A new feature in the CFEngine Community Core is attracting some interest from system administrators. It is the simplest of ideas, but then such ideas are often the best.
Following CTO Mark Burgess’ recent blog with Carolyn Rowland on the Business Value of System Administration, this new feature emerges as a simple way to document the business value accorded to the system administration job.
The value_kept, value_repaired, value_notkept settings fall under cfengine transaction logging and allow administrators to attach actual monetary (or other) values to promises kept, or issues repaired, or conversely measure the loss of non-compliance in dollar terms (choose your currency). This value is summed and recorded for each execution of CFEngine, and can be turned into graphs for your management reports.
“If you combine this with system performance data, and other reports from CFEngine, you begin to build up a pretty compelling case for IT services value. Hopefully this will give skilled system administrators the leverage they need to advance in the view of the more removed managerial levels, guarding the purse strings,” says Mark Burgess, author and company founder of CFEngine.
System administration (the “IT services department”) has long been viewed as little more than a cost centre by business leaders, rather than the creative solution it should represent. Burgess and Rowland’s article suggests ways to combat that prejudice, and this feature was something that came out of this. The article summarizes the USENIX LISA workshops on business alignment chaired by Mark Burgess.
“Of course the amount of value one can create for an organization also increases when savvy administrators use a tool like CFEngine, and there is an additional value that we have not factored into the mix at all yet, but which is one of the biggest focuses for the company: knowledge management.” Mark Burgess, adds, “This is part of our Continuing Research into system administration issues. Not everything is about technology, but you’d be surpised where a small technical feature can help.”
