Reliability With Accountability
By Meg Mitchell Moore
Reliability in information systems seems like an obvious requirement for any
business, but what exactly does that mean?
Is a reliable infrastructure one in which the company’s servers never fail?
Or one that can be counted on to provide access to the right people and keep
the wrong people out? Or does reliability deserve a more business-oriented
definition, one that takes into account the extent to which information
systems and the people that run them help organizations achieve strategic
goals?
At heart, BSM initiatives share the goal of helping IT prioritize projects
based on the needs of the business.
More and more, experts are focusing on that last definition and tying it to
the concept of business service management. “BSM is simply the goal of
identifying, then prioritizing, the key services that help to define the
business,” says Michael Dortch, principal business analyst for the Robert
Frances Group, an IT consulting firm based in Westford, Connecticut. The
next step, Dortch explains, is to manage the “care and feeding” of those
services and their alignment with overall business goals—and with the IT
infrastructure and strategy.
Enterprises have long recognized the value of such alignment, but now,
smaller companies are beginning to appreciate BSM’s merits as well. “SMBs
are now more mature in their technology, in the way they think and the way
they want their IT to go from reactive to proactive,” says Carlos Hidalgo,
senior manager of SMB solutions for BMC Software, a Houston-based company
that develops business service management solutions “They’re starting to
awaken to the fact that they need solutions to do the exact same thing as
the enterprises: make sure that IT is producing the reliability and support
so that the business can continue to move forward.”
BSM can take myriad forms, and how sophisticated it gets depends largely on
how mature a company’s technology infrastructure is and how willing both the
business and technology sides are to monkey around with that infrastructure.
At heart, though, BSM initiatives share the goal of helping IT prioritize
projects based on the needs of the business.
Let’s say that the IT staff of a midsize manufacturer of ski boots and
bindings receives an alert that a Web server has gone offline. At the same
time, they learn that a color printer has broken down. The normal response
would be to tend first to the Web server, says Brad Tuffendsam, director of
infrastructure services for Ascentium, a technology and marketing consulting
firm based in Bellevue, Washington. But what if the marketing department is
using the printer to prepare for an upcoming trade show in the next two
days, and the Web server is dedicated to an internal Web site that has
information about the employee picnic in July? If the company has carefully
mapped its IT resources to business priorities, the printer will receive
attention first.
“If anyone doubts [the importance of reliability], they should realize that
the majority of companies that do not recover sufficiently quickly from a
disaster or other major event that disrupts IT and business operations never
recover at all,” says Dortch. The challenge in smaller organizations is that
more information is consolidated on fewer machines, which, while simplifying
matters from an IT perspective, raises the reliability risk factor, because
if one server goes down, it could impact half the business. “In a midsize
company, it is often the case that several business services, such as
accounting, inventory or e-mail, reside on only one or two machines,”
affirms Tuffendsam.
BSM can involve significant changes in both process and technology, and it
requires commitment from both the business side and the IT side. “The
ability to monitor, learn and act on pressing business issues will demand
that workgroup structures change,” says Tuffendsam. Experts recommend
building a cross-functional team to study the relationship between business
operations and IT infrastructure, though midsize companies must keep in mind
that assembling that dream team may leave departments shorthanded.
On the technology side, vendors are developing tools that can help automate
and simplify critical BSM tasks and measures. BMC, which is a Microsoft®
Gold partner, offers a suite of products built on Microsoft architecture
that includes a service-desk product and a desktop automation suite, which
provide inventory and asset discovery and software distribution. Another BMC
product is a network monitoring tool that allows businesses to measure the
performance of IT assets.
Many businesses extend these tools with an “executive dashboard,” an
application (often created in-house) that gathers data from a variety of
sources to give managers a glimpse of critical performance information all
in one place, says Tuffensdam.
Ready, Set…BSM
If undertaking a BSM initiative sounds daunting, consider the following
steps. Incremental change toward a broader BSM philosophy is the goal,
versus an overnight revolution.
1. Assess IT resources. Experts are united about the importance of a
comprehensive assessment of everything in the IT infrastructure; without
such accounting, true reliability is impossible. This task should be managed
by the IT director, although outside consultants can help. Hidalgo points
out that a surprising number of business-side executives still have no idea
about their IT needs and resources. “They wonder, ‘Where are my laptops,
where are my servers, how are they being utilized? Are they being utilized
in the best manner to support the business?’” he says.
Creating functional profiles of foundational business applications such as
financial systems, customer management systems, and product or project
management systems is an important part of this auditing exercise, Dortch
adds. For example, a business application profile might contain information
about hosting platforms and licensing along with who is responsible for
frontline support. User profiles can contain information about which user
groups have access to which applications and the business criticality of
specific user groups.
2. Bring the IT department closer to the business. Information systems are
ultimately managed by people, and the reliability of those systems depends
on the IT department’s understanding of how the business works. “The best
companies make it a point for all employees to understand the business,”
says Tuffendsam. That could mean a number of things: immersing senior IT
staffers in business meetings or business units, or assigning a
business-savvy member of the IT staff the task of helping others learn about
the business. The point is that the IT department must understand that its
decisions do have a financial impact on the company.
Hidalgo suggests that business leaders meet and share their respective
departmental growth forecasts with IT leaders. Another way to foster this
understanding, Tuffendsam notes, is for business leaders to give IT
organizations service level agreements (SLAs) that map to business goals.
For instance, a company’s Web site transactional system might require a
response time of less than one minute to process an order. When orders start
to take more than 1.5 minutes to complete, then the SLA has been violated.
If those SLAs fit directly with business goals—achieving or beating
industry-competitive customer ordering metrics—then the IT department can
see a direct impact between its work and the organization’s objectives.
It can be more difficult for the business side to appreciate the specifics
of the IT infrastructure, so IT leaders need to be able to present in lay
terms the department’s strategy, via regular meetings or status reports.
“The business person needs to understand exactly what IT is doing for the
business,” Tuffendsam says.
3. Redesign processes and systems where necessary. Once business and IT
managers are on the same page, it’s time to consider which processes,
supporting services, infrastructure and systems might need to be replaced or
overhauled. For example, an online retailer that wants to generate real-time
sales data to better calculate daily demand must ensure that the database
that collects customer transaction and order information has an uptime
metric of 99.5 percent. That may require tighter monitoring of that system
and its related server, and even a network upgrade to guarantee fast
response times.
4. Maintain it for the long term. Once a BSM initiative is in place, the
business needs to determine how to sustain this newfound alignment. “The key
is to document it, get buy-in from both sides and say, ‘This is how we’re
going to go forward with all of our assets, or our support, or our service
levels,’” says Hidalgo. A business might consider setting up a change
committee to ensure that the new processes are followed on a permanent
basis.
It’s important to remember that investing in BSM doesn’t necessarily mean
investing a lot of money in new technologies. In many cases, your existing
infrastructure is appropriate to support the business—you just may need to
optimize it or customize it to better achieve business goals.
In the end, says Tuffendsam, BSM is really about engaging in a set of
tradeoff decisions: “It entails identifying the critical IT resources to
support the critical business systems, then acting accordingly to prioritize
and assign those resources for action.”
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