What’s a bottleneck? From Dictionary.com, it’s “a narrow entrance, spot where traffic becomes congested”. In IT terms, it’s something causing slower operations or that inhibits a Service Level Agreement (SLA) from being met. The worst case scenario is a lot of IT shops are absolutely confident that they don’t have bottlenecks as they are meeting or exceeding their SLA’s. They couldn’t be more wrong!!! 

There are a wide variety of traditional methods for identifying bottlenecks. On an IBM mainframe, a business might use IBM’s Omegamon, BMC’s Mainview or CA’s SYSVIEW. On a desktop, it could be as simple as Microsoft Task Manager or Apple’s Activity Monitor. On networks, there are a many tools. At home, you might wonder if your ISP or internal network is running well, so you’d try Ookla’s speedtest.net. In the cloud, there are monitors for Amazon Web Services, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Yet, none of these will find the modern IT system bottleneck. When you have an IT system bottleneck, there’s always someone to blame. But who is it? Is it the System Programmer’s fault? Is it the Application Developer’s fault? Is it the asphalt? Oops, wrong punchline. No, it’s the System Architecture’s fault. It’s a 1990’s mentality that looks at IT in operational silo’s and independently manages the systems. But hang in there for another moment. There is a cure.

The 1990’s methodology bases IT operations on server silos. The mainframe is independently managed from the Unix servers, which are independent of x86 servers, which are separate from cloud and mobile and desktop and network. Security is done for each domain. Business resilience is done for each domain. Budget’s are created and departments compete for more spend in their particular area. Some areas might claim they have a bottleneck and warrant more spending to resolve it. Next budget cycle, they’ll still have issues and want more.

Another type of silo-ed operation is looking at separate systems for Record, Insight and Engagement. Systems of Record are the master database and transactional systems that update those databases (e.g. credit/debit, stock sales, claims, inventory, payments, etc). Systems of Insight are the analytic systems (e.g fraud detection, sales opportunity, continuous flow delivery, tracking). Systems of Engagement are the human computer or Internet of Things (IoT) interfaces (e.g. mobile, IoT device, tablet, browser). Many businesses create silos to manage each of these areas independently because if you had ever tried to do this in the 1990’s, you’d hit a bottleneck or drive up IT costs too high. Funny how the systems of the 1990’s actually created the hidden bottleneck today!  But it can be fixed.

Where can you buy the “fix” for this? Is it via a software product? No. Hardware product? No. Cloud? No. Consulting services? Maybe. But the reality is every business can solve this pretty easily within their own environment. I guarantee that your business can far exceed current SLA’s and establish new business goals. In the process, your business can save tremendously in IT expense, while improving security and business resilience. The solution is pretty simple.

Stop copying data between systems! In the new API economy, all of the systems have been modified to allow for direct access to applications and data from other systems. The change is either philosophical and/or organizational for most enterprises. It’s all about managing the IT systems together instead of separate silos. That starts at an architectural level, with hybrid development systems and extends to hybrid operational systems that address end to end security, business resilience and performance.

If you’ve moved  data to another server to keep the Systems of Record separate from the Systems of Insight. Stop the move. Keep the data together. Systems like IBM’s mainframe are now capable of hosting both databases and analytics in a single system and improving analytic performance many times over separate Systems of Insight without impacting the SLA’s of the transactional systems. The applications  that access the Systems of Insight can be easily modified to point to the Systems of Record instead via updated device drivers without changing any code logic. This changes things like batch analytics, which might be used for fraud detection into real time analytics that can be used for fraud prevention. And in the process, businesses will save with reduction in storage, network bandwidth and system utilization, costs and time associated with copying the data. Products such as Rocket’s Data Virtualization Studio can provide the device drivers and mappings necessary for applications to share data from a variety of Systems of Record, across platforms. And new apps can be developed to join the data from different sources, including partner organizations or from “the cloud” to solve business problems in new and creative ways. These applications wouldn’t be possible without sharing data. Apache Spark technology is one means for collaboration across data sources.

There is no reason to copy data to move it closer to or tailor it for a specific System of Engagement. The API economy allows for applications to directly access the data or transactions on other systems via the API economy. New pricing options are available that allow for increased transaction rates, due to direct access to mobile, at a lower cost than traditional access methods. zOS Connect is one of the tools for making the API connection between mobile and transactional systems.

Regardless of how you might transform your business, the unintended consequence of standing still on current IT silo-ed operations is there are bottlenecks and slow downs in business systems that depend on heavily copying data and batch windows to facilitate copying. Direct access to data and devices is the future. The future is now. Begin the migration to hybrid operations management. If you need help in deciding how to look at your architecture differently, don’t hesitate to ask me.