IT - It’s a funny game, especially with regard to business critical systems like CODA, SQL Server and COGNOS.

One minute life is good. You are skipping blissfully through life and enjoying your day. The next minute a surly looking Director drags you back to reality with a bump, ‘Something is wrong!’

It could be something, it could be nothing, however the effect is teams of people suddenly pulling their hair out or sitting idle at considerable cost, waiting for YOU. You have effectively lost headcount.

There are three ways that this happens:

• Staff could be waiting because there is a genuine system outage, or
• system performance is either just bad or not quite good enough.
• Maybe you just don’t have enough knowledge of the system to get the best from it?

To get a sense of scale, let’s do some simple and conservative sums:

• If you’ve got 20 people in a Finance department waiting for system outages for only a total of 2 hours each in a year, then you’ve lost 1 head for a week.
• With the same 20 people, how much do you lose if enquiries take 10 seconds when they should take 2?

You take my point, right? But why do problems occur in the first place?

Well, there are a multitude of reasons as to why problems arise. e.g:

1. practical oversights e.g. ‘we’ve run out of disk’
2. technical nuances e.g. ‘we’ve suddenly got the wrong middleware combo’
3. human error e.g. ‘somebody has just done something really daft’.
4. software errors e.g. ‘I think we’ve just found a bug’

Now we aren’t going to pretend you can mitigate every risk...this is IT after all. But we do know that a large proportion of problems are avoidable, with the exception of item 4 above which is why you pay maintenance fees.

To deal with points 1 to 3, we at ThinkTree have launched our ‘ThinkTree Assurance’ service aimed squarely at addressing the issue of system performance and continuity, avoiding such incidents and ensuring you get the best out of your systems all the time.

ThinkTree Assurance is a remote service provided via a highly prescriptive schedule of agreed audit and optimisation steps, removing the guesswork and risk. The result is a perpetual review of your environments, ensuring optimised configurations, uptime and best practice.  We look at both the application usage and in addition to the underlying technology.

The steps we undertake are designed to be identical every time as part of ongoing preventative maintenance and application development, with constant feedback and recommendation. As such they represent an assurance policy that could be executed on any suitable schedule e.g. monthly, Quarterly, Bi annually, annually. We recommend a minimum bi annual review.

ThinkTree Assurance, like us, is flexible. It can be tailored to suit both your systems and resources. Some things you’ll want us to do, while others you’ll want to do using your own resources. By working to a ThinkTree Assurance plan you remove uncertainty and won’t miss anything.

For more details or for an informal chat about your situation and requirements call us on 0800 118 2171 or email us at enquiries@thinktree.co.uk

About ThinkTree

ThinkTree is a professional services company offering consultants and consulting services in CODA, MS SQL Server and COGNOS. Visit our website at www.thinktree.co.uk