Yphise portfolio of valuable projects

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1 Yphise portfolio of valuable projects Independent investment recommandations since 1985 Software Project EXECUTIVE WHITE PAPER SUCCEEDING WITH PROACTIVE IT With ASG s metacmdb BSC Business Strategy and Control BIS Business Information Systems ISC IT Strategy and Control IPS IT Project and Service Management Foreword 3 Introduction 4 1. How to align IT on business goals 6 2. How to step up from reactive IT management to proactive BSM 9 3. ASG metacmdb, helps companies succeed in BSM projects Glossary 16 Yphise ISO 9001-certified independent quotations of software solutions

2 Yphise ISO 9001-certified ongoing research program since 1985 Yphise independent research continuously monitors the strategies and solutions of all successful software vendors in order to select valuable and high-priority projects for improving the business performance. Each year, Yphise research draws up the portfolio of valuable projects that the executives should consider when making investment decisions. Yphise transforms high-level strategies or complicated problems in concrete projects with accurate benefits and valuable software solutions. Yphise puts forth investment recommendations on software solutions, proprietary or open source, based on accurate assessment according to valuable business cases. Yphise judgment relies on a detailed assessment of each solution. Yphise has unique experience in identifying the useful functional and technical requirements in order to score solutions according to benefits expected by large companies. The Yphise ongoing research program has helped executives plan, prioritize, conduct and control the useful software projects in order to increase business performance since Our independence since 1985 proves our unparalleled expertise in helping the executives stand back from operational pressure and arrive at sound decisions focused on the issues of large companies. ISO 9001-certification of our research program is evidence of this expertise. This unique distinction states independence and robust methodology for assessing products according to issues and priorities of large companies. yphise@yphise.com - This report is produced and edited by Yphise. Yphise is an independent analysis company. Yphise cannot be held responsible for the use made of the opinions and results provided. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express written consent of Yphise. Yphise. June

3 FOREWORD This Yphise Executive White Paper (EWP) introduces the concept of a federated CMDB. This paper highlights how ASG metacmdb is a key foundation for successful business service management (BSM). The EWP series of reports is a result of Yphise s ongoing research program, which identifies valuable software projects according to issues of interest to executives. Since 1985, this program has helped executives plan, prioritize, conduct and control useful software projects in order to increase IT performance. This program covers all areas of interest to large companies. Yphise has unparalleled experience in identifying those market segments that represent valuable investments and projects. This program is ISO 9001-certified (since 1999). This unique distinction is evidence of independence and robust methodology in assessing software products according to priorities of large companies. The EWP series of reports provides executives with an accurate understanding of software market opportunities. Each report highlights expected value-added stemming from investment in the market segment. It highlights key requirements of the solution in order to obtain these benefits; this solution design is a key factor for successful opportunity and feasibility analysis. The EWP series of reports supplements the Yphise portfolio of investment recommendations pertaining to emerging market segments, innovative use of existing products or dedicated use for specific business areas. 3

4 INTRODUCTION BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT: WHY AND HOW? Most business activities rely on IT services. The performance of IT services is essential to business competitiveness, productivity and agility. This is why business lines request increasingly reliable and efficient services from the IT. Aligning tightly the IT value on the value expected by the business requires improved IT management practices and processes, usually called business service management (BSM). The purpose of BSM is determining how to drive IT activities according to the value-added business services to be delivered to clients. Moving from previous technical-centric IT management to BSM is a difficult challenge. This challenge requires appropriate software solution in order to support these new practices. This paper highlights how ASG provides a clear, well-defined path to successful BSM and shows the value of ASG s metacmdb for BSM projects. It explains why ASG s metacmdb deserves investment. First, it describes the reasons for investing in BSM support software. Second, it explains which maturity steps make sense in order to attain the expected BSM value. Third, it highlights why ASG s metacmdb has the key features and characteristics required to succeed in BSM. How to align IT on business goals IT management by technical silos makes it almost impossible to drive IT activities according to business priority. Business lines expect business-centric views of the delivered services and service levels. Consolidation across technical silos in order to build such views is a hot challenge. IT departments should behave as if they were independent third-party service providers. They must focus on client satisfaction. This business-centric approach is the foundation for business service management. Chapter 1 describes business service management benefits and issues. It explains why BSM currently remains a challenge not yet met by most companies. How to step up from reactive IT management to proactive BSM Awareness that business and IT services should be managed in a unified way across silos is essential. However, that is not sufficient. Business service management encompasses so much of the IT and business activities that only progressive behavior 4

5 can succeed. A big-bang switch from silo IT management to BSM will most probably fail. ASG promotes a progressive path to optimization in order to step up to BSM. This path ensures clearly identified benefits at each step. It ensures that the IT is able to demonstrate the value-added benefits of this approach to the business in order to get the required commitment. Chapter 2 describes the ASG path to optimization, a step-by-step approach to business service management. How ASG s metacmdb helps companies succeed in BSM projects Each step of the ASG path to optimization is sustained by specific solutions designed to help companies step up seamlessly to BSM. Once the first steps are covered, ASG s metacmdb plays a key role in switching from reactive IT management to proactive BSM. The solution helps maximize the value of BSM projects, through its flexibility and its advanced features. Chapter 3 describes the value of ASG s metacmdb for implementing the BSM. Glossary Chapter 4 provides a glossary of useful BSM wording. 5

6 1. HOW TO ALIGN IT ON BUSINESS GOALS Business goal Business service Business service Business service BSM IT Service IT Service IT Service IT Service IT silo IT silo How to align IT on business goals? Business lines rely extensively on IT services to deliver their own business services to clients There is a major disconnect between IT services and business services. «Traditional» IT management is technology-centric. It focuses on granular configuration items (s) in the information system, technical silo by technical silo. IT management by technical silos makes it almost impossible to drive IT activities according to business priority. Business lines expect business-centric views of the delivered services and service levels. Consolidation across technical silos to build such views is a hot challenge. While s must still be managed on their own, the key for effective alignment of IT and business goals is business-centric IT management. This requires focusing on business services and approaching the s top-down. This is radically different from «traditional» bottom-up IT management. 6

7 Competition and increasingly demanding customers make it mandatory for any company to tightly align their IT services management with business issues and priorities. IT departments should behave as if they were independent third-party service providers. IT activity must focus on client satisfaction. This business-centric approach is the foundation for business service management. BSM is a key concept developed in ITIL ITIL Version 3 defines BSM as «an approach to the management of IT services that considers the business processes supported and the business value provided; this term also means the management of business services delivered to business customers». BSM is a key part of service management, which is the subject of ITIL. We remind you that ITIL defines service management as «a set of specialized organization capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services». BSM bridges the gap between IT-centric service management and business goals. ITIL V3 is the international reference of best practices for service-oriented IT management. Complying with ITIL V3 recommendations is a key consideration for any IT organization, in any business area and any technical context, in order to optimize the value delivered to the business. The need for business service management increases with the business need for agility, lower costs and improved service levels Increasing business agility. Business services, and therefore the underlying IT services, must change at market speed. Accurate knowledge of dependencies between IT items and services, on the one hand, and business services, on the other hand, is mandatory in order to analyze the impact of change, to decide on useful changes and to meet business requests. BSM is a key factor in understanding the dependencies between IT items and business services and, therefore, in aligning the IT services and business goals. Cutting costs. The cost of business services is tied to the cost of IT services. Business lines want to pay only for the infrastructure, application and IT services that actually contribute to their own value. BSM helps identify low-value IT services. BSM is a key factor in aligning the IT expenditures and investments to the business strategy, goals and priorities. Improving delivered service levels. Service level delivery depends on the reliability and performance of IT services. Investment aimed at improving service levels must be aligned with business goals rather than on technical considerations. Monitoring of business services is essential to understanding the actual service levels and providing an opportunity to improve these levels. This monitoring enriches the 7

