Integrated Service Management: The Operating System for a Smarter Planet

Fulfill the promise of the smarter planet with a new, broader service management model

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. At Pulse 2010, which took place in Las Vegas from February 21-24, IBM pulled the curtain back on its compelling new service management model: Integrated Service Management.

Integrated Service Management delivers both the insights and the tools organizations need to respond effectively to today's challenges, while also making the most of tomorrow's opportunities. And with Integrated Service Management, IBM has scaled up its overall service management vision, and value proposition, to a much larger playing field.

How much larger? Try this on for size: the planet itself.

As IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has observed, our world is gradually becoming infused with new possibilities at every layer of both systems and processes. It is becoming more instrumented, more interconnected and more intelligent. And the organizations that recognize this truth and leverage it will be achieving much more than just greater business success. They will also be making the planet, in a broad sense, smarter; they will be steering it toward a better future.

Imagine smart power grids designed to minimize not just the carbon footprints we generate, but the prices we pay for energy. Imagine smart telecommunications, in which new, in-demand services can be created and rolled out 85 percent faster than they are at present. Imagine smart traffic services that substantially reduce traffic snarls and give 40,000 more travelers per day safe, convenient transportation as a result of optimized asset management. Or, for a particularly topical example, imagine smart healthcare services, in which the time needed to develop clinical applications falls by 65 percent, and the cost of physical therapy declines by 90 percent. These represent only a few examples of IBM's vision of a smarter planet—one enabled by Integrated Service Management.

That being said, there remain formidable obstacles standing in the way of those compelling possibilities. Infrastructure complexity must be reduced, to create a shorter path from service level targets to operational reality. Constrained resources must be unlocked; one example would be the staggering 85 percent of computational power currently wasted on average in data centers, partly the result of poor hardware utilization. Processes must be more closely and logically linked with goals, to ensure that those goals are achieved quickly and cost-effectively. And risks both known and unknown must be addressed—ideally, in a proactive manner before they can occur. In financial services, for instance, a data breach will on average result in a 5.5 percent loss of customers. A rapid response to such a breach is good; preventing the breach from happening is far better.

Providing Visibility, Control and Automation for a Smarter Planet

To succeed in today’s ‘smarter’ planet, organizations must address these complex opportunities and challenges—yet few have the expertise needed to respond fully to either.

Integrated Service Management from IBM provides the visibility, control and automation across business and IT infrastructures, resources and processes needed to deliver new, innovative services in a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent planet:

Visibility: To see business services, and quantify their performance, in real time
Control: To manage service risks, and more easily achieve compliance with both internal mandates and external regulations, and
Automation: to build agility into service delivery processes

Together, visibility, control and automation can dramatically improve the economics of service delivery—leading to more services that are more easily and more cost-effectively managed, in closer alignment with the dynamically-changing requirements of the smarter planet.

Integrated Service Management serves as the operating system for a smarter planet, ensuring that goals are achieved, and resources managed, for best results—in many different contexts and environments.

Consider, for instance, how Integrated Service Management might apply in the case of smarter city services. Visibility, in this context, might mean real-time comprehension of emerging traffic patterns, vehicle emergencies, and their impact on traffic flow in real time. Control would imply the changes applied by the city to address such problems, involving assets such as traffic lights, emergency response teams, and public transportation. Automation would carry out such changes in an exceptionally rapid and cost-effective way (in specific cases not requiring human oversight).

Or, alternately, imagine the possibilities of Integrated Service Management as applied to smarter energy services. Visibility might translate into quantified awareness of infrastructural failures, and an assessment of their impact on customers. Control would empower energy providers to better measure power distribution at such a time, bill customers accurately and secure services. And Automation would trigger a faster and lower-cost resolution of technical problems, and their impact, by eliminating the need for manual attention such as a truck roll in many cases.

When you consider the significant variation between these two examples, drawn from two fundamentally different and yet exceptionally complex fields, you begin to see just how flexible and powerful Integrated Service Management is—and you get a sense of its scalable potential to capitalize on the emerging possibilities of the smarter planet.

