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| Mar 30, 2007 2:05 pm |
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What Do You Know About Your Network? |
Ken Hilving
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If you are focused on IT, telecom, or ICT (information & communications technology), you probably have a fairly good grip on the physical aspects of your network. You know your sites, the components at those sites, the circuits between those sites, and the capacity of those circuits. You probably have a Visio or similar network map, and might even keep it current.
If you are a bit more sophisticated, you might know the network costs associated with each site, the primary business role of each site, and the virtual network of corporate systems. You might have available the history of problems by location, duration, cause, and impact.
Maybe its time to step up your knowledge to the next level?
Every network has a wealth of business intelligence buried within how it is used. The data is in the traffic flows. The when, what, and who of that traffic is a key part of understanding how the network relates to the business. Of course, that understanding requires more than just technical data. The "who" in technology is a source/destination pair of IP addresses and MAC addresses. Linking those to specific individuals or roles is where the intelligence is found.
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An example - when it is expanded to Joe Blow, top sales rep, it becomes intelligence the sales division can use to bring other salespeople closer to the performance levels of Joe Blow.
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The problem has always been one of data overload. This is why we moved from spreadsheets to network diagrams.
I believe the next step is to integrate the network data sets with other business data sets and then apply visualization tools to these.
If you aren't familiar with these, check out some of these sites.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/genisis is Open Source and free.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home is an IBM package. There is a cost for using it within a private network.
http://www.gapminder.org/ comes from Google. Its online and is included here as an example of visualization tools.
http://www.swivel.com/ is another online example. My understanding is that a private version will be available soon.
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I want to thank Ryze member John Maloney for his post on the World Wide Knowledge Management network regarding GenIsys.Private Reply to Ken Hilving (new win) |
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