Yahoo, It’s A New Year

What a holiday break for me. I had lots of fun: snowmobiling, ice skating, downhill skiing, a trip to Lambeau Field, and visiting relatives. My mind is clear and ready to go. It’s time to start fresh, get rid of the old habits, develop new ideas, foster new relationships, and establish new goals.

Each year I have to commit to writing a certain number of blogs, conducting Webinars, planning seminars, visiting customers, signing up new business partners, and attending new development review meetings. In 2010, I met most of my goals. The hardest area was getting more success stories from our customers. I promise to work harder on that one in 2011.

So how did you do in 2010? One common theme from many customers last year was trying to get more out of what they owned. Did you have a similar goal? Did you accomplish it? I really like this goal since I know that many of you are not using all of the features of our products to automate or secure your systems.

How do you know that you're using the tools you own at a level that returns a good investment?

A simple test might be to determine whether you're still experiencing problems in the areas that concerned you. My suggestion is to interview the staff involved. Do they feel good about the results? Did the product achieve your goals? If you've automated everything you could think of, maybe you should ask other departments what you can do for them. I am sure they’re running processes manually that you're not even aware of.

If I were you, I'd establish the following goals for 2011:

• Our data center will always know about system problems before end users do.
• Each month we’ll automate at least 10 new processes.
• Virtually all (99 percent) of our batch processes will end on time.
• We’ll have no downtime due to disk space problems.
• We’ll monitor all mission-critical servers at the data center.
• Each month we’ll use 5 new features from the software product set that we own.
• We’ll finish 99 percent of our backups successfully.

I would love to hear any other goals that you have for managing your data center in 2011.