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Smart organizations recognize that end-to-end, customer-focused operational service management is crucial to providing a consistent, reliable, measurable and usage-based customer experience, whether your "customer" is a million-dollar buyer or a typical end user. What's changed in the past year or two is that vendor offerings have evolved to help IT make technology investments work together to optimize services. What hasn't changed is the need to do good old-fashioned documenting of processes, and that monitoring network, servers, applications and other service infrastructure components is usually easier said than done.

Further complicating matters is the fact that buying better management products may take a back seat to other fiscal priorities. Moreover, enterprises with distributed and mainframe systems in a converging IT environment have massive repositories of customer data. Ensuring this data is kept safe is mission critical.

But the fact is, if an organization keeps pushing management systems to the bottom of the budget pile, it risks compromising the overall integrity of IT systems.

To provide high QoS to customers, IT must develop a structured, process-driven methodology focused on operational service management. Such a focus enhances service assurance, service activation and service fulfillment, and will eventually yield superior customer service management. We'll guide you through the key functional areas that must be addressed to achieve a truly operational IT environment.

Understand
At its most fundamental level, operational service management seeks to measure IT services that are provided to users, rather than measuring individual components of the supporting infrastructure. The technology silos necessary for delivering service, such as networks, servers, applications, firewalls and other devices, are typically operated and managed independently. What service management systems do is effectively intertwine them to give a coherent end-to-end view of the IT services that these various infrastructure elements provide.

Because silos are operated and managed independently, however, many organizations fail to correlate user expectations for service with the technologies that actually deliver the service. This disconnect creates inherently disjointed and inefficient services, and ultimately results in dissatisfied users.

On the IT side, adapting to a customer-focused service management offering can be a difficult transition. It's critical that your team has an understanding of the drivers before implementation gets going.

A successful operational service management strategy must encompass not only the technical aspects of the infrastructure, but also the operational processes involved in delivering service, such as change, configuration, incident, release and problem management. You must establish operational processes and workflows in concert with the technology end, otherwise you'll never realize the full benefit of the service offering.

Don't be tempted to move forward with skimpy process documentation—real and lasting benefits may prove elusive if the underlying service processes are dysfunctional or inefficient. Understanding how your company does business is critical to choosing an appropriate service management tool. An understanding of process also helps drive effective enterprise-level views of the business. Online executive dashboards, for example, when implemented in the context of key process viewpoints, provide focused, actionable, real-time service assurance information. Process understanding also drives effective system implementation by feeding the development and training activities related to technology, workflows and customer relationship management that are required for successful implementation.

Mapping APO to Key Performance Indicators Click to enlarge in another window

The diagram (right) provides a high-level view of operational service management and how processes interact with technology.

Set Operational Objectives
One goal of any operational service management strategy is to enable IT to quickly resolve outages and system failures. That means you need the ability to collect and correlate configuration information on network and server assets, access customer information for business impact analysis, and provide data on internal or external service level agreements and/or metrics. Understanding an organization's operational culture, current operational concepts, and the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders is critical for success. Other key project objectives include:

• Proactively reduce service-impacting, customer-affecting outages;
• Prevent slowdowns by monitoring service degradation throughout the infrastructure;
• Provide real-time and historical service views;
• Develop a customer-focused service management strategy that can scale across multiple organizational units. Include a foundation of consistent operational work-flows;
• Define a proactive, customer-based model of operations, for example, identify managed services-jack-to-jack IP management, e-mail, ERP—then document components that comprise each service along with component-level dependencies and/or relationships;
• Review and validate business and operational workflows to allow organizations to control costs, measure operational metrics and enhance mid-level integration among IT organizations;
• Integrate additional network and server-based utilities seamlessly; monitor additional network services with minimal impact; and store, roll-up and report on collected SLA metric data.

As organizations migrate to operational service management, a unique opportunity exists to incorporate best practices. Eventually, you can increase overall efficiency, reduce costs and streamline operations.

Examine key operational processes by developing a baseline of current operational workflows. Detail technical requirements and explore ways to improve the overall service experience. The methodology described below employs a tested process approach that leverages investments in technology to streamline operations and help executives, engineers, operators and staff work more efficiently:

Phase 1: Define service-level requirements.
The first step in migrating to an operational service management model is to define the expectations of the user community, in the form of service-level requirements. Without SLRs, also known as key performance indicators, or KPIs, IT can never measure and manage the user experience in a meaningful way.

In addition, it's critical to define operational level requirements, or OLRs, for supporting outside organizations, such as network, hardware and application vendors, to ensure that they understand and are accountable for their impact on the end user experience. During this process, prioritize SLRs and OLRs and limit their scope to only key success factors in service delivery. Defining too many SLRs and OLRs makes management of the environment overwhelming, and ultimately unproductive.

Phase 2: Baseline the customer service management infrastructure.
This phase concentrates on assessing operational readiness and identifying areas of improvement to ensure that a customer-focused service management strategy can be implemented and supported, both tactically and strategically. Areas to be assessed include:

• Increasing operational efficiency by standardizing management services across all operation centers;
• Reducing the cost of delivery by minimizing effort spent on support and custom services;
• Improving QoS by raising the level of available standard services.

Phase 3: Develop next-generation customer service management requirements.
Once SLRs are developed and an assessment has been performed, the next phase focuses on developing service management requirements. This includes identifying the functional and technical requirements for supporting SLRs and OLRs. These requirements can span across executive dashboards, fault management, performance and capacity management, asset and inventory control, configuration management, and service activation.

Phase 4: Develop an operational service management architecture.
With a comprehensive set of requirements in hand, IT can move toward building an operational service management system. The architecture should be vendor-independent and support a long-term strategy over a number of years. Our reviews and analysis of various offerings will help you develop a shortlist of vendor partners.

Phase 5: Operational service management implementation.
Upon completion of the architecture plan, you have several deployment options, based on time and budget. If you don't have in-house resources familiar with implementing an operational service management system, consider engaging professional services. Providers have access to an abundance of knowledge on successful-and maybe more important, unsuccessful-operational service management initiatives.

Bottom line, as tools, infrastructures and processes mature, organizations with an eye to growth must move beyond simple reactive management and look toward deploying next-generation network infrastructures with effective operational service management systems. In planning normally evolutionary network initiatives, organizations now have a unique opportunity increase overall customer QoS within their environments while at the same time boosting efficiency and reducing costs.

Michael Biddick is a contributing editor for Network Computing and executive vice president of solutions for Windward Consulting Group, a firm that helps organizations improve IT operational efficiency. Write to him at mbiddick@nwc.com. Post a comment or question on this story below or in our discussion boards.

 

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