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Written by Demir Barlas
Line57.com
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 20:08
IT management is normally a domain to which larger companies pay attention, but these days even small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can benefit from a rigorous approach to monitoring and managing their IT assets. Take the case of New York state's Anderson School of Autism, which provides residential education and treatment for nearly two hundred school-age autism sufferers. Gregg Paulk, IT Manager of the Anderson School, explains that his organization recently adopted an IT management solution from vendor Alloy Software in order to handle the increasing volume and complexity of IT assets. "In 2003, we had three servers and 35 computers," Paulk tells Line57. "We now have over 200 computers, 20 servers, and a 10-terabyte storage device."
The Anderson School is one of many organizations below the enterprise level that has a much larger portfolio of IT assets than ever before. In Anderson's case, the explosion of assets is connected to the school's desire to automate previously manual processes and to provide connectivity to students. "We service every school district in New York state," Paulk explains. "If a school district cannot provide a quality education to autistic students, we do paperwork on behalf of that district to bring those students to us." That process, which used to be completely paper-driven, is now automated, necessitating an investment in IT in order to lower the costs of manual processing. Another reason for the increase in IT assets has to do with the nature of Anderson's students. "Autistic students are often non-verbal, so they might communicate with their parents via the Web," Paulk says.
Paulk tracks his organization's servers, workstations, and peripheral equipment via the Alloy Software dashboard, which automatically displays information (such as BIOS versioning, types of loaded software, IP addresses, and repair history) for each device. The dashboard, which LIne57 demoed, is intuitively designed, offering a single window into a company's entire IT infrastructure. Alloy also allows users to manage tickets, which in Paulk's case means the automation of reporting that was previously done by calling him on his cell phone. Ticket management is extremely importantly, not only because it offers a faster, alert-based road to issue resolution but also because it feeds into a particular device's performance history. The Alloy dashboard lets you see the repair history of each device so that, if you happen to notice that a particular device has been troublesome, you can make a business case for replacing or retiring it.
Working with Alloy not only allows Anderson to offer better service to internal customers but will also assist the organization in its next big project. Anderson has paper documents dating back to 1924 that it is electronically archiving. This project will let end users search through the entire catalog of Anderson's valuable and informative autism archives, and Paulk anticipates that the current IT management system will make the project easier.
Anderson is paying only a few thousand dollars a year for robust IT management. Speaking to the company underlined the business case for deploying a solution of this kind. An internal IT department can't be run in putting-out-fires mode; it needs an automated system to track, manage, and troubleshoot its IT assets.