a better service to the business.

RELATED MATERIAL
From Virtualisation to Private Cloud (Research Report)
Unified Infrastructure Management (Full Feature)
Playing the SLA Long Game (Full Feature)
Conducting the Trio, not Orchestrating a Symphony (Full Feature)