Applying Systems Thinking with Essentials 2007
I ran across an article by Gill South at the New Zealand Herald. His interview with Dr Kambiz Maani caught my attention. The story was about how the national rugby team of New Zealand was trying to figure out how to fix their loss at the Rugby World Cup. Maani was frustrated by their search for a single solution. He didn't want them to focus on one event, but to look deeper, to apply Systems Thinking to the problem.In a nutshell, Systems Thinking is a way of thinking about the world, work and life based on the primacy of relationships. How does this relate to Essentials 2007? In an IT environment, it is the sum of the networked relationships that determine whether the system is healthy and functioning correctly. No one single component is responsible for system failure.One of the key features of Essentials 2007 is that it creates a unified management platform to monitor each piece of the puzzle as well as the entire system. You can collect information from a wide range of disparate systems. For example, you may have an Exchange Server, several network devices, and 50 client PCs that you manage. You receive a call that a user can't send or receive email. Instead of having to diagnose each potential failure point, you investigate all your systems from a single point of view. Imagine the ability to monitor the health of the Exchange Server, the connection to the external network and the user's machine from a unified interface. You isolate the issue much more efficiently and have the tools at hand to quickly resolve the problem. Essentials 2007 can help you understand what a particular error message means, guide you in managing your Exchange Server, offer guidance in restoring network connectivity or identify what aspect of the user's system as not functioning properly.
One of the tenants of systems management is to look at patterns and to unravel relationships. Essentials 2007 helps you emphasize the connections between various factors. You can use the built in feature to generate diagrams to help understand relationships between what might appear as two separate problems. Get away from making decisions in isolation and understand the wider effects of the systems you manage as a whole.
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