- Email: [email protected]
DP and user roles in capacity planning
a
0
DP and user roles In capacityplannmg by LEILANI E ALLEN
E
ffective data centre management has become an increasing concern for senior corporate management. Brandt Allen’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review’ pointed out the perils of an unmanaged computer system. Today’s firms, large and small, are increasingly dependent on information resources which, at least structurally, are under the control of the MIS (management information services), manager. The availability of accurate, integrated, intelligible data has quite literally become one of the critical success factors for an enterprise. With this recognition of dependency has come a singularly unsettling realization as well: that this key resource is often controlled by a highly skilled and talented group of people who nevertheless are outside of the mainstream of the business, who don’t use the same management models and who usually do not themselves recogAbstract: Capacity management is a vital component of thefunction of the data processing centre. To be effective capacity management must take account of both businessrequirementsand user service needs. User education, service level agreements and workloadforecasting are the three main areas in which DP managers can involve users, thus providing theframework for ajoint, cooperativeeffort. Keywords: capacity management, training, forecasting, coordination. Dr Leilani Allen services at the Engineering.
~0125
no 2
is director Institute
march 1983
of educational for Software
nize the importance of their corporate role. The ability to efficiently and effectively process data can make or break a manager - little wonder then that when this processing ability breaks down or is unacceptably slow the level of frustration mounts. This frustration becomes the source for angry phone calls, stormy status meetings and, in general, an unattractive adversary relationship between data processing and the rest of the organization. On the positive side, this recognition of dependency has brought senior management to the realization that the data centre must institute some effective system for managing resources, both now and in the future. This is now called capacity management. Capacity management has been defined by Kolence as: ‘control of the financial and technological resources of data processing installations and configurations to produce maximum economic benefits for the larger organization in the current and future time frame”. What this means is that capacity management is driven by business concerns, not technical concerns. What are the implications of this view? First, that data centre managers must understand the business requirements of the organization. Second, that the user service needs must be recognized, documented and serve as the basis for operational procedures. Third, that it is possible to define the capacity of current and alternative hardware/software resources, and pinpoint when a given capacity must be available for the firm to fulfil its busi-
0011-684)(/83/020009-04$03.00
0
1983 Butterworth
ness objectives. Fourth, that resource costs can be balanced against service costs to provide a rational basis for planning. In each case, user involvement is required to tie service to resource to cost. There are at least three distinct areas of opportunity to involve users in the capacity management effort: l l l
user education service level agreements workload forecasting
The first area alerts users to the fact that capacity management is truly a joint responsibility and that they can choose to use the information resources more efficiently to increase service. The second area involves users in setting up the operational standards for the data centre in terms of service level commitments that guide tuning efforts. The final area asks users to provide the business-based data that are the foundation of long-range capacity plans.
User education User education for capacity management is an ongoing activity designed not to make users more knowledgeable about data processing but rather on how specific behaviour impacts the short-term performance and longterm capacity of computer systems. It takes two distinct forms: formal presentations which address specific problem areas and written communications which paint a general picture of operating constraints and possibilities.
&Co (Publishers)
Ltd.
The specific procedures for designing effective user education have been covered in a previous article3. Basically: these procedures involve identifying the different interest groups in the user community, selecting subjects of relevance and immediacy to each group and communicative in terms that each group understands. These farmal educational efforts are most effective in dealing with overcoming short-term problems. They are complemented by a long-term effort to educate the user community about capacity in general, These written communications should fundamentally take the form of a ‘performance notebook’ routinely distributed to key end users and management. This document consists of a selective series of visual displays that accurately represent planned performance, actual performance, the variance between the two and the reasons for that variance,
Good performance reporting should be clear, tailored to the specific recipient and consistent in format from month to month. It should be designed to ensure that meagerness will never be surprised by any request from the data centre for additional resources, changed procedures or more flexible service commitments. It should not seek ro disguise problems but should instead advertise them so that everyone concerned can become conditioned to the fact that extraordinary measures might need to be taken. If these measures prove successful, that message should clearly be demonstrated in the reports as well. As Synnott and Gruber observed, “it’s not enough simply to perform well; one publicize that must EllSO performancey4. In short, performance reporting is the key way to ‘raise the consciousnessf of the user co~u~ty to the real performance of the data centre and what factors (both data centrecontrolled and user-controlled) affect that performance.
