IT Management Symposium Africa 2012
The IT Management Symposium Africa - presented by CA Southern Africa and its partners, in collaboration with ITWeb - provides an update on global IT trends, strategies and technologies. Click here for more information.
With users making ever-increasing demands on the level of service IT is able to deliver, the model used for service delivery has to change, says Carl Lloyd, business lead, service assurance, at CA Technologies.
Lloyd says consumer-driven IT is impacting on the IT department, with end-users, among them business executives, having heightened expectations of what IT should deliver.
Now that employees can easily use nearly any mobile device, application, social media platform or public cloud for work agility and continuity, they expect all the technologies they use to deliver the same front-end simplicity.
Lloyd says: “Users are becoming more tech-savvy. And they're asking 'why can't I get the same IT experience at my workplace that I have in my personal use?'”
And amid growing levels of maturity, the IT department is facing the reality that service quality and delivery can be assured if a company outsources its IT management, he says.
“IT is facing increasing pressures from the business, and if it cannot deliver the expected levels of service, business is going to look elsewhere,” Lloyd adds.
Business and user attitudes aren't all that has changed, he notes. IT is an increasingly important business driver, and must be closely aligned with the business' strategic goals. Plus, disruptive developments such as cloud computing, mobility, big data and social media for the enterprise are forcing rapid change in the IT department.
An IDC study, sponsored by CA Technologies, noted that “agile enterprises that move aggressively to adopt these technologies are putting themselves in the best position to take advantage of the consumer scale these technologies open up, that is to say, new business models, new ways to reach customers, new ways to sell products and provide service and support, new ways to increase customer loyalty, and new ways to improve employee productivity.”
Eliminating the silos
In this rapidly changing environment, the traditional IT management model is no longer good enough, says Lloyd.
IT has traditionally worked within operational silos, addressing applications, transactions, databases, networks, and physical and virtual systems individually. This may keep systems running, but it does not ensure strategic business support and service levels that meet users' expectations.
Lloyd says CA runs ongoing surveys of its market, and is finding that the cost and complexity of managing IT in silos is becoming a challenge for customers.
“What comes up is that the cost of IT management tools, and the effort involved in integrating these tools, is significant.
“When IT is managed in silos, one does not get a complete picture of the situation. With fragmented technology silos, they'll find manual processes, no end-to-end view of transactions and composite service complexity. Individuals may see a set of switches performing well, but will not see it in a service delivery context; and where it is connected to business imperatives. Many IT departments are now starting the move towards managing IT with a view to the business context, and are looking to deliver service levels that support business.”
The solution is clear - the silos need to be eliminated and the three key disciplines of infrastructure management, application performance management and service operations must be consolidated.
Building a single system
Evolving to the next level of IT effectiveness requires a new level of integration and analysis of cross-silo management information, says CA. This involves linking application status and root-cause information with infrastructure status and relating that to impact on IT service quality.
Service assurance needs to bring together the three key disciplines of infrastructure management, consolidating them into a single solution requiring one set of servers to run it on, and no integration requirements.
The solution must be based on an integrated intelligence platform that brings together infrastructure management, application management and third-party tools for a single source of truth and easier troubleshooting. This platform should have, at its core, federated modelling for real-time measurement of the user experience and end-to-end root-cause analysis and resolution.
A converged solution will deliver simplified business service modelling, end-to-end transaction visibility, converged views of actionable intelligence, consistent quality of experience and quality of service, and effective service reporting for all stakeholders, says Lloyd.
With inconsistent delivery, CA says, businesses risk a poor end-user experience, lost productivity, a decrease in sales and an inability to innovate.
CA is addressing this need, with a multi-year, multi-stage project to integrate these tools. “We have now done the first release - to be announced on 13 September,” says Lloyd.
The ultimate aim is to consolidate everything in one place for a faster and more proactive triage of remediation, with guided workflows and intelligent metrics; highly scalable data collection and presentation; intelligent analytics for large volumes of disparate data; accelerated time to value with a lower total cost of ownership; and automation of critical tasks and workflows, including service discovery, event and incident management, and root cause correlation.
Lloyd will address the upcoming CA IT Management Symposium Africa on the subject, giving delegates a high-level view of the future of service assurance, as well as a closer look at CA's work to deliver a consolidated IT service assurance solution. For more information about this event, click here.
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