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 Drive service levels higher through improved Visibility, Control, and Automation
It's commonly recognized that IT has become the central nervous system of most organizations today. IT is responsible for the infrastructure which supports and enables business services; if that infrastructure is robust, efficient, and agile, it translates directly into success for the services, and in a larger sense, the organization. Clearly, then, effective service management should be a key element of any strategy designed to drive central business goals (PDF,99KB), such as achieving compliance with government regulations, maximizing customer satisfaction and retention, creating competitive distinction through innovation, and increasing revenue and market share over time.
As enterprise IT has generally become more complex and more siloed, however, achieving effective service management of this type has become a challenging prospect. Management tools, for instance, are often limited to specific contexts, lack real-time visibility, and fail to connect technological problems with prioritized business impact. These tools are not always able to scale in proportion to emerging demand; in this way, business success can lead to service failures, exactly the opposite of the desired outcome. While business processes should be implemented in a closed-loop fashion, to allow for continual evaluation and improvement of core services and higher and higher service levels, this is not always the case. The siloed organization of IT divisions also commonly leads to exceptionally complex cross-silo analysis, making it hard to track and resolve technical problems in a holistic, end-to-end manner.
Toward resolving these and similar problems in service management, IBM recommends that organizations enhance three broad categories of IT performance in a closed-loop system: visibility, control, and automation.
Through visibility, organizations are empowered to track service levels and business impact in real-time via solutions with dashboards which are updated on the fly to reflect immediate changes taking place in the IT infrastructure.
Control, in this context, means managing assets, in both business and technology domains, in such a way as to maximize the business value they generate at every stage in the asset lifecycle.
Finally, through automation, organizations can enhance overall IT agility, increasing the responsiveness of IT services to business and technological changes via intelligent technology which can, in many cases, address routine tasks. If implemented effectively, automation of this type will not only free key staff to attend to tasks better suited to their talent levels, but will also improve both the speed and the accuracy with which common IT tasks are carried out, reducing or eliminating the possibility of inadvertent error that could occur through a manual implementation.
A closed-loop approach is ideal for achieving improvements of service health, and connects these three areas via a logical sequence. Conceive of the IT service lifecycle not as a straight line, but as a circle; within this circle, IT services are continually being refined and enhanced to deliver higher and higher service levels over time. Intelligence arising from improved service visibility is delivered to managers, where it leads to change via control; finally, through automation, that change becomes possible to implement as quickly and effectively as possible, while at the same time, the organization can track the impact on the customer experience. Finally, this information is, in turn, fed back to visibility, where the cycle begins again.
IBM's six-step approach delivers revised service management in a closed-loop cycle
Naturally, creating a closed-loop system of this type will require significant evaluation of existing processes and technology and, very probably, significant tailoring, to achieve effective implementation within the organization in order to best achieve results. However, IBM suggests a six-step approach, guided by its history with thousands of customer engagements and industry best practices. These steps are designed to help the organization refine its service management scheme, improving it so as to help business and IT managers determine what is taking place in the IT infrastructure, connect events to their business impact, and deliver the prioritized response according to business and operational objectives.
Step one involves monitoring the service infrastructure. Tracking service health means monitoring the various elements which comprise the service, and while most organizations have implemented monitoring of some form, it is often not as comprehensive and integrated as it should be. Where monitoring gaps exist in the IT infrastructure, they should be detected by discovery tools; furthermore, monitoring information should be integrated, to span the complete range of technological dependencies involved in any given service. Equally important is prioritizing the information. The organization should strive to achieve effective event prioritization via consolidated management solutions which deliver an integrated view of availability, performance levels, and system integrity across application, system, network, mainframe, security, and storage domains, as well as all business activity sources. Consolidated management of this type is essential to connect the specifics of a technological event with business impact—in short, the extent to which the event relates to service health.