10
“Capacity’and LIP With either approach it is essential, first and foremost, to co~~cate the concept of capaci;ty to users. Capacity, simply defined, is the ability of a given entity to process work in a given period of time. Surprisingly, even business school graduates who are taught the arenas of~p~ci~ planning in a production sense are unable to relate it to the DP department. There are two major reasons for this. First, today’s users view the computer centre as just another utility, similar to the &one service or the electric power agency. We certainly do not ring up the local pawer station when we buy a new electronic gadget; we expect them to have planned well enough to have su%cient capacity to service our needs.. Imagine our surprise were the power agency to send out a survey asking for projections of om kilowatt usage> five years in the future. Yet that is precisely whar we require users to do (if we even deign to include them in the forecasting process). No wonder the hapless user is at best befuddled and often dawnright blasphemous on the subject of ‘capacity management’, The second reason why capacity is a difficult concept to communicate to users is that data processing has yet to find a good measure of capacity - a metric that is s~~sric~y valid and can be easily translated into business terms. Software physics was an attempt to lind just such a metric (software work) for systems and subsystems. Less ambitious efforts have used a composite of m~su~ble quantities (CPU seconds, I/O counts) to develop a ‘computer resource unity6. The average practitioner usually settles for a single unit which shows up on the monitor reports. Quite obviously, this unit is nonsensical to the option at large and lacks true technical validity. Greater efforts must be made to develop standard measurements7, and to relate these measures to business unitss.
Education is not merely the transmission of facts but is an effort to change behaviour, Users don’t want any more facts, they want service. Consequently, any discussion of capacity must be phrased in terms how a change of behaviour (on DP or the user’s part) will make it easier or more difficult to obtain or provide required service. The discussion must delineate the tradeoffs between service, cost and resources. In this way, capacity management becomes the joint respo~sibili~ of users and the data centre, Considering that the data centre exists only to process user work, this seems a fair arrangement. If this joint responsibility is recognized, the user education effort can be viewed as successful, If not, the attempt to involve users in service level negotiations or forecasting activities will necessarily come t0 grief.
Service level management is an approach to resource management which is based on the assumption that the service needs of the user community can be translated into specific objectives that are formalized in contracts, service level agreements, between DP and the users. These agreements are negotiated between the two sides and contain commitments by both parties. DP agrees to provide a certain rmge of service by transaction type, job class or application system, This service range should usually be different for peak and nonpeak periods. It should also be both ‘meetable and beatable’, that is the threshold should be such that DP carr occasionally provide better service than the contract specifies. On the other side, the user agrees to provide a certain volume and mix of work. The crucial as~mp~ion is that if the user provides a higher voiume of work, or a mix of work that requires more processing resources, the service threshold can be exceeded, The con-
data processing
verse is equally true.
Having service level agreements in place allows the data centre to establish internal performance objectives (% CPU busy or paging rate) which can be monitored and reported. These objectives provide the basis for tuning, but now tuning is done not to some abstraction like ‘best possible service’ but to external commitments made to the users. Service level agreements provide a basis for setting operational standards’ which will indicate how well the data centre is managed. Most importantly, service level agreements give the MIS manager the ideal way to justify requests for increased resources since they tie service directly to user projects and business deliverables.
Workload forecasting As stated in the introduction, capacity management concerns itself with both the current and future timeframe. Service level agreements support performance management. Workload forecasting is an essential component
~0125no 2 march 1983
of capacity planning. Capacity planning seeks to answer the fundamental questions: Where will the organization be l-5 years in the future, what workloads will need to be processed and what is the best combination of hardware/software resources to process them? It should be clear that the first two parts of the question are endemic to all planning’. Just as clearly, they require user and management input to deal with them intelligently. To even approach these groups we need to have a good understanding of what the organization is currently doing and which workloads are currently being processed. How many DP installations have fully met these prerequisites? How well does the capacity planner understand the business he or she is in? I don’t mean data processing. I mean finance if the business is banking, weaponry systems if it is defence and manufacturing if it is the steel industry. An inability to relate to, understand and most importantly predict the behaviour of the external organization is a severe handicap for MIS managerslo
and especially for capacity planners. It hampers the ability to ask intelligent questions and assess the significance and implications of what we are told. It keeps capacity planning marooned on an island of uncertainty which is often resolved by costly over-engineering of systems. Outdated architectures, incompatible devices and inefficient applications are part of the price we pay for this isolation. The actual procedure for conducting user interviews involves compiling a workload profile (see Table 1) which contains detailed information on a particular application system or department. These profiles are compiled by the capacity planning group and are used as the basis for asking questions about the growth of existing workloads and the addition of new workloads” I The user interview process provides a necessary check and balance on any quantitative forecasting techniques we might utilize (regression analysis, time series analysis, etc). It can be judged successful to the extent that we can explain deviations between plan and actual overtime and
11
use this knowledge to adjust our shortand long-range DP plans accordingly. Responsibilities So far, I have been using ‘DP’ as an all-inclusive term for a number of distinct functions. Which of these functions are responsible for initiating and sustaining the user liaison effort? The common assumption is that it falls in the software development (applications) area, presumably because the systems analysts have an ongoing dialogue with users. Is this really true? To what extent does program maintenance (or even development) require a genuine understanding of the user department’s responsibilities, constraints, planning cycle or future needs? Probably very little. Besides, many companies with significant backlogs already have an adversary relationship established between applications and the users. Hence the creation of the Information Centre (IC), a concept that IBM is actively promoting’2. With an IC in place, departments are trained and encouraged to interact with user-friendly systems to do customized analysis and reporting. The liaison responsibility is thus one step further removed from the systems staff. Information centre staff often lack indepth systems knowledge and are surely not capable of translating user needs into resource utilizations. The question eventually comes down to the following: who is responsible for seeing to it that the capacity is available to provide the service required to meet organizational goals? This is clearly the main function of capacity management. The CM function must coordinate the user liaison effort if it is to obtain the vital information required to perform efficiently and effectively and plan for the future. Summary Users play a vital role in any successful capacity management program. This
12
role must be clearly defined to and for the organization. Users must be educated on the relationship between their own service needs and data centre capacity. They need to be involved in selecting service thresholds and managing service to ensure good performance management in the current timeframe and in forecasting work, as part of the capacity planning effort for the future. The responsibility for seeing that this understanding and involvement take place lies squarely within the systems area. This is a difficult and often tedious enterprise. However, it is not inherently more demanding than the many technical challenges that most good DP staffs face and overcome every day. The only deficiency is the lack of experience with the larger organizational concerns. But as Ellen Terry observed, ‘deficiency can be overcome by that faculty for taking infinite pains which may not be genius but is certainly a good substitute for it’. Most large organizations and a great many smaller ones have reached the stage when these 0 ‘infinite pains’ are now required.
ante evaluation, SHARE Inc, Chicago, IL (1982). 6. Thulin, K, A measurement standard for planning heterogeneous data processing systems, CMG Transactions No 37 (November 1982). 7. Grant, J and Allen L E, Integrating corporate plans and data processing requirements, Institute for Software Engineering, Sunnyvale, CA (1981). See also Jozwik, R and Pearlman, W, A top-down look at workload forecasting, CMG X Proceedings (1979); Artis, H P, Forecasting computer re-
quirements: An analyst’s dilemma, ECOMA Proceedings (1979); Mohr, J F and Penansky, A forecasting-oriented workload characterization methodology, ICCMIII Proceedings (1981). 8. Vincent, D R, Performance stan-
9.
10.
References 1. Allen, B, An unmanaged compu-
ter system can stop you dead, Harvard Business Review Vol 60, No 6 (November-December 1982).
11.
2. Kolence, Kenneth W, The Meaning of Computer Measurement: An Introduction to Software Physics,
Institute ing, Palo 3. Allen, L capacity
for Software EngineerAlto, CA, 1976. E, User education for management, Computer Performance Vol 3, No 1, March 1982. See also User survey on capacity management, Computer Perfbrmance Vol 3, No 2 (June 1982). 4. Synnott, W R and Gruber, W H, The care and feeding of users, Datamation (March 1982). 5. Merrill, H W, An engineering approach to computer perform-
dards for capacity planning, Corn-Extra (September 1981). Chandy, K M, Planning information systems, Capacity Management Vol 1, No 1 (August 1982). Allen, L E, Technical and management concerns in the user interview process, J. of Capacity Management, Vol 1, No 2 (December 1982). Crane, J, The changing role of the DP manager, Datamation (January 1982). See also Froehlich, A F, Managing the data centre as a business, Computerworld (September 6 1982). Hammond L, Management considerations for an information centre, IBM Systems Journal Vol 2 1, No 2 (1982). See also O’Connell, D J, The information resource center: Why so popular?, Computerworld OA (September 1982). For a contrary view, see Bartimo, J, IBM info centre concept ‘hodgepodge’, Exec, Computerworld (October 18, 1982).
puterworld
12.
