Case study: getting in tune
Anand Ramachandram, director and senior vice president, information services, Asia Pacific at T D Waterhouse, believes tuning is an ongoing process that needs to start from a known point.
-It's best to gather the results and start with an outsourced service," he says, -you want a professional opinion on where you are today." Then you can gather the tools needed to track your performance against that baseline. -A lot of people jump the gun" and don't establish the baseline or understand their problems before trying to make improvements.
T D Waterhouse consulted several companies to establish its baselines: Dimension Data (network), Mercury Interactive (Web site), and Enstor (storage). Tremendous improvements have been made in the year or so following that exercise, Ramachandram says. For example, the company had budgeted $600,000 for network improvements, but the analysis showed that was overkill and the actual expenditure needed was around 45 percent less.
The savings arose because the process revealed where problems were andââ,¬"just as importantlyââ,¬"where they weren't. For example, a network problem was cured with $50 worth of new cables instead of a new router as originally planned. -Small tweaks here and there" fixed a variety of issues, he says.
While T D Waterhouse was expanding rapidly, Ramachandram was considering EMC storage systems to help cope with the growth in data. When that growth slowed, he instead reviewed the utilisation of the existing disks. -We had to do a lot of cleaning up," he says, but by rearranging drives and rebuilding various servers the company avoided a major investment in new storage.
He recommends -a disciplined approach, looking at the bottom up for everything." It's important to approach optimisation in a stepwise fashion, because if you make ten changes at once, you can't tell where the benefits came from.
Ramachandram's experience is that it is important to take time evaluating tools for measuring software performance. It is important to understand how they interact with proprietary programs so that the results are analysed correctly. -It's best to be more conservative with time, and more aggressive with the budget."
Prioritisation is important, but for Ramachandram that doesn't mean starting with the jobs that promise the biggest bang for the buck. He advocates doing the simple housekeeping tasks first and moving on from there, partly because projects that promise big returns don't always work out that way. He admits this strategy isn't easy: -it's a very hard thing to do when you're a senior IT executive" as you must motivate staff to find time to do the boring tasks while keeping other projects on track. Ramachandram recommends involving staff in the plans and after three to six months they will see the results and draw satisfaction from the difference they've made. -Developers are the hardest to convince," he says, -but it can be done."
While his strategy is to do the work in-house to avoid becoming dependent on a third party, Ramachandram will get an outside opinion of his team's progress every couple of years to check he is still on track.
One difference between Australian and US businesses is that US companies are more likely to compare their performance with organisations in the same industry, whereas Australian companies generally compete on their own track record says Ramachandram, who previously worked for T D Waterhouse in New York.
Subscribe now to Australian Technology & Business magazine.
