The BAC infrastructure is spread across two data centers - development and production. There are two production BAC servers, two for testing, and two VMWare virtual machines for development. There are business process monitors in the company's 21 core offices and distribution centers. Oracle is being used for the back end.

"It provides support staff and management visibility into application performance [and] a single view for both end-user and infrastructure performance," Tonkin said, adding the organization really sees this project as a foundation for future IT service management.

"We designed for the project, but also thought about the larger-scale implementations. Don't try to integrate everything if it doesn't make sense."

Tonkin, a 20-year veteran of the company, with more than 10 years in systems management, recommends organizations don't try and do everything at once because "Rome wasn't built in a day".

"Start small, learn, improve, and extend," he said. "When designing, think about the future [and] whatever you build should be reusable. Simple is good. Fit it in, don't rip apart. Don't rip out other infrastructure monitoring tools. You don't want to change all your infrastructure tools. Show success and it will breed more success."