Featured Article - "The Missing Link"


by Jan D. Vromant - Published 09 August 2004

(Note: a new feature presentation will be on this page from time to time)

Part 3 of 5 - Cascade

A marketing group of a major US company decided to plan a significant advertising campaign for the second quarter of the fiscal year. The sales group hired 200 people to handle the additional load in the 'sales funnel'. This meant 200 laptops, 200 email accounts, an additional Exchange server, 200 Siebel licenses, another Siebel application server, and other services, for which the capacity [and the corresponding budget] was not planned. As the Sales and Marketing group failed to timely inform the IT group, the result was 'fire-fighting' in the IT operations.

    The correct sequence of events should have been a ‘cascading’ effect: Cascading Effect Sequence of Events
  1. get information about the expected increase in personnel [when will they be hired, how many, permanent or temporary, where];
  2. identify the IT services needed to support the business requirements [CRM2, email, RAS3, etc];
  3. identify the capacity needed, based on the configuration needed to support a service [additional Exchange server, RAM and CPU capacity, backup needs, bandwidth, routers];
  4. based on the increased capacity estimates, prove the cost and demand the budget.

The "Cascading Requirements" scenario on the right is so obvious that it would be almost idiotic to point it out. Unfortunately, "common sense isn't!" IT people are wrapped up in trying to get the upper-hand of their reactive behavior and attempting to get into a proactive mode4. As a result, they are not following the above logical decision-making path when thinking about capacity.

    The way to break through this vicious cycle is to
  1. get a timely understanding of the business requirements by having IT management involved with or at least thoroughly informed of the business decisions;
  2. break the business requirements down into the needed IT services by establishing a Service Catalog, have Service Level Management in place to correctly identify service levels, and have the IT architecture designed from a point of view of services;
  3. make sure a good Configuration Management is in place with the proper linkages of the Configuration Items, so that the increase in service levels [e.g., availability and performance] are matched by a corresponding increase in capacity;
  4. have the Financial Management process tie in to Configuration Management to show the immediate budget adjustments.
    5. Federal Enterprise Architecture Model

A good parallel to the concept of this cascading approach is the way the US Federal Government is mandating the use of a Performance Reference Model, cascading down to a Business Reference Model, followed by a Services Reference Model, and finally a Technical and Data Reference Model5.


• Capacity Management and Business Requirements • Missing Link • Cascade • ITIL • Commitment, Planning, and Belief •

2 Customer Relationship Management applications
3 Remote Access Service
4 Another explanation is that some IT people want to be fire-fighting heroes and are paranoid keepers of their knowledge. Some feel psychologically rewarded when the organization is reactive instead of proactive.
5 See the Federal Enterprise Architecture web site at http://www.feapmo.gov for further details