Mary Nugent - Preparing your Business Services for the Future

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In your IT department, what happens when your alarm levels go from 300 alarms an hour to 30? Would you trust your tools enough to know that the alarms it sends you are truly halting a business service? While Mary Nugent won’t use this podcast to attempt to tell you technical details on the correct alarming thresholds, she will share some excellent stories.

Discover how IT affects even moving the most precious deliveries safely, thanks to IT predictions and avoidance of failure. When does monitoring a printer actually stop trucks from leaving the premises? What surprises her about the future of predictive intelligence? What can non-futurists learn about predicting a system’s behavior with enough data collection? Find out this and more in this informative interview with Mary Nugent, vice president, Service Assurance, BMC Software.

Bio

Mary Nugent, vice president, Service Assurance, BMC Software, is an accomplished software technology executive with extensive expertise and in-depth knowledge in the emerging service management marketplace. She manages BMC’s customer-facing efforts for the company’s Service Assurance portfolio, including infrastructure management, event and impact management, and capacity management products. In addition to her 15 years of technology experience, she also has 10 years of experience in public accounting and is a certified public accountant.

Questions

1. Predictive intelligence involves a lot of data collection, analysis, and configuration of thresholds and seeking the truth of many data inputs. What can we non-futurists use to help “see” and predict the future? Are dashboards with combined views helpful, or are most people more comfortable in front of their usual threshold and management tools?
2. One concern about predictive intelligence is that if the collected data is wrong, it’s a very costly problem. What do you think about that concern? Is it valid?
3. Are there trade-offs to consider when collecting and storing all this data, or is storage so inexpensive to maintain that the returns on storage investment pay out quickly?
4. Do you have any good stories of an IT department that became “alarm-deaf,” where the noise level of alarms was drowning out meaningful information?
5. What has surprised you the most about predictive intelligence and where it is today?
6. What final message do you want to leave listeners with today?

To our listeners – if you have any questions or feedback and input for new shows please let us know. We want to hear from you. Send an email to talk@bmc.com