Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for IT specialists. In this issue:
• Professionalism in IT
• Tech View: Beyond Monitoring
• Specialist Profile: Brian Ruddy, WebSphere and JBoss Administrator
• Real People, Real Skills: Account Director, Tracey George-Jones
• B & M ProTech - total project delivery
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Professionalism in IT
HR Manager Matt Jones takes a look at the developments designed to make IT a recognised profession
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"..establish a recognised IT profession…”
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According to The Chartered Institute for IT (formerly the British Computer Society / BCS), IT professionals are struggling to improve their reputation within the business community and there is an increasing call by businesses and IT suppliers alike to establish a recognised IT profession. Having achieved Chartered status last year, BCS is focused on promoting professionalism in IT with its Chartered IT Professional (CITP) and other professional qualifications which set international benchmarks of quality for anyone in the IT profession. Last year, it launched the BCS Academy of Computing, designed to ensure a coherent strategy for advancing computing as an academic discipline, with a remit including:
- Developing and supporting a cohesive academic community
- Facilitating the scientific and engineering application of computing knowledge
- Endeavouring to ensure the relevance of computing knowledge throughout the education, business and research sectors
- Nurturing innovation in computing
- Promoting excellence in the study and application of knowledge in computing.
More recently, the Academy has put together a business case which considers what kind of Computing and IT education is required at school to enable UK businesses to improve their competitiveness over the long term.
Although attitudes have improved over the years (beards and sandals are long gone), there is still a lack of common standards on which to assess skills. While, for many IT contractors working at customer sites, there is little time for classroom training and often little or no appraisal of skills or work assessment, the wider choice of online learning means that professional qualifications are now within the grasp of more people in the industry.
It remains to be seen whether formal qualifications become the norm but in the meantime there is no substitute for technical and business experience.
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Tech View: Beyond Monitoring
Enterprise Tooling Consultant Nigel Hadfield considers recent progress in the quest to remove errors from monitoring
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There was a time when monitoring a computer system meant a bunch of operators sitting in front of screens looking at messages, hoping to spot when something had gone wrong. They were backed up by a slightly smaller bunch of systems programmers (or system administrators, depending on your platform), who kept an eye on the more technical aspects of the system, such as CPU utilisation, paging, and disk space.
The advent of products like Tivoli’s Distributed Monitoring, HP’s OpenView, and CA’s Unicenter led to the notion that computer systems could be monitored automatically, and that humans need only be troubled when the automation software had discovered a problem. The idea was an easy sell to IT management, who were finding the increasing complexity of their systems difficult to manage, and were also feeling increased pressure to keep systems running and to adhere to SLAs on availability and response times.
This approach worked pretty well for sites that were running no more than a few hundred servers. But the early software was a long way from perfect. It was difficult to install and configure, the monitors themselves often failed, and the monitoring agents acquired a reputation for being buggy resource hogs. Although these problems are gradually being resolved, the sheer scale of the IT infrastructure deployed by large enterprises means that operational control centres are still overrun by alerts that are difficult to respond to appropriately.
Recently we have seen the emergence of new products and technologies that enable large organisations to take monitoring and alerting to the next level. These products still rely on the traditional low-level system monitors for their basic data, but this data is intelligently filtered and enriched by new software products that analyse the data to pull out just the important events and trends.
To give a real-life example, a large financial institution has recently deployed Netuitive, a product that eliminates error-prone rules and thresholds. It automatically aggregates systems and application data from existing monitoring tools then applies advanced mathematics and statistical analysis to self-learn the environment's normal operating characteristics. When it detects or forecasts anomalies it delivers accurate indicators of impending performance issues or service failures. These indicators are displayed on a service health dashboard, which also allows technical staff to drill down to the underlying data and perform root cause diagnostics.
As you would imagine, this is a significant investment where benefits can be gradual and not always easy to measure. However, better quality alerting leads to fewer people wasting time on false alarms, leading to an operations centre that is less overloaded, with pro-active alerting that is more focused on the services that are most important to the organisation.
