Business Service Management

Business Service Management – An Every Day's Example

It is 2:15 am on a Monday morning and Auto Glas (AG), a leading supplyer of high-end automotive and industrial glass products, is about to experience a server outage of a "minor IT system" at its Munich data center. But this is not a standard outage … 
With domestic data centers in Munich and Berlin as well as international operations in Spartanburg (USA) and Nagoya (Japan), IT Operations for AG has hundreds of interconnected systems and network devices under management. With rare exceptions, each of these systems is monitored by the AG's monitoring and notification system.
What’s different about today’s outage is that the alert for this minor IT system actually got lost in the daily shuffle of alerts and notifications brought up by AG’s network management system. The alert for the “minor IT system” was categorized with a very low priority and was missed by AG’s monitoring help desk. So, this outage will go unnoticed for nearly 6 hours before IT in the Denver office begins arriving for the Monday morning grind.
When IT personnel in charge of the system begin arriving at around 8:00am, however, they do notice the outage of this “minor IT system,” identify the problem with the hosting server computer, and resolve the problem with little effort. In their chart of system priority, AG’s IT recognizes this system as having a Tier III criticality level. Within the Service Level Agreement (SLA) they’ve agreed upon with the business, AG’s Tier III systems must be brought back online within 8 hours. Since the problem began at 2:15am and was resolved prior to 10:15am, IT sees the problem as within the scope of its SLA and writes off the problem as fixed to agreed-upon standards.

Lessons Learned from this Example

These sorts of problems happening every day in IT, show the weaknesses of the problem solution process in many companies.

1.) The traditional infrastructure-centric focus leads to a misevaluation of IT systems and their relationship to business processes. The IT department in our example did not realize that the "minor IT system" was actually part of a much larger enterprise-wide system. The business actually felt the problem quite a bit more than IT did because that "minor IT system" was a component of a system thread linked all the way to AG's Tier 1 business-to-business Web system.
The manual process of solving the problem caused costs for the business – costs typically associated with a Tier 1 outage.

2.) Dissonance between IT priorities and those of the business
What IT sees as a "minor IT system" actually affects the business in a highly critical way. IT is not necessarily at fault for their misevaluation of the problem. They did their job the best way they could. Where the fault lies is in the essential translation from the priorities for IT and those for the entire business.

3.) Challenges of the Global Business
Adding to today's problem is the global nature of AG's business. When the problem occurred between 2:15am and 8:15am (MST) in the United States virtually no B2B business was being transacted. The working day in Europe already had begun and in Japan and other Asia-pacific regions the day had not ended yet. Understanding the business calendar and business periods means recognizing how time shifts affect a globalised company.

 

Figure 1: The time chart of the AG failure shows the problem impact in the different time zones. An event occuring in one part of the world at 2:15a.m., impacts the working day business in another part of the world. (source: Greg Shields; Business Service Management, Realtime Publishers)

Business Service Management – Definition

Business Service Management (BSM) is a category of IT operations management software products that link the availability and performance status of IT infrastructure components to business-oriented IT services and enable business processes.BSM is effectively a mechanism by which the goals of business are applied to the technology of IT. With BSM, IT goes about a reconfiguration of the way it considers technology – adding to the traditional device-based approach it begins embracing a service-based approach to monitoring.This embrace of technology in terms of business services means that individual outages are treated as profit-and-loss events for the business. A loss in a subsystem to a business service feeds into the total quality of that service. A performance reduction of a system reduces its quality. And, most importantly, a decrease in response time for a customer-facing system reduces its service quality.BSM is more than just an idea: It is a fully defined category of software und implementation guidelines. It ingests availability and performance data and outputs quality-related metrics to the business on the health of the network's business services. BSM applies a monetary value to the reduction of quality for each identified service and serves up that information in a way viewable and understandable to both IT and business leaders. In other words, BSM represents the combination of monitoring and financial analysis.

 
The Gap between IT and Business

Since the beginnings of the computing and networking era IT organisations have used rich tools to monitor the status of computer hardware and software. Technologies such as SNMP for networking and UNIX devices, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for Windows devices, Java Messaging Services (JMS) for Java applications, or many other Web Services protocols for years have provided the system administrator with the opportunity toq query network-attached devices for status, inventory information, performance metrics and active configurations.
Combining these technologies to a centralised IT management system enables the IT department to build a single-screen view into the network.

 

 
Figure 2: Mature IT organisations have for years incorporated Network Management Systems to monitor and notify when network-enabled devices incur problems.

This singe-screen view helps to enlighten IT as to the health of the network and the devices and applications that make up that IT infrastructure. If a device goes down, the IT management system notifies the administrator through a pop-up alert, an email or a SMS. Most service desks have installed heads-up displays where green lights go red when problems occur.

When criteria for performance are preconfigured in the IT management system, it can notify administrators when performance dips below preset thresholds. Highly mature IT systems even define auto-remediation actions to occur when preconfigured events occur. A mature IT department has probably been proactively monitoring such elements for years.

