2.1. Requirement Gathering The design process starts with finding out what your company needs MOM to do and stating those requirements plainly for all interested parties to review. As you develop the list of requirements, talk to people in IT management and technical roles: business process owners, executive management, and information security. It is important to solicit different points of view to ensure a best-fit design for your company. Your questions should be open-ended and broad. Start simply with "What do you want MOM to do?" Answers will range from the very functional, such as, "MOM needs to tell me when something has gone wrong in my environment," to something that is more of a consequence of implementing MOM, such as, "Once implemented, MOM must reduce our downtime by enabling us to be proactive." Hopefully, the answers will be consistent with each other. You should be able to answer, "Yes, MOM will tell you when something has gone wrong in the environment" and "yes, implementing MOM will help us reduce downtime." An inconsistent answer means that someone expects MOM to do something that it doesn't do. You must then educate end users about what MOM can do so expectations are brought in line. The question to ask next is, "What does our company need MOM 2005 to be optimized for?" A few options include performance, availability, redundancy, cost to implement, integration with existing operations management products, and network impact. These discussions provide two benefits: you will have the input needed to build the most beneficial operations management solution for your organization and expectations can be set with key stakeholders. The following example is how a Windows administratorMax at Leaky Faucethandled the requirement gathering process. Max must improve system uptime. He is on a small team of 3 people that provides services to 11 sales offices and a central financial and IT office. The team supports about 50 servers. They have been plagued with intermittent loss of communication between the workstations and the file and print servers. The financial and order-taking systems have not been affected. So, although these outages are disruptive, they have not yet hindered the company's ability to service its customers or negatively affected the revenue stream. Max is bringing MOM 2005 in-house to help monitor these systems and is starting the design process. He has completed interviews with the director of IT (his manager), the director of the business units most affected by the outages, the IT support staff at the remote sites, and the CFO. Here are their responses:
Director of IT MOM 2005 must provide real-time monitoring and alerting. Since the IT department is not staffed to provide around-the-clock coverage, MOM must have minimal outages and notify the IT staff when they are out of the office. The director of IT views MOM 2005 as an autopilot for his IT operations, but it is no replacement for hands-on human monitoring. For his needs, MOM must provide solid reliability and availability.
Business unit director The business unit director is the IT department's primary customer and is more than a little annoyed when her staff's daily work is interrupted. She expects IT to provide a higher quality of service, especially since she receives a monthly charge-back for the disk space her staff uses and other IT overhead charges. She wants IT to give her reports on service uptime and resource consumption. Her business unit is also purchasing a new document management application and IT is to report on that as well. She has no need to interact directly with MOM and, in fact, doesn't really want to know that it existsshe just wants the IT services to work.
Remote site support staff The remote site support staff have job responsibilities in addition to local desktop, printer, and backup/recovery support. They want insight into the computers that are their responsibility and are not interested in anything else. The remote site support staff must be able to get the information that MOM produces, but are not interested in MOM configurations or rules groups. If MOM is not giving them the information needed, then the IT staff at headquarters will be called for support. The remote site support staff have limited administrative abilities in Active Directory over their organizational unit (OU).
CFO The CFO is responsible for ensuring that governmental audit requirements on the financial systems are met. Although the Microsoft space is not significantly impacted by these requirements yet, she wants similar controls here. Primarily, she wants accountability for changes introduced into the IT systems and to know who accesses certain restricted data. The auditing reports from MOM must be available on a weekly basis and, for reasons of confidentiality, only she and the rest of the executive staff can have access to them. They also need to get the reports without relying on IT. Because IT operations are under her responsibility, she is the executive sponsor for all IT efforts and represents IT to the rest of the executive staff and the board of directors. She expects that MOM will be implemented in the most cost-effective way possible.
The Leaky Faucet physical environment consists of: 128 Kbps and 256 Kbps wide area network (WAN) connections that have fairly heavy use, with a firewall between the remote sites and the central site and an DMZ configuration between the central site and the Internet. All Internet connectivity goes through the central site connection. They have upgraded to Windows Server 2003 for all domain controllers and member servers in Leaky Faucet's single production AD domain. In this environment, the company runs Active Directory 2003, Exchange 2003, IIS 6.0, SQL 2000 ISA 2004, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, and BizTalk.
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