Institute for Software Engineering, 510 Oakmead Parkway, Sunnyvale, CA 94086, USA. Tel: (408) 749 0133.
data
processing
0
DP and user roles In capacityplannmg by LEILANI E ALLEN
E
ffective data centre management has become an increasing concern for senior corporate management. Brandt Allen’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review’ pointed out the perils of an unmanaged computer system. Today’s firms, large and small, are increasingly dependent on information resources which, at least structurally, are under the control of the MIS (management information services), manager. The availability of accurate, integrated, intelligible data has quite literally become one of the critical success factors for an enterprise. With this recognition of dependency has come a singularly unsettling realization as well: that this key resource is often controlled by a highly skilled and talented group of people who nevertheless are outside of the mainstream of the business, who don’t use the same management models and who usually do not themselves recogAbstract: Capacity management is a vital component of thefunction of the data processing centre. To be effective capacity management must take account of both businessrequirementsand user service needs. User education, service level agreements and workloadforecasting are the three main areas in which DP managers can involve users, thus providing theframework for ajoint, cooperativeeffort. Keywords: capacity management, training, forecasting, coordination. Dr Leilani Allen services at the Engineering.
~0125
no 2
is director Institute
march 1983
of educational for Software
nize the importance of their corporate role. The ability to efficiently and effectively process data can make or break a manager - little wonder then that when this processing ability breaks down or is unacceptably slow the level of frustration mounts. This frustration becomes the source for angry phone calls, stormy status meetings and, in general, an unattractive adversary relationship between data processing and the rest of the organization. On the positive side, this recognition of dependency has brought senior management to the realization that the data centre must institute some effective system for managing resources, both now and in the future. This is now called capacity management. Capacity management has been defined by Kolence as: ‘control of the financial and technological resources of data processing installations and configurations to produce maximum economic benefits for the larger organization in the current and future time frame”. What this means is that capacity management is driven by business concerns, not technical concerns. What are the implications of this view? First, that data centre managers must understand the business requirements of the organization. Second, that the user service needs must be recognized, documented and serve as the basis for operational procedures. Third, that it is possible to define the capacity of current and alternative hardware/software resources, and pinpoint when a given capacity must be available for the firm to fulfil its busi-
0011-684)(/83/020009-04$03.00
0
1983 Butterworth
ness objectives. Fourth, that resource costs can be balanced against service costs to provide a rational basis for planning. In each case, user involvement is required to tie service to resource to cost. There are at least three distinct areas of opportunity to involve users in the capacity management effort: l l l
user education service level agreements workload forecasting
The first area alerts users to the fact that capacity management is truly a joint responsibility and that they can choose to use the information resources more efficiently to increase service. The second area involves users in setting up the operational standards for the data centre in terms of service level commitments that guide tuning efforts. The final area asks users to provide the business-based data that are the foundation of long-range capacity plans.
User education User education for capacity management is an ongoing activity designed not to make users more knowledgeable about data processing but rather on how specific behaviour impacts the short-term performance and longterm capacity of computer systems. It takes two distinct forms: formal presentations which address specific problem areas and written communications which paint a general picture of operating constraints and possibilities.
&Co (Publishers)
Ltd.
The specific procedures for designing effective user education have been covered in a previous article3. Basically: these procedures involve identifying the different interest groups in the user community, selecting subjects of relevance and immediacy to each group and communicative in terms that each group understands. These farmal educational efforts are most effective in dealing with overcoming short-term problems. They are complemented by a long-term effort to educate the user community about capacity in general, These written communications should fundamentally take the form of a ‘performance notebook’ routinely distributed to key end users and management. This document consists of a selective series of visual displays that accurately represent planned performance, actual performance, the variance between the two and the reasons for that variance,
Good performance reporting should be clear, tailored to the specific recipient and consistent in format from month to month. It should be designed to ensure that meagerness will never be surprised by any request from the data centre for additional resources, changed procedures or more flexible service commitments. It should not seek ro disguise problems but should instead advertise them so that everyone concerned can become conditioned to the fact that extraordinary measures might need to be taken. If these measures prove successful, that message should clearly be demonstrated in the reports as well. As Synnott and Gruber observed, “it’s not enough simply to perform well; one publicize that must EllSO performancey4. In short, performance reporting is the key way to ‘raise the consciousnessf of the user co~u~ty to the real performance of the data centre and what factors (both data centrecontrolled and user-controlled) affect that performance.