8 information about s, technical services and business services, by providing status information on the health of each component and service. It computes health indicators for services based on the underlying services or items. Efficient monitoring of business services is a prerequisite for successful BSM. Effective business-centric management of IT services becomes increasingly difficult when the complexity and richness of IT environments increase IT services involve dynamic interactions between multiple layers, distributed resources, virtualized servers and applications, as well as heterogeneous technologies. This makes it increasingly difficult to identify, manage and monitor the technical components actually involved in business services. The need for dependency analysis and management increases with technical complexity. This is why BSM is a «must have» to ensure effective business services. Moreover, the IT resources used by business services change over time. They may even change dynamically with ESB-driven service-oriented architectures or virtualization. Understanding and forecasting which business service may be impacted by technical incidents becomes more difficult. This leads to reactive IT. IT is often unable to be proactive when dealing with business incidents. 8

9 2. HOW TO STEP UP FROM REACTIVE IT MANAGEMENT TO PROACTIVE BSM Business goal Business service Business service Business service IT Service IT Service IT Service IT Service 1. Reactive 2. Normalized 3. Managed 4. Optimized How to step up from reactive IT Management to proactive BSM BSM success is tied to a step-by-step approach Existing IT standards and best practices, such as ITIL V3, describe the processes that must be implemented for effective business service management. However, these standards do not describe how to move from reactive silo IT management to proactive BSM. To succeed, such complex and wide mutation requires a progressive and flexible approach. We recommend relying on the IT management solutions in place, leveraging these solutions and adapting the IT management processes on a step-by-step basis. We recommend a step-by-step transformation into a BSM-enabled company. 9

10 ASG promotes its own «path to optimization», i.e. successive progressive steps and maturity levels recommended for successful BSM. This path to BSM relies on the ASG Business Service Portfolio (BSP). We recommend a four-step approach. Companies can choose the entry point that meets their maturity level. These four steps are aligned on the ASG «path to optimization», although the exact wording in our description differs from the ASG wording. These four steps are as follow. 1. Reactive. The goal is to improve operations within an IT domain. 2. Normalized. The goal is to provide an overall normalized and consistent view of the IT and how it runs in order to assess the health of IT services. 3. Managed. The goal is to identify and analyze the IT services and their relationships with the business services. 4. Optimized. The goal is to implement proactive IT management processes through an ITIL V3 CMS. 1. Reactive: improving the operations within the various IT domains Knowing precisely what the IT infrastructure is and how it runs is a prerequisite for service management. The first step in BSM implementations consist of deploying tools focused on specific domains in order to improve operations. These tools provide information about the existence, performance and availability of IT assets and infrastructure. 2. Normalized: providing a normalized view of IT Once domain-specific tools are deployed to manage and improve IT operations, companies need to aggregate the information provided by these tools in order to get a clear and normalized view of their IT. They need service level target metrics. This is key to assess the health of IT services and monitor them efficiently. The second step is aimed at building a consistent, clear and usable view of the centralized information of the resources in use. This requires understanding the metadata in order to identify valuable information, to clean and to de-duplicate data. This also requires aggregating this information in order to build clear, reliable indicators with consistent granularity. This is a key factor in order to compare items and make decisions. Raw information is difficult to use for efficient decision making. Comprehensive views of the items and resources in use require dashboards, maps and reports appropriate presentation adapted to the decision to be made, i.e. to business service management. Such views and dashboards should be able to map performance and availability 10