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Specialist Profile: Brian Ruddy, WebSphere and JBoss Administrator
We talk to Brian Ruddy about his first contract placement
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Brian Ruddy is on his second contract at a major European public body. His initial 6-month contract as an administrator helping to migrate the organisation’s WebSphere applications to a JBoss environment and supporting the middle tier has now been renewed for a further year.
As Brian explained, this particular project provides an ideal opportunity for him to use his considerable WebSphere expertise, whilst learning newer skills and improving his knowledge of working in Linux Open Source environments. “I believe that this organisation is ahead of the curve in moving to Open Source – the infrastructure here is really ahead of the game and will deliver cost savings and business benefits for the organisation in the future”.
As someone who is relatively new to contracting, Brian is thoroughly enjoying living in The Netherlands working in a truly multinational environment. “It’s my first time in mainland Europe after five years in Dublin”, he explained, “I am pretty happy here, with a nice place to live and an easy commute to work”. Brian also enjoys the fringe benefits of working for an organisation with subsidised leisure facilities, all on site. However, as he explained, it is the working environment that makes the job really enjoyable: “The best thing is that there isn’t really a big divide between permanent and contract staff – everyone works together. There are a large amount of contractors from all over Europe here so it’s easy to fit in”
Brian had not worked as a full contractor in the past, so found B & M’s advice on aspects such as finding a payroll company and moving abroad particularly valuable. “B & M gave me good advice on my interview when I first got the contract and provided a helping hand with setting up and with my move to The Netherlands.” He concluded, “I have a good relationship with my account manager, Seamus Hayes, and we meet up every now and then”.
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Real People, Real Skills: Tracey George-Jones, Account Director
This month we talk to one of B & M's skilled Account Directors
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Tracey joined B & M in April 2008 as an Account Manager having spent nine years as a Senior Account Manager at Black Box, a worldwide network services company.
After studying Biology at Manchester University, followed by a spell working as a chalet girl in a Swiss ski resort, Tracey began her career at 3M as a sales administrator. Tracey enjoyed working in a sales environment and moved into her first sales role in 1987 working for a small IBM & Compaq reseller called Combro, which by 1992 had become part of the ICL Fujitsu group. This was an exciting time in the IT industry as technology was moving rapidly and networks were just starting to be implemented in many organisations, leading to a growing demand for computer resellers to provide more specialised services.
Tracey later worked for Computacenter and SCC before moving away from the IT industry to join Sub-Contract UK, a business services company, as contract renewals and customer services manager. After five years in this role Tracey missed the challenges and the pace of the IT industry and moved to Black Box, before joining B & M.
In her spare time Tracey enjoys family life, cycling, tennis and working on a major family project to design and construct a garden from what was a large bare patch of earth.
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B & M ProTech
total project delivery
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B & M ProTech delivers technical projects tailored to meet each customer’s ICT needs. We work closely with customers to agree whether the best solution is to have resources that are managed in-house, or reduced risk, achieved by having B & M manage the project team on the customer’s behalf using a professional project manager. Whichever form of management is appropriate, B & M ProTech delivers multi-disciplined teams with consistently high levels of technical knowledge and expertise who work to pre-agreed levels of service.
All technical projects are delivered in compliance with our best practice standards.
For more information on B & M ProTech please contact sales@bmeurope.com
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B & M Europe Limited
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B & M has specialised in delivering skilled ICT specialists to meet the needs of leading organisations throughout Europe since 1992. We focus exclusively on providing technical services, consultancy and support for z/OS, UNIX and Linux enterprise systems, including third-party systems software, open systems and networking connectivity. We add real value for HR and IT professionals by taking the time to understand their needs and applying best practice methods to deliver results. To find out more about our approach to providing the best skills for each business, go to B & M Services.
The views, opinions, positions or strategies expressed by the authors are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, positions or strategies of B & M Europe Limited or any employee thereof.
B & M Europe Limited
Whitehouse Farm, Silchester Road, Tadley, RG26 3PY, United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0) 118 981 1880
Fax +44 (0) 118 981 1881
Registered in England and Wales
Company No. 02696668
VAT No. GB 591718218 Expert Technical Resourcing for Enterprise Systems
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