IT Management Solutions and Maturity of IT departments

Having worked with numerous IT organizations around the world, it is quite interesting to see the difference in maturity and organization witnessed over the years at some of these. One side is the technical infrastructure, where shops grew fast without any standards and an enterprise level infrastructure is managed without naming standards, DNS and OS, network and applications standards. To my opinion these are the responsibility of the IT manager or technical leads of the administration and support teams. These are usually addressed with documents that the tech teams need to put together and eventually enforce these standards. Moving one layer higher, the IT director should get his people to put processes together for the various teams under him or her to work more organized and efficient. These areas should address infrastructure monitoring, incident management, release management and IT operational processes. Moving one more layer up to the CIO level, this level should address how all teams should interact between them and how to serve the business. The initiative for change management, asset management, service level management and incident management should come from the CIO who should force all directors and managers to enforce these inter-departmental functions. In quite a number of shops, the IT manager expects from the administrators to get together and come up with standards, the IT director expects from the technical administrators and their leads to come up with infrastructure management initiatives and solutions and the CIO expects from one director to enforce processes across areas that are not under his/hers responsibility with no backing from higher up. The result is an enterprise level IT organization that runs like a small IT group. Problems left and right, firefighting, finger pointing and eventually an IT organization that the business sees as necessary to the business as electricity. The failure of the IT department to run like a business is a major issue that prevents IT from showing it's value to the business and be regarded as a function critical to the business. The lack of consulting firms who can guide the customers to the right direction or the inability of the consulting firm to talk to the right level in the IT organization is also a major issue.
We have seen IT organizations with low maturity that addressed infrastructure management solutions as a tool to be used by the administrators to monitor servers, networks, etc. The management expects from the administrators who's job is to maintain the servers, networks, etc. to also monitor the infrastructure. This is the job of the IT Operations team and very rarely an administrator will proactively monitor the infrastructure. The managers fail to see the business gain from these solutions that is really the ability to find where the problem is right away and route it to the appropriate support team to fix it. I have heard IT managers going to the CIO or IT director with a request for few hundred thousand dollars and when their management asks "What is it going to do for us?" the answer is that it will tell us if a hard drive is about to fill up or if our backup failed... this would be similar to someone asking their parents for college money and when asked what they'll do with that money, the answer would be "I'll live in dorms, attend classes and get a paper". Any CIO would be out of his mind if he or she approved a requisition for few hundred thousand on the basis that it would tell his techies that a hard drive is full...
Moving on to Service Support, this is a more difficult area in the sense that it usually involves multiple departments in the design and implementation of such solution. We have seen IT managers who do not understand ITIL processes and how things should work, who inquire about a service desk solution and in their mind they are looking for a help desk software. When they hear the prices they freak out and they are right, since they are looking to buy a moped and they see the price for a large truck. However, their approach is wrong to begin with. You do not manage the finance department of a large company the same way you run bookeeping for a small company and these are the signs of an immature IT organization. We have witnessed maturity growth in Telecom organizations and particularly GSM providers and our business is growing fast in that sector. However, the banking IT organizations still have way to go before they address IT Management solutions that will be used appropriately and see high return on investment. We as Parallon typically have a high cost of sales development since it involves educating the customer during a long sales cycle but the results are encouraging when the customer reaches a level of maturity and we see initiatives coming from inside the company seeking to improve IT efficiencies and the quality of services.

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Telecom Service Level Management

We have witnessed an increase in demand for Telecom SLA solutions in South Europe and the Middle East given the trend of large organizations to outsource their wide area networks to Telecom providers. Our expertise in such SLA solutions has grown over the years and we have even developed a business logic bus integrated with the HP BTO software to satisfy specific needs for Telco SLAs where practical problems in incorporating complex business rules, long term data retention, exceptions and integration to BSS/OSS systems are not easy to address with a standard products. Parallon’s deep knowledge of Telecom business and HP software management platform along with our implementation and IT management experience has brought us into the spotlight nowadays. Our loyalty to HP as a technology and business partner, the hard work and dedication of our team, the attention to detail and quality results, and following a strategy of focused core competencies offered across multiple geographical markets, have placed us way ahead of the competition and positioned our company for high growth.

