The evolution of IT operations

In recent years the focus of IT management has shifted from a purely technology focused approach to a service-oriented paradigm, based on approaches such as ITIL and business service management (BSM). Bill Csorba reflects on the evolution of IT operations, and what it means for the enterprise.

As organisations have improved service delivery, they have also turned their focus to presenting business value more positively. These organisations are beginning to develop true BSM systems in two ways:

• By understanding the metrics that successful businesses employ to determine the value of IT.
• By linking these metrics and associated business services to IT infrastructure components.

Over the last five years, IT professionals’ desire to get closer to customers and to raise their credibility through measurable results has resulted in IT operations becoming more business-centric. Consequently, this has changed IT’s structure, resulting in the creation of new roles, including relationship managers and process managers.

This change has resulted in more organisations defining standardised, business-relevant products and services, delivered to their customers with service-level assurances. Delivering high-quality services requires mature, disciplined, and well-designed IT operational processes that coincide with business needs and issues. As a result, IT, and specifically, operations management, is changing its infrastructure to focus on BSM.

Fusing business and IT objectives
 
Organizations continually work to fuse their IT efforts with the overall goals of the business. The main obstacle in this effort is the cultural divide between business and IT functions. While executives and business managers are accustomed to focusing on business results, IT has a legacy of focusing inward on technology and system performance.

Executives and business managers translate business objectives into IT services by communicating and defining their business needs within specific services and service-levels that IT must deliver, based upon business-defined metrics. Rather than traditional IT service-level agreements (SLAs) that measure performance based on the availability of systems and applications or response time, new performance measures have become more business-focused (payroll processing for customer must be done by close of business every day).

Business needs, priorities, and objectives must proactively manage mission-critical services delivered by IT operations by integrating real-time IT and business impact information, along with root cause data, into incident tickets for improved customer satisfaction. This type of management requires IT metrics to be converted into business-relevant information.

A true BSM solution must rapidly identify what physical and logical elements (service, routers, switches, databases, gateways, web servers, application servers, etc) and dependencies comprise an application infrastructure. IT and service information is managed at an enterprise level with secure, distributed roles and responsibilities. This enables businesses to immediately identify chronic bottlenecks, service-impacting problems, and troublesome workflow processes for which underlying IT resources (servers, routers, critical batch processes, etc) may be the root cause.

While BSM is the answer to integrating business and IT service management, it can appear to be very complicated to implement. For guidance, many IT departments have turned to ITIL as a framework to drive improvement. But if IT professionals do not adopt a business perspective, they may not be entirely successful. To truly fuse IT efforts with business goals, business managers and IT must have a common vision and vocabulary. They must share processes that enable them to enter into informed dialogues, resulting in reasoned decisions about what is good for the business.

The key to effective collaboration between business and IT lies in the tools they use to manage technology. BSM solutions support the needs of both business and IT. Built on the premise that business outcomes are the top priority BSM solutions are integrated to provide end-to-end processes, and supported by a foundation that gives business and IT leaders alike visibility and control over the entire IT infrastructure.

Importance of IT operations management
 
To support BSM initiatives from purely an operations management perspective, core responsibilities focus on the successful delivery of production workloads, and the underlying infrastructure to execute those workloads. Critical batch processing needs to be identified and included as part of business service recovery, along with other infrastructure assets.

Today, most businesses cannot define the relationship between their investment in IT and overall business performance. In many cases, end-users report service outages before infrastructure monitoring tools do.

Enabling responsiveness
 
A holistic approach to IT and business objectives enables agile businesses to be responsive to change. This approach can help by:

• Using a common platform for integration.
• Grouping objects into virtual applications and services where a common CMDB translates disparate events and data information.
• Handling events automatically through intelligent, systematic processes; integrating information sources across disparate systems and allowing events and data to be passed between applications.

Rather than SLAs, which traditionally measure performance based on availability or response time, new performance measures have become more business-focused.

For example, rather than measuring performance based on systems and applications, or even user frustration to slow response time, performance might be measured by a business function, such as payroll completion by a set time.

From infrastructure through service-level to BSM

Many organisations now have enough IT infrastructure management tools to be able to efficiently monitor and document system and component failures. The resulting engineering metrics for downtime and response rates, along with CPU and disk usage, provide important information to operators that are concerned with infrastructure management.

Some organisations have also developed service catalogues and SLAs, and provide feedback to their users about the actual quality of service against their SLAs. Unfortunately, the feedback is primarily IT-centric rather than business-centric, and relates primarily to system availability and response times.

Business managers’ expectations of IT have matured over time. They understand technical details much better, but they expect IT to measure and report service quality using overall business metrics rather than IT metrics. Business managers see IT as simply enabling business processes, and will increasingly measure IT on how well it directly supports the business process on their terms. Some business managers even expect IT to provide feedback about the process efficiency based on IT’s operations data. This is BSM, and it has three main drivers:

• Service guarantees across the enterprise. Business processes that an organisation regards as being mission-critical and that receive the most attention from management almost always cross existing business application boundaries. These processes cover more than one application and concern more than one business department. Business expects IT to be able to mirror this perspective and understand the impact of their IT.
• The quality of IT service in business management terms. The ability to report on how IT maintains its own inventory is no longer remarkable; it is expected. But this information is not relevant for business managers, who need information on their own business process terms rather than IT terms. The business manager’s experience counts.
• Mapping business to IT infrastructure. New technologies that have hit the market in the past 24 months have made it possible to directly associate business services with the behaviour and performance of IT infrastructure components. The best tools can even monitor these associations dynamically, which is important when the data centre encompasses dynamic provisioning and virtualisation technologies. The technology itself supports application mapping, but business managers can also define the linkage between applications and enterprise-wide business services.

Complete BSM solution

The resulting quest to improve IT productivity and predictability has led to the creation of BSM and the CMDB, the two central pillars of the new wave of IT management software tools.

The complete solution needs to discover and describe business processes in a meaningful way. It should focus on the key metrics of the business process, not mapping the entire business process.

It also needs to discover and handle all infrastructure resources. This requires a coherent view across all providers of resources, both internal and external, as well as the formerly distinct layers of IT and telecom functionality.

BSM solutions map business service metrics to the infrastructure resources. This is not a one-time creation of a dependency map; the mapping has to be updated in real-time to be relevant. Therefore, fully federated CMDB solutions are a must. Organisations that implement BSM solutions must ensure that they take manageable steps, with clear ROI targets and cyclical measurement intervals along the way.

Online monitoring of business process health with periodic SLA reporting is mandatory. The system also needs to analyze the root causes of outages and the business impact of infrastructure resource failures.

Bill Csorba is Director of Product Management at ASG Software Solutions.