The gap mentioned above occurs in the definition, what's important. IT tends to deem the status of each individual device important. If the device is up, everything is fine. Business leaders have different priorities, though. For them, importance is best measured by customer satisfaction, external service availability and the capability to meet customer needs. If a customer completes a Web transaction and is satisfied with the results, the business leader's light stays green.

But who really "owns" the service and is responsible for its quality? Is it the business leader who pays for and relies upon the service? Or is it the IT organisation that watches it, manages it, and ensures it remains up and operational? According to BSM – they are both. With BSM and the corresponding tools both organisations are provided with the information they need to make the best decisions within its area of control. Table 1 highlights some example of this idea.

 

(Elements needed by IT Elements needed by Business Leadership
Device availability Service Quality
System performance metrics Customer wait time
System performance thresholds Customer drop rate
Network latency percentages End user experience metrics)

Table 1: Within BSM, information about a system and the services that reside on that system id broken down into elements useful to its stakeholder (source: Greg Shields; Business Service Management, Realtime Publishers)

The Business Service Model as Foundation for BSM

From a BSM perspective the most basic form of identifying a business service is to quantify it in monetary terms. If a service can be measured by some amount of cash that moves during its processing – and therefore is missing when it fails to be processed – then it becomes a good candidate for a business service.
Where the complexity arrives in defining such services comes in finding the lines of demarcation between individual services. This process in breaking down a business service into its disparate components is the next step in the BSM process and at the same time the most critical activity.
But it is the interrelation of these service components that eventually build what BSM calls a service model. If each business service component is akin to a city on a map the service model is the complete map including all the roads that connect those cities.
This service model forms the foundation of a powerful BSM concept. It is within the BSM service model that dependencies between services are described and where individual service subcomponents are logically interconnected. 

Figure 3: In BSM’s service model, services and service subcomponents are atomized and interconnected to show dependencies. Upper-level services rely on lower-level services for functionality. The Quality of Service (QoS) of lower-level services drives the QoS for those above them. (source: Greg Shields; Business Service Management, Realtime Publishers)

Once the service model is defined, you need some mechanism for reporting status and experience information back to the stakeholders in real time. BSM's implementation of this status and experience data is through so called dashboards. These dashboards are customised for the interests of their viewers. In other words, the same monitoring data that informs the IT department about an outage in a "minor IT system" must be refactored to be useful to a business executive.
This brings up the question: What data is of interest to each party? The IT department is interested in the name of the server that went down. Event better for them is when the monitoring system can inform IT why that server went down and the event log error that immediately preceded the outage. This information supports the IT department in restoring the server to health.

For a business executive, knowing the name of the system that went down or the event log error that preceded the system crash is irrelevant. A controller is not likely to care about any of this. What is of concern, however, is the impact that a server's outage has on the ultimate profitability of the business as a whole and the business's ability to serve its customers.

One of BSM's central tenants involves the digestibility of the information provided. If the BSM system can provide information related only to downed server names and log data surrounding an event, an executive is not likely to pay attention to that system. If the system can provide digestible information to the executive – the name of the business service affected, the monetary consequences associated with the reduction of QoS and how the service's outage affects other services – the executive will be empowered to make educated decisions.

The Benefits of Business Service Management

End User Experience Monitoring

One of the major components of BSM is its ability to enhance the administrator’s view into the experience of the user. Administrators and business leaders alike rarely have the time to manually check and verify the functionality and palatability of customer-facing business systems. Thus, automation components that can constantly repeat this verification and alert when out-of-bounds conditions occur is critical to ensuring the QoS and maintaining customer satisfaction.

Achieving Management Value

The management value of BSM lies in an improved vision into highly technical environments. Too often in IT, the technical people are incapable or unwilling to communicate with management on the true status of their systems.

Achieving Operational Value

Through a well-designed BSM system, a business can reduce operational expenditures through better planning and forecasting vision. BSM can also serve as a management umbrella under which unified controls such as management tools, notification, automated and partially automated remediation tools, scripting, and reporting engines can reside.

Achieving IT Value

No conversation about the value proposition of an IT system is complete without discussing how that system provides value to IT itself. IT’s needs for management and monitoring are well established. However, BSM provides unrecognized additional value through its unique way of looking at data.

Supporting Processes

The framework for deploying BSM is based on industry-standard practices. Two of these industry practices, ITIL and Six Sigma, compliment BSM to provide tangible return on investment. Combining ITIL, Six Sigma and BSM provides rich capabilities for continual quality improvement with a focus on the business.

SLA Life Cycle

BSM is a top-down, phased approach that first considers what is most critical to the business. The presentation and respectively documentation of the SLA life cycle guarantees that only service agreement are signed that will be accomplished.

Service Catalogue

Another benefit of GSM tools is the capability to standardise services in a service catalogue.
It should be the goal to use clearly defined services and service components as often as possible. Both the service recipient or customer and the service provider in his role as a Service Delivery Manager will profit from best-practice service elements. Both can focus on the targets of the required services. The Service Delivery Manager will especially profit from BSM tools during the alignment process with his customer as they will demonstrate why higher qualities of service will cause comprehensively higher costs.

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