Mind the Gap—Leveraging the Service Desk and IT Operations for Improved Business Service Delivery

Mature IT operations and service desk professionals have long understood the need to integrate their change management processes in with their incident management and problem management processes to achieve maximum effectiveness. For example, if a customer calls an airline to change a ticket, their itinerary, flight status, and current flight operations data is all available to the ticket agent. If an IT technician queries the service desk about an outage, the event message, trouble ticket number and other event facts are available, so why not maintenance schedules, device locations, IP addresses, related applications and databases, or upgrade tasks? Why aren’t CIOs dealing with the complexity of IT management data in the same way that airlines deal with the complexity of flight data?

For over a decade, IT organizations have been making attempts to integrate their real-time IT operations1 and the service management2 teams. The results have provided limited control through the logging and integrating of real-time event data with user-driven service desk data. This at least provides a single point of reference for IT management to understand the issues across both the technology and user base, but the gap between IT operations and service management still remains large. Only a few innovations beyond trouble ticket integration have emerged to bridge this divide.

This document explores this challenge in-depth, provides examples of how successful integration between the real-time operations and service management can reap excellent IT service management rewards, and presents BMC Software solutions that can tool your environment to overcome this challenge.

Why Has Progress Been So Slow?

The biggest hurdle preventing synergy between real-time operations and service management is the organizational gap that is created by companies with disparate IT operations and service management teams. This gap is derived of superficial barriers that prevent these disciplines from working closely together to forge a common set of workflow processes and a well-defined integrated management tool infrastructure.

The need to integrate both environments is understood. The effort, focus and actual capability to achieve this goal is not. If a company continues to foster an organizational gap between the two teams there will be no or limited growth in understanding how the two groups can work together to deliver successful business services.

Without a level playing field where people can address process workflows between the two venues, the ability to implement and benefit from software that integrates the two technology groups is unlikely to be successful and provide measurable returns. In cases where companies have integrated operations and service management products but not their people or their processes, they have inadvertently created additional issues and a degradation of service to the end-user.

Additional reasons for the lack of synergistic progress between real-time operations and service management include:

Poor understanding of what data needs to flow between the event management and service management environments and products

Limited out-of-the-box integration between event management and service management products

Lack of an IT management focus to make and drive the decision to integrate both the real-time operations and service management teams

Lack of understanding and appreciation between real-time operations and service management personnel of each other’s functional areas

Software vendors in both the IT management and service management market creating confusion by claiming they, alone, can provide business alignment and service level management from their products without needed information from other products

Real-time Operations Focus

To date, operations personnel have focused their time providing reactive support to the IT infrastructure using event managers. Increasingly, however, IT organizations are accountable to their businesses. Companies are no longer satisfied with IT being a reactive cost center and are demanding IT becomes a proactive profit center. The business wants to understand how IT is impacting them by IT providing them with object-based statistics.

With the market now demanding business-focused IT management, some event management vendors are moving to the next level of management—business service management. This next level focuses on the real-time impact that individual IT events have on business services, service level management and reporting, and end-user quality of service.

Service Desk Focus

Service management products focus on service desk management, service level management, and asset information and change management. Up to 90% of all calls logged through a service desk are still taken over the phone. Service Management products primarily report and act on information driven directly from end-users; although, some service management product vendors have been able to harness the ability to manage event information automatically fed from real-time event management products. Business managers are demanding to know IT details about the nature of problems, how long until service is restored, and why an outage has occurred in the first place. With the onslaught of service level agreements, service desk personnel now need to know more in depth knowledge about the IT assets during an outage than ever before.

Poor Integration Doesn’t Help

The idea of getting real-time processed event messages into the service desk is not new, but the failure to harness this powerful combination of management tools continues. One reason is poor product integration. When the passing of information from an event manager to the service desk is via e-mail or a command script, the communication may be sent in line with a company’s event escalation and outage processes, but this basic send-and-forget method can be unreliable, is itself difficult to manage and track, and provides no means of guaranteeing further action.

Additional issues wrought by poor integration between event management and service desk tools include:

The real-time event management product looses the ability to track how events are managed once the event is sent to the service desk

The service desk product can become overloaded during an event storm

The service desk product may not be able to update the real-time event management product if a trouble ticket is managed or closed.

