Gain strategic insight into business services to help optimize IT.

Transcription

1 Closed-loop measurement and control solutions To support your IT objectives Gain strategic insight into business services to help optimize IT. Highlights Gain insight and visibility across the IT project portfolio to better align investments with business objectives Improve visibility and control of software projects Visualize the health of critical business services and associated service level agreements (SLAs) Monitor the health of business services and intervene before service levels are compromised Leverage a service management platform with complete visibility into project and service availability and status IT organizations are increasingly strained by their inability to predict the delivery of critical projects and services against defined objectives, and lack the vital real-time and predictive intelligence needed to take corrective action when issues arise. The need for this information is clear: the cost of a missed software delivery deadline or downtime to business services, such as an e-commerce site that crashes at a peak time, can be catastrophic in terms of reputation, competitive advantage, customer churn and profit loss. Gaining end-to-end visibility and intelligence across critical projects and services is key to improving service predictability. IT organizations need a way to predict with greater certainty: When key software enhancements will be delivered. What actions are required to help ensure on-time delivery. What business value they will bring. Which services are approaching failure or a service level breach. What proactive measures can be taken to avoid disruptions to services. What the associated business cost or impact will be.

2 IBM solutions for closed-loop measurement and control can help organizations: Understand the current state of IT projects and services. Take corrective action for at-risk projects and services. Meet target project delivery dates and SLAs. Improve cross-department processes. IBM measurement and control solutions combine hardware, software, implementation and financing services to drive greater predictability throughout the service management lifecycle. No matter what the area of focus development or operations IBM offers the targeted, predictive intelligence needed to support your functional area and improve business visibility into key service management processes. IBM Service Management solutions help organizations create value by more effectively delivering against business objectives and manage value by assuring greater predictability of services across the complete service management lifecycle. This document highlights IBM solutions best-of-breed capabilities that customers are using to improve service predictability across the service management lifecycle. Gain measurable business insight Too often, IT organizations collect a wealth of isolated data that is uncorrelated with business priorities and ultimately fails to deliver meaningful business insight. While a particular metric may deliver information on the status of a specific resource, this information does little to show IT s ability to deliver against targeted business and operational objectives. To help provide maximum value, metrics should be aggregated and intrinsically tied to business objectives. This transforms less-relevant IT metrics into higher-value key performance indicators (KPIs) that empower IT to understand and improve performance against business objectives. The closed-loop measurement and control solutions we outline here will help you do just that. Gaining visibility into these KPIs can help organizations gain predictability across projects, services and processes. By communicating the business value of IT software and services, they enable the transformation of IT from a cost center to a true business partner. Create value more effectively with IBM software delivery solutions Gain insight and visibility across your project portfolio Businesses often have so many ongoing projects that it is difficult to determine where to allocate resources to maximize business potential. IT must be able to help the business choose its highest-priority projects. IBM Rational Portfolio Manager helps by providing an enterprise-wide view of all projects across the business. Rational Portfolio Manager enables you to manage a full portfolio of IT projects to roll out a series of new mainframes or a new software project for example and to capture the objective measurements that help organizations prioritize investments, manage project progress and gain visibility into project status and performance. When projects are software related, you can