Sukru Arslan joined the Parallon Team

Sukru Arslan has joined Parallon as a Senior Solutions Architect. Sukru ranked number 2 in the world in the HP Management Software forums at itrc.hp.com and has worked for a number of IT companies in Turkey, including IBTECH, the IT group of Finas Bank, a subsidiary of the National Bank of Greece. Sukru is a member of our Middle East Infrastructure Management team.

Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

One step at a time...

Running an enterprise IT department without an ITSM infrastructure is similar to running a finance department with spreadsheets. Ironically, IT departments support the 'computerization' of their company's business units that are running advanced solutions in the meantime, IT barely has any solution for it's own use. Now, when a customer has no ITSM platform and they ask us for reporting, I try to explain the steps needed to get there, that is infrastructure monitoring, service monitoring and then service reporting. Similar to setting up a financial system first and then expect to get your financial reports. If a customer has it's availability report then there is no beyond that as to the status and performance of the IT services. If I get a service report with 80% say availability, then I do know I have a problem but don't know why I have a problem and therefore I can't do much about it to improve it. Well, at that point I don't really need the report since the business units will be complaining about the IT service provided to them.
Therefore, the first step to implement an ITSM platform is the ITIL infrastructure optimization layer. Monitor every infrastructure component of IT and relate that component to the IT services provided. Focus on each IT service (on-line banking, pre-paid billing systems, ERP, etc. etc.) and then drill down to the infrastructure that supports the service rather than focus on servers and disks. Monitor every layer of the IT service, NSP, network, application, database, cluster, Operating System and hardware. Monitoring of only one layer, e.g. network with Network Node Manager, is only a part of the picture and will not bring significant value to IT and the business. Give the monitoring function to IT Operations since that is where it belongs, don't expect the adminstrators to monitor the infrastructure since that is not their job to begin with. This practice will increase availability since the time spend to find where the problem is (is it on the server, hardware or Operating System, is it the database, is it the network?) and reduce the finger pointing between the technical departments. You heard many times the phrase "it's not an application problem... it must be the database..." Well, eventually the problem is low swap on the server but you just wasted precious time of the application support administrator, the database administrator and the systems administrator to figure out something that a good ITSM implementation would have shown within 5 minutes. In the meantime, while the technical support personnel was searching and pointing to each other for 3 hours, your IT service was down!
Cars nowadays have advanced monitoring and diagnostic systems that let you know right away you have a problem, with the correct severity (red light for running out of oil, orange for check engine, cyan for running out of windshield fluid, etc. etc.) but your multimillion Euro IT infrastructure is running with no monitoring system.

IT Service Monitoring (end-to-end) is the next step. Try to monitor the IT service the same way the end-user 'sees' it. Emulate a user transaction and check that every few minutes in order to know right away you have a problem and record that data.
You are now ready to start working on Service Reporting.
Now, plug-in the bussiness requirements for the service (business hours, required availability, planned maintenance) and you got your report you need to do the job while Infrastructure monitoring will provide the data you need to take actions.

After you get to this point, then you can start looking into Business Technology Optimization, where you start monitoring flows of data, queues etc. etc. and translate that into business terms. In Infrastructure management, I have an alarm that the CRAPPQ queue is high and I let my application support people know about it to figure out where the problem is. When I get to business service management I translate this to 'credit application queue' and I link this to the rest of the business process supported by IT in order to receive and approve credit applications by customers.

Business Technology Optimization. Not everyone ready for it...

HP Software's direction is BTO (a term evolved from 'bussiness services management') that became a hot topic these days with the acquisition of Mercury. Starting from Infrastructure management and then off to service management the next logical step is business service management but I firmly believe that unless you have graduated the infrastructure and service management school, then you are not ready for business service management. A number of our customers are monitoring the IT infrastructure and services from the business point of view (meaning linking the infrastructure to the service and then managing the end service with monitoring, reporting and support). These kind of customers get into the business processs by monitoring the parts of the process. E.g. for banking payment systems there is a flow of the business process to accept for example utility payments either through on-line banking, ATM and other payment machines, process the payment and inform core banking, and other external systems and/or agencies of the payment status. Mercury has great tools to help us map application interaction and monitor the flow between them, which will help with the manual process we currently use to get people in a room and try to map the application flows on a whiteboard. How fast then can an organization move to BTO? That varies significantly, depending on a number of factors but unless these projects (infrastructure, service management) are backed by the top IT management then the expect a very slow pace graduating the ITIL arena with little projects that will win concensus and then move on to BTO.
George