Passing events without further communication can cause duplication of effort

Passing events without further communication can result in no effort with both teams assuming the other is handling the problem

Finding a Solution

The IT operations team uses real-time event management products that are designed to act as the focal point of IT availability control for the business. The service desk uses service management products that are designed to act as the focal point of IT services control for the business. The tools that groups use are targeted to deliver a focal point of IT management control for the business. This is a big reason why the operations and the service desk need to align not just their own workflows, tools, people and processes to the business, but why they also need to align their workflows, tools, people and processes to each other!

Other reasons to integrate both real-time operations with service management include

Combining user-reported problems with IT component and quality of service (QoS) events to provide a truly consolidated IT management picture

The need to smooth the workflow between service desk management of user problems and IT operations management of asset outages

Addressing business demands to deliver a complete service level report, which includes not just IT asset and QoS availability events and performance metrics, but also how many end users were impacted, how much end user productivity or service delivery was lost, and what was the cost of all those human resources waiting around for the business service to be restored

IT operations and service desks need to seek out software technologies that can adapt to meet a their company’s business needs without assuming or dictating a rigid method of event or service management. With greater tool flexibility, operations and service desk people are not crammed into rigid unforgiving processes. Richer functionality between tools drives less stringent processes because of greater process options and aides better understanding between people—all of this can shrink the gap.

Bridging the Gap with Tools

To pass information between the real-time operations environment and the service desk requires processes and guidelines for the following:

Too many events will reduce the effectiveness of the service desk and may overwhelm it. For quality events to get to the service desk requires that the underlying real-time event management infrastructure supports

Escalation/de-escalation and correlation to reduce event volume to the service desk and to provide priority and focus

Dynamic field update and events linkage to the service desk software to manage events from either IT operations or the service desk and keep information synchronized

Abstraction, blackout and enrichment to add intelligence to events and trouble tickets

Meanwhile, the event management product must be able to accept and manage events created by the service management solution and when appropriate, match any manually reported event with real-time events currently open. IT operations and the service desk should be able to choose either product to manage event processes and service problems without the risk of duplicate effort or total neglect.

The following table illustrates the ideal role of the IT operations and service desk solutions, as well as the end user position when a correctly tools environment supports business service management in a company.


IT Operations	Service Desk	End User
Events are detected	Events are logged	I know what’s going on
Issues are fixed	Events are escalated and managed	I am receiving the agreed service
Real-time availability is monitored	Service levels are managed	I know where to go if there is a problem
IT objects are managed	Customer satisfaction is monitored	I can deliver a service to customers

Bridging the Gap with People

IT Operations groups believe they are best suited to manage the complexities of a company’s IT business. They do, after all, monitor and fix the IT asset issues.

Service desk personnel believe they are best suited to manage the company’s IT business needs. They do, after all, talk daily to the users (therefore the business), manage service levels and provide the escalation and outage for IT problem management.

Service desk personnel are not as bound by an IT object based focus as IT operations staff, while IT operations staff are not as driven by the needs of the end-user as service desk personnel. Each group needs to learn about, understand, and respect the others role to dissipate the gap and focus on building a better business service management organization. This type of culture change must be driven by management and supported by the tools.

Recently new players have emerged in the IT infrastructure supporting the needs of the business and spanning both real-time operations and service management functions through service level agreements. These new players have many names including customer support managers, service managers, IT business managers and business unit managers. Without a meeting of the minds between IT operations and the service desk, it will be difficult to break down the barriers that stand in the way of fully aligning the entire IT organization with the real service levels needs of the business.

Calculating the Benefits of a Closed Gap System

The high-end benefits of providing a solution that enables management of event information from discovery to recovery aligned to service levels are enormous creating an environment that is totally in tune, measurable and aligned with the needs of the business. These benefits include:

Reduce downtime (Mean Time To Repair [MTTR])

Find problems before they impact the business (Reduce time to detect)

Find the root of the problem (Reduce time to diagnose)

Repair problems faster (Reduce time to fix)

Reduce failure frequencies (increase Mean Time Between Failures [MTBF])

Know about problems before the customer (Increase problem awareness)

Effective IT Operations

Finding problems before they impact the business

Finding the root of the problem

Increased operational efficiency

Repairing problems faster

Prioritizing repair efforts

Increased availability of IT services

Time to keep up with the constantly changing business

Understanding scope of business impact

Coordinated Service Management

Knowing about problems before the customer

Better coordination with IT Operations

Input into diagnosis process

Can be early detector source

Support and enhance agreed-upon service levels

Understanding the status of business-critical services

Increased Service Availability

What Next?

