|  | 7.1 |
The Administrative Side of Network Management
| 7.1.2 |
Understanding and establishing the boundaries of the network

In an enterprise network, it is important that the network staff knows its responsibilities. Is it the responsibility of the network staff to diagnose problems on the user's desktop, or is it simply to determine that the user's problem is not communication related? Does the network staff's responsibility extend only as far as the horizontal cabling wall plate, or does that responsibility extend all the way to the NIC? These definitions are very important to a networking department. They affect the workload of each person, and the cost of network services for the enterprise. The greater the responsibility of a network staff, the greater the resource cost. Imagine a restaurant owned and operated by a single individual. This one person is responsible for all tasks, including cooking, serving, washing dishes, and paying the bills. The human resource cost of the restaurant is relatively low, but possibilities for growth and expansion are limited until the owner hires cooks, waiters, busboys, and accountants. Now that responsibilities are divided, the restaurant can serve more people more efficiently. The tradeoff, of course, is that resource costs have risen along with the growth and expansion. Just as the restaurant example showed, the job of network support can encompass all aspects of the network or it can be limited to just certain components. These responsibilities need to be defined and enforced on a department by department basis. The key to understanding this relationship is that making the responsibility area too large may overburden the resources of the department, but making the area too small may make it difficult to effectively resolve the problems on the network.
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