Low Score< scoring range: 1 - 10 >
< your score:"; var low2 = ">
Your Command Center/NOC is probably not providing any added value in accordance with any best practices frameworks. You are at high risk of having inefficient command center organizations, processes, and tools and your support staff probably suffers from many sleepless nights. You need to invest in tools, processes, and skills that will give your infrastructure the capability to ensure high quality end-to-end services. These steps will allow you to develop the beginnings of command center processes for your customers.
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Medium Score< scoring range: 11 - 20 >
< your score:"; var med2 = ">
Your Command Center is better than nothing. You may not be suffering from sleepless nights, but you probably spend plenty of time putting out fires that could be taken care of by the Command Center. Even if your organization doesn't live by the descriptions in this quiz, you at least have an understanding of the way things might be. Now is the time to start building command center organizations and ensuring service management process frameworks are being implemented. Basic reporting must be distributed to senior management, development groups, and possibly financial groups.
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High Score < scoring range: 11 - 30 >
< your score: "; var high2 = ">
Your Command Center appears to be sufficient. Congratulations, you probably have a sufficient command center approach that works for your organization. However, you bear high risk of suffering from many individual process or tool failures and can still suffer from the impact of a thousand cuts. At the other extreme, you may be overspending on resources because of poor organizational structure or inefficient processes and tools. You should undertake doing a gap analysis to precisely identify shortcomings in your current organization, tools, and processes. Then you can develop a plan to fix those shortcomings. In particular, you should examine your current infrastructure carefully.
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Top Score < scoring range: 31 - 48 >
< your score: "; var top2 = ">
World-Class Command Center Management. Your organization is good! Congratulations, you have an organization that does things well or you are a good test taker with a load of common sense. You may have little or no risk of suffering from poor service support and service delivery processes. You might also suffer from minor irritants and now is just the time to optimize your service support or service delivery processes or tools. Good Luck!
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IT Exam: IT Command Center

What is a Command Center? What are the characteristics of a Network Operations Center (NOC)? One definition of a Command Center is Òthe operations organization responsible for monitoring, reporting, and command and control of the enterprise.Ó There are plenty of other definitions depending on the functions performed by the group. Command centers and NOCs are interchangeable throughout this quiz.

Greenwich Technology Partners has been a planner and implementation leader in Command Center, Data Center, IT Service Management, and Enterprise Management for years, advocating responsible expenditure of resources. Many of the topics raised in this quiz date back to the 1960's. This quiz will provide an opportunity for you to reflect on your organization's command center or network operations center's capabilities and characteristics. Select all the correct answers.


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1. What are some of the main tasks of a Command Center?
  • Systems monitoring
  • Systems reporting
  • IT troubleshooting
  • Incident management
  • Escalation management
  • IT infrastructure management
  • All of the above
2. What groups might use a Command Center?
  • Service desk
  • 1st level support
  • 2nd level support
  • 3rd level support
  • Incident managers
  • Escalation managers
  • Business leadership
  • All of the above
3. What systems might the Command Center use?
  • Service desk tools
  • Enterprise management monitoring and reporting tools
  • Capacity and performance tools
  • Configuration management tools
  • Change management tools
  • Release management tools
  • Incident and problem management tools
  • Other
  • All of the above
4. What are the IT Service Management areas that command centers might provide services for?
  • Service support and service delivery
  • Capacity management
  • Problem management
  • Incident management
  • Service desk
  • IT service continuity management
  • All of the above
5. What core functional areas might a Command Center touch?
  • Networking
  • Facilities infrastructure
  • Servers
  • Storage
  • Databases
  • Middleware
  • Security
  • Applications
  • PBX, telephony, wireless, pagers
  • All of the above
6. What processes does a Command Center support?
  • Incident management
  • Change management
  • Problem management
  • Capacity management
  • All of the above
7. What do you do when there is a service-affecting problem?
  • We panic and pray
  • Take cover
  • Call engineers on our contact list to get them on a conference bridge. Nobody leaves the bridge until the problem is fixed.
  • Our monitoring software can pinpoint where the problem is. We notify the person on call for the relevant technology to get the problem fixed. We also notify Service Desk so they can proactively notify our customers.
8. How do you detect a problem in the infrastructure?
  • Our customers/users drop by our office
  • We get a phone call from Service/Help Desk
  • We get a trouble ticket and phone call from Service/Help Desk
  • We have a monitoring system. Often, the problem is identified, isolated, fixed before anyone even notices it
9. How do you detect a problem in the infrastructure?
  • Too many to count
  • I would say a dozen though I don't know how to use them all
  • The health of our infrastructure is important to us. We've invested in every technology available in the market
  • Well, there might be a few, but we only see a single unified interface for managing all our infrastructure events
10. How do you assess the impact of an incident on your business?
  • It is based upon the number of calls our users make to the command center
  • Calibrated based upon the noise decibels at the Service Desk
  • Our Command Center analysts have years of experience and they can assess business impact of any event
  • Our monitoring systems display business impact based on the event(s) detected
11. What typically causes the service failures?
  • It's none of our business. We fix things when they happen
  • We've some idea of top issues. Our analysts can give you further information on that
  • We generate weekly and monthly reports that can give you top issues causing services failures
12. Do you have Operational Level Agreements (OLA) with infrastructure support organizations?
  • Sorry, never heard of that phrase before
  • We don't have anything written down but we have an informal agreement to help out each other as best as we can
  • We have agreements with some support organizations
  • We've documented agreements with all support organizations. The OLAs map to our overall Service Level Agreements. We review the OLA compliance on a regular basis
13. How do you track the progress of an incident?
  • We extensively use our telecom facilities and post-it notes
  • We record tickets in our Incident (Trouble) Management system. However, the tickets are not often updated
  • We track and document the progress of a problem through its lifecycle. Anyone can go and view the trouble ticket to get the most up-to-date problem status
14. Do you do any proactive monitoring of the infrastructure today?
  • No, we don't know of any process or system in place to do that
  • We have a system in place that provides historical performance reports
  • We have a Performance/Systems Management system in place that provides both near real-time performance/systems metrics to assist us in fault diagnosis and historical reports to enable capacity planning and predictive trending functions to be performed
Marlin Ness is the Practice Director of Enterprise Management at Greenwich Technology Partners. He has over 20 years of practical IT architecture, engineering, operational, and process experience. He can be contacted at mness@greenwichtech.com.

Sanjay Jain is a Managing Consultant in the Enterprise Management practice at Greenwich Technology Partners. He has over 15 years of practical experience in the architecture and design of operational processes and management systems for telecommunications service providers and Fortune 500 enterprises. He can be contacted at sjain@greenwichtech.com.