The next step is Business Service Management (BSM) by BMC Software. To manage levels of service requires the integration of both service management technology and event management process that addresses both the reactive event environment and the customer/user driven service management environment. To achieve this, you must promote

The dissolution of gap barriers that allow IT operations and service desk professional to formulate the best practices that are needed to deliver on the promise of becoming a business aligned profit center

Investment in flexible, open event management and service management tools that will avoid process rigidity and foster understanding and communication

With BSM, your business and IT groups unite in the common goal of supporting critical business services. The IT organization can then align its resources—people, processes and technology—with key business objectives. This means you can track application, network and database events, and prioritize your responses based on the needs of the business.

The result of this process is a closed-loop system, which ensures that resolution time is kept to a minimum, customer satisfaction is maximized and the impact on the business is reduced. In addition, a complete set of historical information is available for future planning and financial management. Thus, you can evolve the environment to deliver better service at a lower cost

Evolving to Business Service Management

With BMC Software as your strategic partner, you can make a smooth transition to BSM. Building on your existing investments, our Service Impact Management solutions link your diverse technologies to the key goals of your business. Within this architecture:

Business and IT leaders identify critical business services and define service level agreements

The service model enables you to map technology to the business services

Enterprise management solutions deliver robust monitoring and management of infrastructure components

IT service management solutions help you to manage the workflow around service level agreements and optimize application performance

Define Service Goals

BSM empowers business and IT leaders to engage in a dialogue about business services. They translate business objectives into IT priorities by working together to define service agreements for critical business functions. To do this, they often can leverage work that has been done for past IT planning processes, such as disaster recovery planning. These will include the business requirements for availability and performance.

It’s also vital to identify the applications that support key business services. For example, customer service representatives may rely on central support services, e-mail and knowledge management applications. Sales may depend on catalog and inventory applications.

Service goals are defined in service level agreements. Underlying infrastructure and service dependencies are defined in the service model—the essential component for enabling the IT organization to relate diverse technologies to critical business services.

Establish A Service Management Process

For more effective support of key business services, you can integrate the service model with other IT service support processes. For example, the Asset Management system feeds service information for all the infrastructure components into the service model. So as IT events occur, the IT staff can understand their business relevance and respond accordingly.

In addition, IT professionals can proactively manage performance on business terms, using Help Desk systems to effectively communicate with end users and resolve problems. Incident response times can be kept up to date in the SLA Management tool. And with a Change Management system in place, the service model can automatically adapt to the changes you make in your infrastructure.

Link Infrastructure Management

Event and Performance Management links infrastructure capabilities to the business, via the service model. The IT staff continues to monitor and manage different components of the IT environment. Events are automatically detected and routed to the service model, where the events are correlated to their business service impact. The result is that when a component fails, the business relevance is already identified. The systems are then in place to resolve issues seamlessly, based on the priority of the business service that is affected. Self-healing and recovery actions can be set up to occur automatically.

By proactively managing the infrastructure, the IT organization can prevent problems from happening altogether. Automated utilities can monitor thresholds, analyze problems and perform corrective actions to avoid downtime and service level degradation. Business performance can be improved with tuning of the infrastructure.

Measure Performance And Analyze Events

To ensure optimal performance in the environment, performance metrics are continually collected to a central data store for analysis. This enables the company to understand trends, analyze the capacity requirements of the current environment and plan future investments based on business needs.

Predictive tools help IT to identify performance requirements before response time problems occur. These requirements are also reflected in the service model. As a result, the company can prevent problems before they occur and measure IT performance in delivering business services according to defined service goals.

Helping you maintain advantage

BMC Software Professional Services helps your company maintain its competitive advantage through a comprehensive suite of services that includes service level management consulting, installation, implementation, configuration, and customization. Our professional services and education offerings are designed to ensure the ongoing availability of critical business applications, maximize product potential, reduce project risk, deliver IT value to your business, and improve your operations. For more information about BMC Software Professional Services, visit http://www.bmc.com/profserv.

About BMC Software

BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2003 revenues of more than $1.3 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit http://www.bmc.com.

Contents

Introduction