3 use Rational Portfolio Manager with IBM Rational ClearQuest and other tools to pull in KPIs from all areas of the software delivery lifecycle, giving you a centralized view into IT project status and performance. Improve visibility and control of software projects While Rational Portfolio Manager provides insight across a portfolio of projects, Rational ClearQuest provides an in-depth view into the status of a single project. Because so many groups comprising architects, developers, testers and business stakeholders contribute to a software project, it is often difficult to understand what is occurring at any point in time across the software delivery lifecycle. Rational ClearQuest is a change management solution that can help you create repeatable, enforceable processes shared by all team members throughout the software delivery lifecycle. By providing control over your processes, Rational ClearQuest helps keep your project on track, reducing overall project risk. Distribution, trend and aging charts help you visualize the state of your project s requirements, test results, change requests and defects delivering the critical information you need to make better decisions. Deliver value more efficiently with IBM service delivery and support solutions Visualize the health of critical business services To effectively manage the ongoing health and performance of business services, you must have contextual service intelligence. IBM Tivoli business service management solutions help visualize the status of business services, associated SLAs and other KPIs that operations staff must deliver against in support of business objectives. It enables operations to target limited human resources, prioritize responses and make informed investments in the areas with the greatest business impact. Tivoli business service management solutions collect real-time event, servicedependency and business data from virtually any source for automated analysis, helping to leverage existing investments in business and operational tools, data sources and technology, while delivering automation and actionable intelligence to manage and predict developing problems. Use them to: Pinpoint developing problems before they impact service quality. Automatically identify the root cause and service impact of problems. Track real-time delivery against SLAs and OLAs. Deliver real-time and historical KPIs for more effective decisions. Monitor the health of business services and intervene before service levels are compromised Equally important in gaining business insight to improve predictability is having both real-time and historical service level tracking. Tivoli business service management solutions are designed to provide predictive service level management capabilities by enabling you to proactively identify when SLA violations are likely to occur and take preemptive actions. The integration of these capabilities with other real-time KPIs assures that IT has contextual service intelligence across silos, to proactively manage service delivery and investments according to business priorities.

4 Track KPIs and automate actions For KPIs to deliver true value, they must be the right KPIs, delivered to the right people, at the right time or else the intelligence delivered is not actionable. Tivoli business service management solutions provide real-time service visibility and intelligence to both business and operational audiences, via a single effective interface. Because views are customizable and updated in real time, they assure delivery of the right intelligence, to the right people, at the right time. Tivoli business service management solutions offer a wide range of other advanced capabilities, including custom correlation, event enrichment with business context, escalation and notification, as well as automated response to more quickly resolve service problems. Leverage a service management platform with complete visibility into application complexity To build an effective service model, IT must have full knowledge of application components and their dependencies. Tivoli business service management solutions provide complete visibility into application, system and other service dependencies by automatically discovering, creating and maintaining application infrastructure maps. Tivoli business service management solutions can leverage automated discovery and relationship information to build an accurate service model. Discovered configuration information and automated change tracking shows what changes were made to the service infrastructure and who made them, enabling faster problem resolution. Leverage reliable, high-availability platforms from IBM Quality service delivery depends on a solid, high-performing platform. For this reason, many organizations are turning to IBM platforms including the IBM Linux platform to consistently deliver advanced performance, high availability and scalability. All IBM systems are designed around the core principles of collaboration, openness and virtualization essential ingredients to support your service management infrastructure. For example: IBM measurement and control solutions in action Lawson Products, which sells and distributes systems, services and products in a broad range of industrial markets, recognized the need to transform its business to sustain future growth. To drive this transformation, the company and its IT team needed to better understand how IT resources were being used and better align business priorities with IT initiatives. The company began a phased implementation of Rational Portfolio Manager to enable time accountability as well as budget and project alignment. Among other things, Lawson Products was able to use the software to demonstrate to business unit managers the amount of work that IT had done to support their divisions. For the first time, the company had clear insight into IT resource allocation across business units and could understand the breakdown of IT project work: 70 percent maintenance and 30 percent new projects. Improved clarity also helped the organization make better business decisions. For example, once the cost of a previous partner marketing initiative was clearly understood, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) cancelled a similar project, saving 400 hours of development time that could now be devoted to higher-return projects. With enhanced insight and control over IT spending and prioritization, Lawson Products has streamlined budget processes, provided greater transparency over IT resource allocation and improved the working relationship between IT and the business.

