In our consulting practice, one of the many things that we look at while performing an enterprise-level assessment is the decision process that was involved in the selection of various products or tools. More often than not, we're told that an extensive investigation or evaluation was performed, and that this product is the "best of breed," with characteristics or features just not found in competing offerings.

This is particularly true when speaking to the individuals who were instrumental in acquiring the product, who will generally go on to extol the virtues of their selection and provide detailed justification and industry statistics to back up their decision. "Our people spent a lot of time looking into these things, and there just isn't a better product on the market for monitoring Wintel servers on a Novel network," we are told, for example. "This is the best there is."

The majority of the time, these claims are actually true. They did look into things, and they did, in fact, select the best product available for the specific, unique function for which they're responsible. But since we look at things from the enterprise perspective, we just have to ask: "But don't you have Unix servers as well, running on a TCP/IP network, and an extensive SNA network associated with your mainframe? How does this product work in those environments, or how does it integrate with other products for those environments so that you can aggregate enterprise wide management statistics?"

Usually, when their response is more than just an open-mouthed stare as if we were some kind of recently discovered oddity that required intensive study, the answer is something to the effect that those environments are the responsibility of the Unix system administrators or the data center, and those people really don't understand the complexities and nuances of managing whatever environment that it happens to be for which this particular individual is responsible. "They have their tools; we have ours. Our environment has unique needs that these other folks just don't have."

And so it goes, from department to compartmentalized department. Everyone is using the "best there is" for his or her particular little slice of the pie. But without a consistent methodology and tool set across the enterprise, it's still exceedingly difficult to track down the source of reported problems and to ensure that the right resource is dispatched to the right area to get the end user back up and running as quickly as possible.