11 information to service levels. This requires solutions to handle the information and to present it in various views personalized to each role and profile involved. 3. Managed: understanding the relationship between the IT resources and the business services Efficiently monitoring the health of IT services is useful, but it still does not yield full expected value from a business point of view. Establishing the relationship between business services and the IT systems that support them is essential in order to manage IT resources according to the business goals and priorities. The third step, aimed at identifying and describing the IT services, is essential for demonstrating IT value for the business. This requires managing the IT configuration items (s), their relationship and dependencies, as well as the lifecycle of each item. The reference repository to manage such information is the Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB), as defined in ITIL V3. An efficient CMDB is a cornerstone for successful BSM. It is a key factor in providing reliable and up-to-date information on how the IT runs to all involved stakeholders. Effective support by appropriate software solutions is essential. CMDBs manage specific concepts. They embed functionality to ensure flexibility in change to IT configuration information. They are designed to provide a clear and accurate view of the IT services. The CMDB is an essential software investment for successful service management. 4. Optimized: implementing proactive IT management The last step is aimed at driving IT processes according to business strategy. It relates the IT activities, services, items and resources to business services and goals. This makes it possible to drive change, implementation of new services or cost cutting according to business priority. BSM bridges the gap between IT services and business services. This bridge is the purpose of the Configuration Management System (CMS), as defined in ITIL V3. CMSs federate various CMDBs. They provide a single, consistent set of information about available IT services. They manage the relationship of IT services with business entities. CMS is the foundation for efficient IT management aligned with business goals. It provides visibility into the services mandatory for efficient decision making. It optimizes service delivery via predictive analysis, automation and broad federation across multiple CMDBs. 11

12 Each step requires appropriate solutions ASG s Business Service Portfolio (BSP) was designed for step-by-step implementation of BSM. It provides four levels of solutions that address the four steps of the path to optimization. These solutions are aligned with the various levels of maturity that exist within organizations. Wherever companies are in the path to optimization, they can get clear benefits at each step, with ASG solutions. At Level 1, ASG provides domain-specific solutions focused on traditional IT operations tasks. Level 2 solutions rely on ASG s advanced metadata management technology. They provide dashboards and metrics in order to analyze IT health and performance. ASG s metacmdb solution is the cornerstone of the last two steps. This progressive approach helps IT departments demonstrate the value of BSM. It was designed to deliver value quickly. ASG solutions can be deployed in every type of IT infrastructure, at every level of maturity. This dramatically improves return on investment compared to other approaches. 12

13 3. HOW ASG METACMDB HELPS COMPANIES SUCCEED IN BSM PROJECTS Features of ASG MetaCMDB Benefits CMS, root-cause analysis Manage IT according to business priorities Flexible data model Describe IT services and their relationships Data federation, dashboards Get a unified view of IT infrastructure Advanced integration capabilities Leverage existing IT investments ASG s metacmdb, a cornerstone for successful BSM projects ASG s metacmdb within ASG s Business Service Portfolio The BSM challenge starts with the implementation of the CMDB, i.e. Level 3 in ASG s path to optimization. This is where many BSM projects fail. Securing this step is essential for a seamless adoption of BSM. ASG s metacmdb solution plays a key role in this step. Its advanced capabilities help IT departments move from IT-centric management to service-based management aligned with business needs. The solution demonstrates quick and clearly identified benefits that improve time-to-value for BSM projects. This is why metacmdb is a valuable investment for any IT department involved in the ITIL strategy. This chapter describes the key benefits of the solution. ASG s metacmdb is easy to implement Implementing the BSM from scratch is costly, long and inefficient. The ability to reuse existing IT data sources improves time-to-value for BSM projects. ASG s metacmdb is designed for quick and easy implementation. The solution helps leverage previous IT investments through advanced integration capabilities. It provides adapters for many different vendor technologies in order to retrieve information on existing configuration items (s). This is a key factor in breaking through the IT silos. It cuts down the cost for business service management and accelerates BSM projects. 13

