CCR2

Linking technology, people, information and processes – IBM launches ITIL-based IT Process Managers
from CCR2, Issue 7 - 2006

The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL), which was created by the U.K. government in the 1980s, describes a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service in a series of eight core books that have been adopted globally as a standard source of best practices. The ITIL framework and models show the goals, general activities, input and outputs of various IT processes, but stop short of implementation, leaving interpretation up to each organization.

ITIL focuses IT service management on best practices for the tactical and operational processes of service support and delivery. Within these areas of interest, eleven IT management components are identified:

Service Level Management Capacity Management IT Service Continuity Management Availability Management Financial Management for IT Services Service Desk

Incident Management Problem Management Configuration Management Change Management Release Management

Because ITIL implementation is left undefined, many businesses look to IBM for help putting ITIL into practice. IBM recently made available three ITIL-based process management solutions to address aspects of ITIL availability, storage and release management. These process management solutions integrate with existing IBM operational management products (OMPs) and tap into the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB), an open-standards based authoritative repository for configuration items, resource attributes and inter-relationships that define your IT infrastructure end to end.

IBM Tivoli Availability Process Manager (released June 30), IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager (anticipated availability in July) and IBM Tivoli Release Process Manager (released June 30) include customizable, out-of-the-box process flows based on self-managing autonomic technologies and best practices. IBM's process managers apply automation technology to the interaction of people, processes, tools and information to make ITIL actionable.

Take it up a level for faster incident resolution
Monitoring change across an organization presents a unique dilemma in a world where it is common for servers and software to be deployed by disparate IT departments. Across your enterprise, IBM Tivoli Availability Process Manager works with Tivoli CCMDB to deliver broader visibility into mainframe and distributed IT components and applications, their interrelationships, and impact on service levels and business processes. Together they help you more effectively diagnose and prioritize incidents and problems.

By drawing upon information stored in Tivoli CCMDB, walking the dependency table and taking the user to the appropriate tool in context, Tivoli Availability Process Manager takes System z and distributed incident and problem management to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness. The process manager helps service-desk analysts and subject matter experts more quickly determine failing components, accurately assess the business impact of each incident, and properly classify and prioritize incidents so your staff can focus on tasks that contribute the maximum business value. In addition, with its dependency tree, Tivoli Availability Process Manager can often point you directly to the root cause of a problem to enable you to restore disrupted services quickly using existing tools.

Having such resource and relationship information tied together can improve IT collaboration and decision making in several ways. It can help Level 1 and 2 support staff:

Identify the source, or sources of a problem, to narrow involvement to only essential IT staff, which conserves both IT resources and speeds time to resolution. Understand the business impact of the incident and prioritize resolution accordingly. Get insight into recent changes made elsewhere in the IT organization to diagnose and solve problems more quickly and reduce an incident's impact on the business.

Tivoli Availability Process Manager's integration of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) and the Tivoli CCMDB is essential to quick problem resolution. For example, a slow Web site response identified by Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking may trigger an alert in the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC), which opens an incident that is routed to Level 2 support. The support specialist can launch Tivoli Availability Process Manager to learn that degradation of this customer-facing Web site will impact product order-taking and service level agreement, which makes speedy resolution a high priority. The Tivoli CCMDB could reveal that another IT specialist changed the configuration on a distributed server several hours before the problem was reported. Launching Tivoli Enterprise Portal in context enables the support specialist to view historical performance information from the Tivoli Data Warehouse that reveals that server's performance was fine prior to the configuration change, after which response time began to climb. Using the Tivoli CCMDB, the Level 2 support specialist can resolve the problem by rolling back the server to its earlier proper configuration. This rollback is itself stored in the Tivoli CCMDB to enable other support staff to understand the server's configuration history if they need to resolve a future incident.

Manage growing storage with consistent processes
Storage and data management have the highest labor costs among all IT management processes, according to IDC in a 2005 report commissioned by IBM Tivoli, and there is no sign of respite: compliance regulations regarding disclosure and privacy have led many companies to store virtually all information, leading to an increased volume of storage requests and a greater likelihood for human error and outages.

ITIL-based processes made actionable through the IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager can help your IT organization manage distributed data growth and storage incidents, configure storage environments and manage data compliance. The solution provides administrators with a deep understanding of the relationships between storage objects, the applications the storage supports, and the network to ensure changes are well informed and carefully considered.

Working with Tivoli CCMDB, Tivoli Storage Process Manager automatically discovers key configuration items in storage environments, and provides relationship maps between storage, the rest of the IT infrastructure, service level agreements, and mission-critical applications and services. Composite applications that rely on System z for backend processing often pass through many distributed servers on their path; managing distributed storage efficiently and effectively, according to business priority, contributes to end-to-end application availability.

Storage management solutions including IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager integrate directly with IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager to form automated workflows for administrators. Customizable templates aligned with ITIL best practices help ensure that the right steps are taken during the storage process, help you define roles and act on storage configuration changes, and ensure only approved changes are implemented.

Control release processes
Within any large organization, the scope of software release deployments can present immense obstacles to implementing successful releases. IBM Tivoli Release Process Manager helps IT staff give greater scheduling priority to business-critical functions and services and complete release tasks that are aligned with ITIL best practices for consistently successful software deployment. Gaining control and standardizing both software and hardware releases protects your live environment and its services.

The solution enables you to customize efficient processes at your own pace and integrates with operational management products for distributed environments, including IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager for automating patch and application deployments; and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for automating complex deployments across multiple servers.

With out of box pre-defined workflows the Tivoli Release Process Manager helps IT organizations manage new and upgraded software – as well as related hardware releases – for server provisioning and patch deployment. It helps ensure that tasks are completed in the proper order by the appropriate IT resources through automation – to minimize risk and protect production and test IT environments.

Throughout the release management process, administrators can use the portal interface to identify which activities have been completed and the current schedule for remaining activities. Each individual responsible for a task within the process can see information captured from prior tasks and subject matter experts — facilitating continuity and collaboration across traditional IT silos.

Conclusion
The IBM IT Service Management Platform integrates core IT processes to reduce the labor cost associated with managing IT services and increase the effectiveness of IT operations. The potential benefits are huge: imagine the savings your IT organization could reap by gaining a projected 10 percent productivity boost in the execution of your own internal processes.

For more information

IBM Tivoli IT Process Management products IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) IBM IT Service Management -- A better way to manage the business of IT

ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IT Infrastructure Library® is a Registered Trademark of the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency which is now part of the Office of Government Commerce.

Related links

	The Mainstream Business journal for the System z community
	Tivoli Beat Weekly updates on the IBM service management perspective
	IBM software for System z The power to drive an enterprise
	IBM Tivoli software Intelligent management software for the on demand world
	Tivoli Software Global User Group Community Join your peers in our information and community hub
	Open Process Automation Library OPAL is Tivoli's worldwide online catalog with hundreds of technically validated, production ready IT Service Management integrated extensions provided by IBM and IBM Tivoli Business Partners.