Forbes recently noted that ‘every company is a data company, eventually’. Some estimates indicate we create up to 7.5 septillion (7,700,000,000,000,000,000,000) gigabytes every day. And, it comes in an increasing number of varieties and flavors. Maximizing the value of data and content you hold is now vital for business success. Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions provide the answer to becoming an information-centric company and deliver a host of benefits.
But to achieve those benefits, you must optimize your EIM systems to ensure they offer peak performance, resilience and availability. Here are four tips to optimizing your EIM technology.
1. Know where to start
The old adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure is equally true for your EIM systems. You need to create a baseline on installation and ensure that it is updated as the system evolves. One popular approach is to establish a ‘site inventory’, a technical document that sets out a graphical view of the entire configuration of your EIM solution.
The site inventory should include:
- Logical system overview
- Server names and IP addresses
- Server usage and communication between servers including ports
- Storage information including disk size
- Load balancer and/or firewall information
- Network information
- Third-party products and integrations
- Installed product version, including patch level
- Configuration overview – installation path, log file path, start/stop scripts, or services
A comprehensive and accurate site inventory helps ease the configuration management burden and facilitates a speedy response in the event of system incidents. It will also help you keep up-to-date with patches and upgrades. For example, companies that deploy OpenText™ Optimize Assist often use their site inventory in conjunction with its optional patch management service.
2. Know exactly what’s happening
Application health is at the core of your business. Downtime from a system crash, according to Gartner, can cost $5,600 per minute. However, this is potentially dwarfed by the hidden cost of poor application performance.
Online service Newsmax notes: “If your IT system is 50% slower than it should be, you’re essentially throwing away half your IT budget and paying twice as much for half the results”. The publication notes that difficulty handling data and information is a major reason for poor performance. It’s essential that your EIM systems are regularly appraised to ensure that they are running at an acceptable level and identify bottlenecks are areas where problems could arise.
While it’s possible for the IT team to carry out its own assessments, it’s often better to employ the software vendor to provide an independent health check. With OpenText Optimize Assist, companies receive a regular health check that analyzes the EIM system performance to identify and address weak points and potential failures.
3. Have the right people at the right time
Many companies have built up an EIM skills-base within the IT service management team. However, there are many occasions where the organization wants to increase the EIM resource available, to quickly engage expert assistance when it is needed most. Some need occasional help, while others take advantage of regular support to augment their application management team.
Increasingly, organizations are deploying third-party optimization services like OpenText™ Optimize Assist to take advantage of proactive and preventative services, such as incident management and on-site and remote technical assistance. Whether on-premise, cloud or hybrid deployments, these organizations benefit from flexible and speedy access to the EIM experts they need. Optimize Assist customers work with a Service Manager – a trusted advisor who provides a single point of contact for all operational issues – and benefit from short incident response times (as little an hour), and rapid engagement of on-site and remote help when they need it most.
4. Learn from others
One of the most difficult tasks for an IT services management team is to judge their EIM system performance against other companies of a similar make-up or in a similar industry. Benchmarking can offer some level of information. However, working with the EIM solution providers through services such as OpenText Optimize Assist gives access to EIM professionals with experience delivering effective systems to a wide range of organizations worldwide. This gives you access to methods and best practices for EIM deployment that are extremely difficult to replicate in-house.
Flexibility and assurance with OpenText Optimize Assist
OpenText Optimize Assist provides your IT service management team with the support they need by combining proactive and technical services personalized to your individual requirements. System health checks, performance assessments, incident tracking and capacity reviews are just a few of the key services available. You gain flexible access to in-depth EIM expertise delivering the assurance that your EIM systems are always fully optimized.
If you’d like to know more about OpenText Optimize Assist or our range of Professional Service, please visit our website.