10
“Capacity’and LIP With either approach it is essential, first and foremost, to co~~cate the concept of capaci;ty to users. Capacity, simply defined, is the ability of a given entity to process work in a given period of time. Surprisingly, even business school graduates who are taught the arenas of~p~ci~ planning in a production sense are unable to relate it to the DP department. There are two major reasons for this. First, today’s users view the computer centre as just another utility, similar to the &one service or the electric power agency. We certainly do not ring up the local pawer station when we buy a new electronic gadget; we expect them to have planned well enough to have su%cient capacity to service our needs.. Imagine our surprise were the power agency to send out a survey asking for projections of om kilowatt usage> five years in the future. Yet that is precisely whar we require users to do (if we even deign to include them in the forecasting process). No wonder the hapless user is at best befuddled and often dawnright blasphemous on the subject of ‘capacity management’, The second reason why capacity is a difficult concept to communicate to users is that data processing has yet to find a good measure of capacity - a metric that is s~~sric~y valid and can be easily translated into business terms. Software physics was an attempt to lind just such a metric (software work) for systems and subsystems. Less ambitious efforts have used a composite of m~su~ble quantities (CPU seconds, I/O counts) to develop a ‘computer resource unity6. The average practitioner usually settles for a single unit which shows up on the monitor reports. Quite obviously, this unit is nonsensical to the option at large and lacks true technical validity. Greater efforts must be made to develop standard measurements7, and to relate these measures to business unitss.
Education is not merely the transmission of facts but is an effort to change behaviour, Users don’t want any more facts, they want service. Consequently, any discussion of capacity must be phrased in terms how a change of behaviour (on DP or the user’s part) will make it easier or more difficult to obtain or provide required service. The discussion must delineate the tradeoffs between service, cost and resources. In this way, capacity management becomes the joint respo~sibili~ of users and the data centre, Considering that the data centre exists only to process user work, this seems a fair arrangement. If this joint responsibility is recognized, the user education effort can be viewed as successful, If not, the attempt to involve users in service level negotiations or forecasting activities will necessarily come t0 grief.
Service level management is an approach to resource management which is based on the assumption that the service needs of the user community can be translated into specific objectives that are formalized in contracts, service level agreements, between DP and the users. These agreements are negotiated between the two sides and contain commitments by both parties. DP agrees to provide a certain rmge of service by transaction type, job class or application system, This service range should usually be different for peak and nonpeak periods. It should also be both ‘meetable and beatable’, that is the threshold should be such that DP carr occasionally provide better service than the contract specifies. On the other side, the user agrees to provide a certain volume and mix of work. The crucial as~mp~ion is that if the user provides a higher voiume of work, or a mix of work that requires more processing resources, the service threshold can be exceeded, The con-
data processing
verse is equally true.
Having service level agreements in place allows the data centre to establish internal performance objectives (% CPU busy or paging rate) which can be monitored and reported. These objectives provide the basis for tuning, but now tuning is done not to some abstraction like ‘best possible service’ but to external commitments made to the users. Service level agreements provide a basis for setting operational standards’ which will indicate how well the data centre is managed. Most importantly, service level agreements give the MIS manager the ideal way to justify requests for increased resources since they tie service directly to user projects and business deliverables.
Workload forecasting As stated in the introduction, capacity management concerns itself with both the current and future timeframe. Service level agreements support performance management. Workload forecasting is an essential component
~0125no 2 march 1983
of capacity planning. Capacity planning seeks to answer the fundamental questions: Where will the organization be l-5 years in the future, what workloads will need to be processed and what is the best combination of hardware/software resources to process them? It should be clear that the first two parts of the question are endemic to all planning’. Just as clearly, they require user and management input to deal with them intelligently. To even approach these groups we need to have a good understanding of what the organization is currently doing and which workloads are currently being processed. How many DP installations have fully met these prerequisites? How well does the capacity planner understand the business he or she is in? I don’t mean data processing. I mean finance if the business is banking, weaponry systems if it is defence and manufacturing if it is the steel industry. An inability to relate to, understand and most importantly predict the behaviour of the external organization is a severe handicap for MIS managerslo
