Question - With the ability to tap an API and availability of Open Source products, WHY is it so challenging for organisations to feed all 'customer & ICT operational' Midrange and Mainframe data to a single area for analytics? This new role has an interesting challenge of bringing alive analytics for: ITSM, Monitoring & Alerting and Historical Volumetrics. ITSM will leverage work undertaken by the Xtraction team. Monitoring & Alerting will leverage work undertaken by the Dynatrace and Elastic Search team. Historical Volumetrics requires strategies for internal and external to the Data Lake. A side benefit of being tool agnostic is the team is able to use products from SAS, and the Data Lake. This has created an environment for the team to work on consultative applications development / solutions delivery. An example is work underway using Power BI to deliver an enterprise forecasting and reporting tool for Project Management.

I am liking the challenge of bringing alive two critical areas for an organisation. The saying old things are still relevant is true: executive buy in, data feeds and a good team make all the difference in delivering a high quality solution. I manage two teams: Configuration Management and ITSM Administration. Both are critical to the operational stability of an organisation. To ensure ROI: empowerment from executive is mandatory, access to data feeds and staff who are able to support the technical needs. In some ways you could say the most important is cultural change and the new behaviour it brings. To do this all stakeholders need to understand the value to them in supporting the initiative. This in essense is marketing and by using a good reporting product like Xtraction from Landesk, stakeholders are able to see first hand the value.

I manage a team which sources Capacity & Performance data from Mainframe & Midrange and business MI. We use Xtraction for reporting and dashboarding of HP Service Manager records. As Xtraction is easy to learn and will map to a large range of data bases it easily supports distributed reporting. An SQL database has been impemented for Xtraction, this will enable a virtual relationship between records from different data sources. We also use SAS ITRM/VAAR and Captell for processing Mainframe and Midrange capacity & performance records. We have recently implemented the 1st ITRM installation in the southern hemisphere. This enabled the possibility of having data feeds from business MI through all ICT infrastructure to storage ' basement to the ceiling'. With this in mind the next phase I would like to implement is a central data store for all capacity and performance data of our organisation. Using SAS tools will be abe to combine information from different data sources into a single ICT viewt for: understanding of issues & forecasting. Recently my favourite topic ITIL CSI has become a focus with two points reafirmed: executive buy in is mandatory and appointing a CSI manager.

For Enterprise Services Branch I provide expertise in: root cause analysis, facilitation, coordination, management and resolution of ICT problems. I will act as a specialist in Situation Management for a business critical task.In March 2012 I was requested to perform a risk analysis of a production environment. This was done to understand the consequences of promoting applications into it. The result was a decision to defer promotion until recommendations were implemented:• Fast track of a project which would upgrade the CPUs and memory used in production servers from 3 months to 1 month.• Undertake a Java Virtual Machine ‘JVM’ redesign project. This will involve creation of extra 32bit jvms for migration of applications, and creation of a 64bit jvm to mitigate memory limitations encountered by 32bit jvms’, • Removal of any redundant applications • To support the above undertake extensive functional and performance testingTo ensure work commenced I organized and coordinated all resources. Seven separate teams were created with work expected to have been completed by end of April. As the March deployment had not occurred and June deployment of applications was mandated there was no option but to deliver at the end of April. Teams were comprised of: Applications, Functional testing, Performance testing, IBM technical staff, Hardware upgrade, JVM redesign project and Migration of applications.In Dec 2011 the promotion of an application into the Medicare Australia Online Claiming production environment caused a high profile incident to occur. I was requested by the Applications area to act as a Situation Manager. This required working with IBM, DHS technical staff and project staff associated with the application. The incident was technically complex and due to external pressures time constrained. After 1 week of intensive effort resolution was achieved.

For Medicare Australia I was responsible for all BAU Operational Incidents/Problems, the internal Service Desk and Executive support. I also assisted in the change management process, providing authorization for promotion of items into the production environment. The section I managed had approximately 18 – 20 staff depending on who was on leave. As infrastructure and data communications was outsourced to IBM and Optus, strong vendor management was needed. This area provided support for approximately 5500 staff, high quality customer service was mandatory. My main responsibility was to provide a stable IT environment for all of Medicare Australia, in particular their Online Claiming applications. To mitigate loss of staff and improve retention I implemented a strategy for cross skilling. All staffing issues were quickly dealt with in a professional manner. This position required the ability to make time constrained decisions on operational matters.

• Act in the position of Manager of Service Operations• Conduit into ICT for all of Medicare Australia• Medicare Australia Service Delivery Manager for IBM and Optus • Facilitated delivery of IT requests in very short time frames,• Resolve any issue not addressed through normal process• Ensured focus on high priority issues until resolution • Provided Kepner Tregoe ‘KT’ root cause analysis for complex incidents and problemsThis position had a high level of autonomy, I was able to move freely within Medicare Australia, work with other government departments as well as the private sector. High quality stakeholder management was expected. In Being outsourced to IBM and Optus strong vendor management was necessary.