5 IBM services offer integrated solutions and expedite service management initiatives IBM Software Services for Tivoli and IBM Software Services for Rational can help with projects from short-term assistance with a single challenge to large-scale, customized consulting projects, or to transfer deep technical skills to your IT staff. Additional support, such as workshops, training and premium support, is also available to help you maximize your IBM Service Management solution. IBM Global Technology Services helps clients assess, plan, design and implement industry-accepted service management best practices like those described in IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT). Using workshops, analytics and process reference models in a flexible and modular way, IBM provides unique, in-depth insight into how your IT resources, processes and investments match your overall business needs and what steps you need to take. The IBM process reference model for IT translates the IBM Service Management framework into concrete actions for implementation, so your organization can follow a streamlined path from design to production. IBM services from Global Technology Services enable your organization to quickly identify quality management opportunities, choose the best entry point and help speed implementation. Specific services available from GTS include: IBM IT Lifecycle Management and Governance Services business of IT dashboard provides the visibility you need to increase application and infrastructure flexibility to support dynamic business objectives. The dashboard enables better IT planning, increases productivity and provides insights that enable CIOs and senior IT managers to respond effectively to changing business conditions. IBM IT Management Consulting Services service management strategy and planning brings a business-oriented, standards-based approach to IT service management planning. IBM professionals use tested and mature assets and methods for planning IT service management. Additionally, our modular services can also provide IT portfolio management and IT governance strategy consulting, facilitating a well-defined path toward better asset management, higher stakeholder satisfaction, increased efficiency and higher standards of service quality. IBM is uniquely qualified to deliver service management As the only vendor offering a service management approach that applies industry best practices that encompass the entire service management lifecycle, IBM is uniquely qualified to offer a modular, comprehensive service management solution. From a single vendor, organizations can start with the service management entry point that addresses their most critical need to create and manage value throughout the service management lifecycle. Typical entry points to service management include: Predict: by improving insight into the health of services and projects and preventing service level violations. Align: by integrating best-practice processes to improve productivity. Innovate: by managing services across newgeneration architectures.

6 Deliver: by optimizing change management to improve service delivery. Manage: by reducing the time required to resolve service quality problems. IBM is helping IT organizations around the globe to create and manage value throughout the service management lifecycle. Organizations create value by focusing on the highest priorities of the business, and by driving innovation through consistent delivery of quality software. Organizations manage value by improving the efficiency and responsiveness of service delivery and support, and by meeting service level commitments with greater reliability. The IBM service management solution helps organizations create and manage value by improving IT alignment, effectiveness and efficiency. For more information For more information about how your organization can use IBM Service Management to gain insight and visibility across the IT project portfolio, or to determine the right service management entry point for your organization, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/itsolutions/servicemanagement About IBM solutions for enabling IT governance and risk management IBM enables IT organizations to support governance and risk management by aligning IT policies, processes and projects with business goals. Organizations can leverage IBM services, software and hardware to plan, execute and manage initiatives for IT service management, business resilience and security across the enterprise. Organizations of every size can benefit from flexible, modular IBM offerings that span business management, IT development and IT operations and draw on extensive customer experience, best practices and open standards based technology. IBM helps clients implement the right IT solutions to achieve rapid business results and become a strategic partner in business growth. For more information about IBM Governance and Risk Management, visit ibm.com/itsolutions/governance Copyright IBM Corporation 2007 IBM Corporation Route 100 Somers, NY U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 3-07 All Rights Reserved ClearQuest, IBM, the IBM logo, Rational and Tivoli are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. IT Infrastructure Library is a registered trademark of the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency which is now part of the Office of Government Commerce. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries or both. ITIL is a registered trademark, and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. Disclaimer: The customer is responsible for ensuring compliance with legal requirements. It is the customer s sole responsibility to obtain advice of competent legal counsel as to the identification and interpretation of any relevant laws and regulatory requirements that may affect the customer s business and any actions the reader may have to take to comply with such laws. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the customer is in compliance with any law or regulation. GMS10337-USEN-00