Step two is measuring the customer experience. Knowing what is taking place in the IT infrastructure is one thing; knowing how those changes are likely to map to customer satisfaction is another. When customers create transactions, those transactions will typically involve many different elements of the underlying service, and through transaction monitoring, the organization can obtain key intelligence on the customer experience. For organizations that require a continuously responsive Web presence to generate business transactions, for instance, transaction monitoring can deliver exceptionally powerful information.
However, still more information is required if the organization is to detect and resolve root causes of technological problems, and in this way maximize IT service levels. Here, step three plays a central role: identifying the service dependencies. In this step, service modeling is used to connect business services with the underlying infrastructure and drive the automated analysis required to manage and assure service availability. Technical information discovered in the first step, spanning the interlinked dependencies across applications, systems, and networks, is integrated into service models, which thus continuously reflect overall service status. However, this step will require exceptionally intelligent solutions capable of automated, realtime service model updating; otherwise, the model will be inaccurate.
In the fourth step, the goal is tracking key performance indicators (KPIs)—central metrics used to evaluate the health of IT services, such as transaction volumes by type, call volumes by region, or trouble tickets by severity—and reflect them in both real-time and historical contexts. A tailored approach designed to mirror organizational needs will yield the best outcome. The organization should identify the most mission-critical services, determine corresponding service levels goals, and reflect those goals and other success metrics via KPIs to obtain a prioritized view of service performance in the appropriate business context. Getting best business value from KPIs will require a service modeling tool which can collect both real-time and historical indicators across a broad range of sources, then correlate them to business activity to generate actionable intelligence.
Linking business information with technological information—and optimizing event response
Step five is connecting business and operational service views. Getting accurate, effective service visualization is best accomplished through a unified interface that reflects both business and operational information that is obtained through integration with existing tools and drawn from core business data. The idea is to present the right information, in the right context, to the right people in the organization. Toward this end, visualization should be customizable to suit the target audience's needs, and deliverable via a standard Web browser for maximum flexibility and easiest access. Service views should also generate balanced scorecards to illustrate the impact of change on services over time, depicting and updating KPIs across both business and operational views to ensure that both groups are continually appraised with accurate intelligence related to their job duties, whether they are technical managers or line of business (LOB) managers.
Lastly, step six is supporting automated action in real time. Here, the closed-loop approach utilizes automation to carry out real-time changes as quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively as possible. This essential step is necessary to address emerging problems, such as event storms, which could conceivably have a substantial negative impact on service health, yet, at the same time, this step's implementation can be complex and challenging. The organization must prioritize events for business value, attend to the most potentially threatening events first and with an appropriate level of IT resources, and at the same time, minimize the time required to effect change. Ideally, in fact, the goal is to detect emerging problems before customers have a chance to become aware of them, and in this way preclude a business impact altogether.
Toward this end, total service management solutions can play a powerful role in step six by facilitating both the analysis/prioritization and subsequent event response stages of the problem, in both manual and automated ways. Manual tasks would likely include drawing information from change and management databases; opening a service desk trouble ticket; viewing device location; opening a change request in the service request system; and accessing trend reports and change histories. Automation, however, can also be used to speed resolution of routine events which don't require direct human intelligence and intervention.
Examples would include restarting systems and applications; creating and escalating alerts; managing and scheduling workloads; provisioning hardware and applications to respond dynamically to demand changes; and closing incidents once a change request has been executed. Because automated solutions deliver results with fewer errors while requiring fewer resources, service levels are more easily maintained, skilled staff can focus on higher value functions, and the overall business value of IT is enhanced.
How to go about implementing these six steps? For best results, IBM suggests that organizations implement service management revisions in accordance with proven best practices in planning, deployment, an ongoing improvement.
And, in the pursuit of an optimized service management solution, IBM also offers a powerful, modular portfolio of integrated offerings capable of addressing many relevant functions needed to assure service availability and performance; these include dependency and event collection, domain-specific management, consolidated operations management, business service management, and enrichment and operational automation. By working with IBM, today's organizations can achieve improved service quality through improved visibility, control, and automation, maximizing return on existing IT assets, tools and staff investments and responsiveness to business objectives, while mitigating operational risk.
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