The purpose of this series of Industry Insights has been to show that companies can use IT to assist companies to be more dynamic and responsive to their core business. Therefore, in my previous Industry Insights, I introduced a few concepts - not necessarily entirely new - but those which are being used in new ways as technology matures.
These new ways are more focused on business outcomes and business benefits, rather than just being used to keep the lights on.
The first of the concepts I introduced was project and portfolio management - something that should be exploited more effectively at a business level. The strength of this lies in capturing new ideas for business, and nurturing them through a strategic process of sanitising, justifying and building. From there, these ideas can come to fruition: the real value - (or at least the estimated value), resourcing and other costing factors which are known to the business. At this stage, it is far easier for business to make decisions on which projects will provide the biggest gain, are the most viable and can be most speedily deployed. This is surely the way to manage risk and yet still gain competitive advantage.
At your service
The next concept I introduced was 'service virtualisation' - not yet a well-known term in the industry, but definitely something that is attracting a lot of attention and making development heads sit up and take note. Wikipedia's take on service virtualisation is that it "emulates the behaviour of software components to remove dependency constraints on development and testing teams".
Essentially, it is able to remove development constraints such as access to hardware for testing interfaces, either because they are not there, not always available, or just costly to use. To business, the value of this is that applications are deployed much faster, as are the updates, and also better tested. This is a fantastic way to demonstrate how the use of IT can make companies more agile, dynamic and more responsive to business needs.
To be able to deliver on business goals and objectives, it is critical to have a unified view of services.
Then I spoke about the traditional way business continues to measure service level agreements. Effectively, this is in a siloed approach, which invariably does not give an accurate picture of the end-user experience. The reason for this is that while each discipline in an IT environment - eg, network, database, application, servers, etc - may meet their individual uptime SLA, this invariably does not equate with the end-user experience. The end-user experience will be a combination of all these disciplines, with the downside that it is generally a lot worse than IT assumes, specifically when the system being accessed is slow or unavailable.
Wasn't me
The other component of this is that there is generally a lot of blame shifting with regards to where a problem may lie. If all IT disciplines in isolation claim theirs is functioning normally - despite the fact that the end-user is experiencing degraded response or even an outage - where does one start to determine where the problem truly lies? Hence, the introduction of service operations management (SOM), a more comprehensive way of managing critical business services to ensure the focus is on the impact a degrading infrastructure or outage is having on each business service, where a business service is defined as any IT application utilised by end-users and customers.
SOM can only be effective if one crucial element is defined and in place, and that is: knowing what components make up a service and what their relationship is to each other. The most common, and certainly best practice place to define this, is in a CMDB (configuration management database).
A CMDB (an ITIL term) is the place where all detailed information related to all items (known as configuration items - CIs) of an IT environment resides. For the purposes of this Industry Insight, I will also refer to the CMDB as being the repository where the relationships between the CIs is defined. A CMDB does more than this, with much wider implications and usefulness to service management, but this feature is arguably the most important in so far as identifying the impact on a service that each CI has. To be able to deliver on business goals and objectives, it is critical to have a unified view of services. To achieve this level of association, IT must define the business context of the services, and map the relevant underlying resources to these services.
Now that this relationship has been defined, there is a much better view of the impact on business, operational management, end-user experience, and change control. The purpose of these Industry Insights was to highlight ways in which IT could support companies with the agility and speed required by business today.
Additionally, SOM - in conjunction with a CMDB with defined services - and the inter-relationships of underlying resources, are critical to smooth IT operations, and go a long way to ensuring IT and business always know how their supporting infrastructure is impacting (or not) on their business at any point in time.
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