As most people who talk with me for more than 5 minutes on the topic of IT management know, the idea of “collaborative IT management” is a pet-topic of mine. So, when given the chance to write a relatively open-ended piece for TechTarget, I wrote-up a short piece outlining what’s been going on recently in collaborative IT management:
The term “more heads are better than one” has a dicey applicability in IT management. As with most technological problems, too many cooks in the kitchen can make the problem worse. Yet, seeking assistance outside of one’s own head and team has long been a hallmark of how the IT department does its job. It’s easy to forget our pre-web lives when USEnet was a hot-bed for rough-made collaboration in posts along the lines of “how do I fix this problem? Error messages below…” Before that, we can assume there was only darkness: using the phone or actually talking to people face-to-face!
Joking aside, we’ve come a long way since even the days of Googling with error codes. Here, we’ll consider what some vendors and services are doing to move beyond the usual methods of collaborative IT management.
The emerging methods can be grouped into two categories: sharing configuration and group problem solving. Both enable collaboration beyond the firewall, pulling in help from outside of the datacenter payroll.
It’s a short piece, so I don’t dive too much into specific examples, but there’s some call outs to Splunk, Paglo, Spiceworks, and FiveRuns.
Disclosure: Splunk, Spiceworks, and FiveRuns are client.