Increasing collaboration between various departments in an organization will help it become more agile. If disparate network administration and security teams can learn to share information, the organization will be better placed to adapt to change. In many cases, collaboration between IT departments is limited as each team is conditioned to keep its own house and minimize its risks. So how can you achieve a culture shift and institute the desire to share information and adapt to change instead of resisting it?

Provide tools to facilitate collaboration

If you have the budget to purchase platforms such as Jira, Slack, Confluence or others – more power to you! At Indeni we leverage Slack and the Indeni Crowd to communicate with our teams, customers and partners.

If cost is an inhibitor you can leverage the following ideas to show early wins across departments:

• Having an open information repository where any team member can find the steps for installation and troubleshooting. To encourage contributions to this repository, prizes can be given to top contributors. Rewards can include paid-up courses and certifications. Simple recognition across the organization can do where there is no budget for more tangible benefits.
• In the same vein, you can institute peer reviews of scripts. Such forums can also need to the automation of tasks that had always been done manually.
• The DevOps culture can also be used as a template from which you borrow ideas on how to enhance collaborative working. The DevOps movement has been sweeping through the tech community for the past few years. Security experts and network operators take a more collaborative approach to tasks under the DevOps model.It has seen IT teams strive to apply agile and lean principles to their operations. This way team members focus more on the organization’s long-term goals when executing their tasks instead of focusing solely on their department’s performance.
• Lunch and learn sessions hosted by experts in troubleshooting devices from different vendors have proved helpful in fostering collaboration. Held during normal lunch breaks, these may be a cost effective way of sharing knowledge and growing scripting skills or finding ways of harmonizing network security efforts.

Find out more about the importance of collaboration in network management from the report generated from Indeni’s extensive research. If you found the information helpful please share on social media by clicking the share links at the top of this page.