and especially for capacity planners. It hampers the ability to ask intelligent questions and assess the significance and implications of what we are told. It keeps capacity planning marooned on an island of uncertainty which is often resolved by costly over-engineering of systems. Outdated architectures, incompatible devices and inefficient applications are part of the price we pay for this isolation. The actual procedure for conducting user interviews involves compiling a workload profile (see Table 1) which contains detailed information on a particular application system or department. These profiles are compiled by the capacity planning group and are used as the basis for asking questions about the growth of existing workloads and the addition of new workloads” I The user interview process provides a necessary check and balance on any quantitative forecasting techniques we might utilize (regression analysis, time series analysis, etc). It can be judged successful to the extent that we can explain deviations between plan and actual overtime and
11
use this knowledge to adjust our shortand long-range DP plans accordingly. Responsibilities So far, I have been using ‘DP’ as an all-inclusive term for a number of distinct functions. Which of these functions are responsible for initiating and sustaining the user liaison effort? The common assumption is that it falls in the software development (applications) area, presumably because the systems analysts have an ongoing dialogue with users. Is this really true? To what extent does program maintenance (or even development) require a genuine understanding of the user department’s responsibilities, constraints, planning cycle or future needs? Probably very little. Besides, many companies with significant backlogs already have an adversary relationship established between applications and the users. Hence the creation of the Information Centre (IC), a concept that IBM is actively promoting’2. With an IC in place, departments are trained and encouraged to interact with user-friendly systems to do customized analysis and reporting. The liaison responsibility is thus one step further removed from the systems staff. Information centre staff often lack indepth systems knowledge and are surely not capable of translating user needs into resource utilizations. The question eventually comes down to the following: who is responsible for seeing to it that the capacity is available to provide the service required to meet organizational goals? This is clearly the main function of capacity management. The CM function must coordinate the user liaison effort if it is to obtain the vital information required to perform efficiently and effectively and plan for the future. Summary Users play a vital role in any successful capacity management program. This
12
role must be clearly defined to and for the organization. Users must be educated on the relationship between their own service needs and data centre capacity. They need to be involved in selecting service thresholds and managing service to ensure good performance management in the current timeframe and in forecasting work, as part of the capacity planning effort for the future. The responsibility for seeing that this understanding and involvement take place lies squarely within the systems area. This is a difficult and often tedious enterprise. However, it is not inherently more demanding than the many technical challenges that most good DP staffs face and overcome every day. The only deficiency is the lack of experience with the larger organizational concerns. But as Ellen Terry observed, ‘deficiency can be overcome by that faculty for taking infinite pains which may not be genius but is certainly a good substitute for it’. Most large organizations and a great many smaller ones have reached the stage when these 0 ‘infinite pains’ are now required.
ante evaluation, SHARE Inc, Chicago, IL (1982). 6. Thulin, K, A measurement standard for planning heterogeneous data processing systems, CMG Transactions No 37 (November 1982). 7. Grant, J and Allen L E, Integrating corporate plans and data processing requirements, Institute for Software Engineering, Sunnyvale, CA (1981). See also Jozwik, R and Pearlman, W, A top-down look at workload forecasting, CMG X Proceedings (1979); Artis, H P, Forecasting computer re-
quirements: An analyst’s dilemma, ECOMA Proceedings (1979); Mohr, J F and Penansky, A forecasting-oriented workload characterization methodology, ICCMIII Proceedings (1981). 8. Vincent, D R, Performance stan-
9.
10.
References 1. Allen, B, An unmanaged compu-
ter system can stop you dead, Harvard Business Review Vol 60, No 6 (November-December 1982).
11.
2. Kolence, Kenneth W, The Meaning of Computer Measurement: An Introduction to Software Physics,
Institute ing, Palo 3. Allen, L capacity
for Software EngineerAlto, CA, 1976. E, User education for management, Computer Performance Vol 3, No 1, March 1982. See also User survey on capacity management, Computer Perfbrmance Vol 3, No 2 (June 1982). 4. Synnott, W R and Gruber, W H, The care and feeding of users, Datamation (March 1982). 5. Merrill, H W, An engineering approach to computer perform-
dards for capacity planning, Corn-Extra (September 1981). Chandy, K M, Planning information systems, Capacity Management Vol 1, No 1 (August 1982). Allen, L E, Technical and management concerns in the user interview process, J. of Capacity Management, Vol 1, No 2 (December 1982). Crane, J, The changing role of the DP manager, Datamation (January 1982). See also Froehlich, A F, Managing the data centre as a business, Computerworld (September 6 1982). Hammond L, Management considerations for an information centre, IBM Systems Journal Vol 2 1, No 2 (1982). See also O’Connell, D J, The information resource center: Why so popular?, Computerworld OA (September 1982). For a contrary view, see Bartimo, J, IBM info centre concept ‘hodgepodge’, Exec, Computerworld (October 18, 1982).
puterworld
12.
Institute for Software Engineering, 510 Oakmead Parkway, Sunnyvale, CA 94086, USA. Tel: (408) 749 0133.
data
processing