Of course, while the power of enhanced Visibility, Control and Automation will deliver superior results in every situation, the details of implementation will vary substantially from case to case. No two industries, business sectors or organizations are identical; no two implementations of Integrated Service Management will be identical either. Each case will require a tailored set of solutions and services to address the particular challenges, goals, strategies, processes and assets that may apply.

To address the unique needs enterprises may have, IBM offers Integrated Service Management solutions for industries, design and delivery and the data center.

Integrated Service Management for Industries

Delivering smarter services requires a more dynamic infrastructure that leverages both smart assets and traditional assets. With the physical infrastructure becoming increasingly more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, the lines between IT, network, and business operations have begun to blur. Companies must integrate their business and IT infrastructures to deliver new services like smart health care and smart energy grids. These assets are interconnected, linked, and integrated across multiple systems and processes to deliver services for each product line of the business.

Integrated Service Management enables unified management of assets across organizational boundaries and the asset lifecycle, providing a common set of tools for procurement, deployment, and management of all assets—smart, physical and IT assets--as well as a common set of service request, service catalog, and service desk and support capabilities. In addition, advanced correlation of smart business and infrastructure events and sharing of critical indicators across business and IT teams help organizations gain a holistic view of the availability and performance of next-generation smart services, helping better understand when, where and why problems occur.

IBM offers integrated asset management specific to each industry’s needs, across smart, physical and IT assets with a single common service desk for better alignment across organizational boundaries. IBM provides the software to instrument and interconnect these assets. The end result is that you can deliver smarter, differentiated services with greater confidence and efficiency. Key Integrated Service Management for Industries capabilities include:

Integrated enterprise and IT asset management and workflows tailored to your industry.
Integrated service desk and support functions that align business and IT.
Software that instruments and connects IT and smart assets with intelligent analysis to optimize smarter services.
Industry expertise on standards, best practices and regulations.

Integrated Service Management for Design and Delivery

The maturity of IT process alignment and automation is becoming increasingly important to organizations. Businesses are requiring their IT organizations to be real partners in innovation and competitive edge. The challenge is that organizations continue to work in a very siloed fashion, with their own separate tools, data and processes. Unfortunately, if people, processes and information are not aligned across all stages of the service lifecycle, the result can be delays in service and product delivery, service quality issues and high labor costs.

To address these problems, organizations require tighter process flows across the organization by which they can:

effectively build services with reduced cost and risk
deploy and manage changes to services in an efficient and controlled manner
assure the quality and continuity of services in production

IBM Integrated Service Management for design and delivery can help organizations manage the life of a service with modular solutions and services that span the entire service lifecycle. IBM’s complete suite of solutions offers integrations across software tools to share data and automate processes across enterprise architecture, development, testing and operations. In addition, our development tools are integrated with our testing and IT operations tools. Key capabilities include:

Consulting services to help align IT with the business and define a complete Service Management strategy.
Integration of data and workflows across architecture, development, testing and operations software.
Best practices including ITIL and IBM assets for SOA, Development and IT Operations accelerate time to value.

Integrated Service Management for the Data Center

One of the unique strengths of IBM solutions lies in the way they can integrate systems management, service management and energy management capabilities to truly transform the data center. IBM hardware platforms and native management capabilities are integrated with our service management platform which allows for higher automation in the data center, as well as better energy management.

IBM offers industry leading systems and storage, with advanced management of both physical and virtual environments. Self-service capabilities, and request-driven provisioning enable greater automation, without the need for operator intervention. IBM Integrated Service Management for data centers offers:

A shared, common management platform for visualization, navigation, security, reporting and process automation.
Integrated systems and service management even in the case of complex, heterogeneous virtual environments involving many vendors.
Scalable systems that can deliver extra performance when workloads unexpectedly demand it—or reduce costs by scaling back performance at times of low demand.
Flexible service delivery options based on your needs—ranging from straightforward appliances all the way up to high-end, highly-automated cloud computing architectures.

Together, these capabilities make it possible to automate the data center much more comprehensively and provide new delivery models, such as public and private clouds, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention and improving productivity in the data center.