14 The metacmdb solution relies on a federated data model. Data federation accelerates the discovery of information. IT departments do not need to implement data replication or complex data integration processes. They can dynamically retrieve the information from trusted data sources. This is also a key factor in maintaining upto-date data. ASG s metacmdb provides a consistent view of the services Companies need a single point of truth in order to have reliable information about their IT services. MetaCMDB s federated data model helps reconcile and aggregate information from heterogeneous data sources. The solution ensures efficient data reconciliation between the various sources of configuration information and helps identify redundant data. The solution can also aggregate information from monitoring tools, in order to provide comprehensive dashboards and indicators on IT performance. ASG s metacmdb includes advanced reporting capabilities that allow users to define customized queries and reports, aligned on their needs. ASG s metacmdb helps understand the relationships between the services Implementing a CMDB is a key factor in identifying and describing IT services. It allows organizations to break through siloed data in order to build a unified view of IT services and their relationships. ASG s metacmdb relies on a flexible data model based on advanced ASG-Rochade metadata technology. This is a key factor in allowing the companies define their own service model. ASG s metacmdb manages configuration items, as well as the attributes and relationships of these items. Thanks to ASG-Rochade technology, companies can adapt this model to their own needs. IT departments can easily extend the model to add new types of s, attributes and relationships. The solution also provides the scalability required by large organizations. It can support data-intensive processes. ASG s metacmdb allows management of IT services according to business priorities BSM allows proactive IT management. This is a key factor in delivering service levels required by the business and in ensuring business continuity. The foundation for efficient and successful BSM is understanding the relationships between IT services and business services. A CMS is required to fill this gap. 14

15 ASG s metacmdb helps understand the relationships between business services and the underlining IT services. Thanks to its federated data model, ASG s metacmdb can be used to implement a master CMS that federates multiple CMDBs. The CMS stores all the business-critical information used to understand how the IT services are used by the business. This is a key factor in managing operations according to business priorities, in making change management more reliable and in mitigating IT risks. ASG s metacmdb enables efficient change management. Before implementing a change, IT departments must assess its impact on both IT services and business services. This requires consistent relationship analysis between s, across various legacy or partial CMDBs. IT departments must have a «single point of truth» in order to manage changes to their configuration items, filled with accurate, consistent and up-to-date data. The ASG solution provides this «single point of truth». Its unique link with application mapping (i.e. ASG-becubic) enhances impact analysis capabilities. The same capabilities can be used for root-cause analysis in incident management processes. This accelerates incident resolution and provides significant help in problem management. 15

16 4. GLOSSARY Business service management (BSM) BSM consists in transforming the IT resources of an organization into valuable business services, i.e. services that provide value to its customers. With BSM, IT departments become service providers: they no longer manage their resources as separate silos but now manage them as integrated services, aligned on business needs and priorities. BSM requires both consistent management processes and software solutions. ITIL V3 The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of processes and best practices for IT service management, published by the United Kingdom Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Version 3 was published in ITIL is a widely adopted approach to BSM. CMS According to ITIL V3, a Configuration Management System is «a set of tools and databases that are used to manage an IT Service Provider's Configuration data. The CMS also includes information about incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases; and may contain data about employees, suppliers, locations, business units, customers and users. The CMS includes tools for collecting, storing, managing, updating and presenting data about all configuration items (s) and their relationships. The CMS maintains one or more CMDBs (configuration management databases), and each CMDB stores attributes of s, and relationships with other s.» CMDB According to ITIL V3, a CMDB is «a database used to store configuration records throughout their lifecycle». 16

17 ABOUT ASG ASG provides software solutions to more than 85 percent of the world s largest companies. Through its comprehensive solution, ASG s Business Service Portfolio (BSP), ASG is an established Business Service Management (BSM) provider with a strong heritage in metadata management, information management, application management, infrastructure and operations management, and service support technologies all integrated by ASG s metacmdb. ASG enables clients to reduce costs, improve businessservice delivery, and reduce risks. Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held company based in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 90 offices worldwide. 17