Systems management is no day in the park

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Want fabulous performance and savings from your electronic systems? Get cool and real about managing operations. That was the message thread among four panelists at "Your Systems -- Fantasy? Adventure? Forging Frontiers for Tomorrowland?" -- a workshop held here Tuesday, June 23, at the Newspaper Association of America's annual NEXPO conference.

Poor network performance, lax oversight of software license compliance, failure of a key network component or hapless help desks all have a dollar value, and the rewards of cool-headed analysis and action will be more effective operations for the entire enterprise.

Moderator Elizabeth Sholar, director of publishing systems for Thomson Newspapers of Stamford, Conn., framed the case in saying that most mission critical functions in the newspaper -- from moving the reporters' stories to their editors to labeling bundles -- have migrated to systems. If the systems and networks aren't working properly, the newspaper isn't operating effectively.

In the realm of client/server system performance, look at reducing the total cost of operation, recommended Nick Marketos, regional manager for EDS Technical Infrastructure of Plano, Texas. He used a benchmark figure of $8000 per workstation per year from Gardner Research, adding that the cost escalates as you calculate the value of user "futz factor" time, unstable systems, informal buddy system support and other unseen yet real productivity drains.

To plug those leaks, Marketos urged "end-to-end management," starting with a keen eye to whether the infrastructure supports applications providing information to support business goals.

"Today's infrastructure rarely supports those kinds of enterprise applications," he said, and instead attention goes to weak system components rather than whether the system is delivering information the business needs.

Borrowing from Carnagie-Mellon University's model for maturity of companies, Marketos used the "desktop maturity model," with its stages of development listed as "initial," "stable," "consistent," "leveraged," and "optimized." He said a system must be "consistent" before it can succeed as an information tool, with well-tuned hardware, common software versions, user training and support standards.

Since 70 percent of help desk response costs are related to people costs, ensure ways to resolve help calls over the phone and on the first contact, to reduce personal fix dispatches. Keep an eye on warrantee coverage and equipment loss, since PC parts may be fixed or replaced on failure.

While they all sound like basic measures, the small stuff can add up to major savings. Take one productivity killer, the floundering of a confused user or "futz factor" -- just an hour a week will cost $7,000 over the life of a workstation.

"That's a real cost to the enterprise," Marketos said.

While help desks sound easy, making a good one click takes a little attention, said Tim Tomlinson, director of strategic sales at GTE's Network Management Services division in Austin, Texas.

Just bodies, telephones and computers. "If you've got those things, you've got a help desk," Tomlinson said, albeit probably not with the efficiency you'd like.

Pop the desk from average to outstanding by elevating the people, telephones and computers, he said. Hire and train people who are service oriented, are sensitive to the user's pressure, have good listening skills and possess minimal qualifications in the support area. Take advantage of the traffic features of Vantive or Remedy support software. Utilize tracking software as a knowledge base, to pin-point bottlenecks and document issues as future solutions.

Then apply enforceable service level agreements, called SLAs, with penalties and bonuses. His used his own SLAs as examples: calls answered 90 percent of the time within 60 seconds, problems resolved 50 to 70 percent of the time on the first call, and six to seven minutes devoted to each first call.

He recommended focusing on quality of help and productivity. The quality of help at his shop is defined as all calls handled in a professional and courteous manner, a 9.0 overall rating from end user surveys and 550 calls closed/taken per month.

One level of system hell starts with FBI agents shouting, "everyone take your hands off the keyboard and move away from the computer!"

That was the grim reality at one east-coast magazine, as it welcomed a software license compliance audit, said Robert McClain, president, McClain Communications, Franklin, Mich.

Those audits can end with high-dollar penalties for having too many copies of a desktop program loaded around the network, when simple, low-cost measures can avoid the unauthorized and illegal copies from the start. Federal law grants a copyright holder up to $100,000 in statutory damages for each copyright infringed.

Infringement means a game brought from home and copied on the office PC, or a advertiser's font that lingers on a designer's desktop after a job is printed, or extra copies of Quark XPress loaded on a network, even though the program limits concurrent users.

Some illegal uses are the result of misunderstandings about the copyright law, McClain said. One common myth is that copying one license of a program onto an office PC, a portable and a home PC is OK, since one person can't be active on more than one at a time. Not so, McClain warned, and he stressed that Quark and Adobe have confirmed that their licenses prohibit the practice.

"Even well-meaning newspapers can have a piracy problem because they fail to periodically review their software practices and compliance," McClain said.

Fortunately the group that polices copyright, the Software Publishers Association, provides a guide to preparing a self-audit at its anti-piracy Web site, (http://www.spa.org/). Downloadable applications called "SPAudit" and "KeyAudit" can help you search the network in a matter of minutes for the names of programs common to the newspaper industry. It's not completely thorough, however, but that doesn't absolve the newspaper from keeping track of its licenses and terms, even for the smallest program purchase.

McClain said, "This law applies equally to a $50 font or an $800 copy of Adobe Illustrator," and fonts can be the most tricky tracking problems for newspapers.

Anticipate system failure and reinforce the possible failure points, urged Mark Owens, national specialist for PrePRESS Solutions Inc. of Billerica, Mass. His discussion pointed to the technical advantages and weaknesses of components, with nirvana being as much fault-tolerance architecture as your business can afford.

Owens underscored that the organization's tolerance for failure, how long a component can be down, makes a big difference in how much a technical solution is worth. How many down hours -- or minutes -- can the business stand to live without e-mail, network links, on-line servers or telephones?

"The best way to avoid an unthinkable disaster naturally is to plan," Owens said.

When ready to add a new device or technology, he suggested asking: How important is this? What would happen if it disappeared? Who would care? How could production proceed without it? How long could we stay like this?

"It's important that people know ahead of time what their options are," Owens said.

Identifying the weak spots may be as simple as asking the system supplier, Owens said. They know from other customers' experiences and from engineering what the bottlenecks and "single points of failure" are.

Deciding what a solution or redundancy is worth is harder.

"The real trick is to protect yourself and to do it economically. Obviously what you are looking for is minimal downtime and to cut the loss of data," Owens said. "Unless you really know what your labor costs are and what your costs of production are, it's difficult to make a justification to your financial officer on why this is important."

-- Marion J. Love