|
 Effective service management can drive competitive innovation
In today's complex and competitive business environment, organizations are faced with many pressing questions. How can they achieve and maintain a competitive edge? How can they manage risks and ensure compliance with government regulations? How can they obtain the best results from the assets they have and acquire new assets as necessary to generate maximum return on investment in the long run?
Innovation represents one common answer to these questions. Through innovation, organizations can distinguish themselves in a challenging marketplace by delivering new, revenue-generating services, processes, and business models. Yet achieving competitive innovation, and maintaining it over time, is far from simple.
While IT has increasingly become the nervous system of organizations, the basic service which enables all other services, it is unfortunately not always aligned well with business requirements. For this reason, service management has become increasingly strategic as a business philosophy and discipline designed to help organizations closely align the services they provide more precisely with the services their clients and customers require. However, improving service levels through a close integration of business goals and technological implementations is a complex area involving IT solutions, business processes, and best practices. As business needs change, the organization must respond by refining and revising the technical infrastructure, prioritizing services for highest business value and creating new services on demand.
IBM Service Management: Visibility, Control, and Automation
IBM can help. IBM service management enables customers to deliver quality service and drive operational efficiency and innovation in three categories: visibility, control, and automation.
Visibility empowers organizations to track service levels through technologies such as real-time dashboards, which give managers key information about changes from both business and technological perspectives. Control addresses resource management to maximize the business value generated by organizational resources over time, despite fluctuating conditions. Finally, Automation is a primary enabler of IT agility, flexibility, and cost-savings strategies. Because automation delivers targeted results, quickly and accurately, yet requires no direct human oversight, it represents a key principle by which services can be changed dynamically and inexpensively to align with client/customer needs.
Organizations interested in implementing the discipline of service management, however, face a common challenge: Where is it best to begin?
Fortunately for them, IBM has identified five different entry points which map to common organizational needs, each broken down into projects. By working with IBM, organizations can select entry points and projects which map well to their specific contexts, achieving a tailored fit designed to deliver real-world improvements in short order.
In fact, IBM estimates that for many organizations, significant, measurable value should be possible in one business quarter or less, from initial assessment to final implementation.
Five Possible Entry Points to Improved Service Management
What provided the genesis of IBM’s entry-points? The answer is key information collected from customers, service management practitioners, and industry analysts worldwide. By assessing common challenges and operational strategies used to resolve them in many different industries, IBM was able to develop a set of starter projects, grouped into five broad entry points, by which service management can be improved with surprising speed. Operationally modular, both the entry points and the starter projects within them can thus be implemented individually or in any combination that pairs to organizational needs. Entry points are non-sequential but are listed here in order of most companies' prioritization.
The first entry point, Discover, is essentially evaluative in nature. Here, the goal is to understand the infrastructure and business dependencies, determining both the resources in place and how they are used to achieve business goals. This represents a critical area of potential improvement for many organizations: According to the IBM Market Assessment Panel (2007), only 34% of businesses have established procedures for problem, configuration, change, and asset and performance management. Infrastructure discovery and mapping is a project in this category through which organizations can understand and map IT assets to the services they support—an essential element of almost any IT service management initiative.
Monitor, the second entry point, involves monitoring resources, events, performance levels, and users to achieve total visibility into the business. It's not enough to know what's happening technologically; the business context of those changes is necessary to understand the impact on clients and customers and adjust the service infrastructure to obtain best results—fast. Toward this end, event and performance management strategies and solutions represent a clear possible project.
Security and data storage are the basic elements of Protect, the third entry point. Organizations today must ensure service availability with new solutions and strategies designed to mitigate business risks across the service infrastructure—securing applications, data, and services against fraudulent or malicious use and improving business resilience through data backup/storage. One good example of a project in this class would involve developing an enterprise-class data backup, restore and retention strategy, to back up data on a prioritized basis which maps to service needs, and deploying suitable solutions.
Industrialize is the fourth of IBM's suggested service management entry points. Here, organizations can decrease costs and errors, and increase responsiveness and accuracy, by managing tasks without human oversight. Just as the automobile industry created assembly lines, the key driver of the Industrialize entry point is automation, which can be achieved in many different areas spanning the service infrastructure. Servers, for instance, can be virtualized to improve overall performance while also reducing energy consumption. End-user management can also be automated in many cases, such as password resets. Organizations looking for a project in this entry point may want to consider asset management, by which the overall business value of assets—both on and off the IP infrastructure—can be tracked and maximized across their full lifecycle. Single sign on for users is another good starter project for the Industrialize entry point.
Finally, Integrate is the entry point most closely concerned with IT planning and execution. The idea here is to improve business agility and process flexibility by managing and reporting on IT services from a business perspective, establishing a controlled process of service deployment, and defining a governance and management model to establish necessary oversight. Business service management represents a good example of a project likely to deliver serious results in this category. By linking technological dynamics with their business consequences, managers can tune services to customer needs, reducing customer churn and increasing revenue over time.
IBM Will Work With You to Achieve Your Goals—Quickly and Effectively
In every case, across all entry points and projects, IBM offers a robust, proven suite of solutions, services, and strategies of direct relevance.
While service management is a complex field involving many variables, and each organization will necessarily have unique operational and business contexts, IBM can nevertheless be the single-source provider organizations need, guiding them rapidly to a custom solution. IBM Service Management, as guided by the three key areas of visibility, control, and automation, can be implemented on an as-needed basis; entry points can be selected to correspond to the client's needs, and projects subsequently developed in order to realize the service management value premise in real-world terms.
Through best-in-class solutions, implemented in accordance with proven industry best practices as developed in thousands of customer engagements, IBM offers the breadth of capabilities and depth of services needed to achieve rapid, measurable improvement of service management in almost any organizational context.
This is the first in a series of articles about Service Management entry points. Visit Tivoli Beat in the upcoming weeks for a deeper dive into entry point projects to meet many organizational challenges.
Add the following sentace at the end of the article,
To hear about how some customers have started, listen to the Entry Points: The Fast Track To IBM Service Management Value podcast
|
