IT service management

The trend towards higher end user productivity and effectiveness will continue, predicts Benny Vogels, European Marketing Manager for the Performance Management solutions at Fluke Networks EMEA. FST asked him how IT organisations can change their traditional management approaches?

FST. Business success is determined by the bottom line, and therefore a key consideration is that IT service management provides measurable ROI. Is it possible to quantify the monetary benefits gained from ITSM? How should this be measured?
BV. The key is to be able to measure the performance of a system. The big question in IT is whatto measure? Traditionally, availability was one of the key metrics. Of course this is great, but who is it helping if a service is available but unusable for the clients? The first step is to also measure performance and end user experience. Having a solid baseline and corresponding business results allow IT organisations and leaders to start improving the performance of critical business services and measure the actual impact of any changes made. This will then be the basis to quantify positive or negative impact on business results.

FST. Providers of IT services can no longer afford to focus on technology and their internal organisation; they now have to consider the quality of the services they provide and focus on the relationship with customers. How can an ITSM approach help with this?
BV. Measurements of end user experience and baselines help to understand the relationship between IT performance and end user productivity and effectiveness. Translated into ITSM world, this means an IT organisation should have a common platform to measure the experience. This should be able to link the subjective opinion of an end user to the objective facts measured by a management system. In the case of a change, it will be easy to quantify the impact to the end user’s experience and explain why things have happened and what can be done to improve them.

FST. What particular benefits can ITSM bring to financial services organisations? Can it be useful with regards to risk and compliance issues?
BV. The storage of certain types of information is a fundamental part of many of the compliance and data retention directives discussed in regulations. An ITSM solution is able to track, store, report and alert on every IP voice and data conversation flow across your network. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for securing access, accounting firms that audit publicly traded companies must keep all documents and communications for seven years following an audit. The penalties for destroying or altering a document can include fines of up to €3.2 million and imprisonment for up to 20 years. 

FST. Some have claimed that ITSM is as much a cultural change as it is a technological one. To what extent do you agree with this assessment, and why?
BV. Business Services today are depending on IT; it has become a commodity. The traditional approach was to prove the components of the system were available. This was enough, as long as no applications were highly sensitive to performance or applications were not business critical. Today, at least some applications arebusiness critical or time sensitive. With the technological change towards unified communication systems, the culture of users has changed as well. Every IT service has to be available and performing in every corner of the world. Users expect that today.

FST. What do you think the next major developments in the market will be? Do you have any particularly exciting innovations in the pipeline?
BV. The trend towards higher end user productivity and effectiveness will continue. IT organisations will have to change their traditional management approaches. It will not be enough just to provide an IT infrastructure that is available 24/7. It’s not enough just to be there and awake, it is much more important to deliver the service to the customer in a form that makes her or him more productive and efficient. The developments in the market have to focus on the ability of an ITSM platform to measure the end user productivity instead of the availability of supporting technology. Fluke Networks Visual Performance Manager already focuses on exactly that.

Benny Vogels is the European Marketing Manager for the Performance Management solutions at Fluke Networks EMEA. He has been with Fluke Networks since 1997. Prior to joining Fluke Networks, he worked in software development and network management. Vogels has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry.