Long gone are the days when information technology (IT) departments were judged on how well they managed technology with little or no thought to the cost associated with their success.
Today, economic constraints have forced a period of reassessment and IT managers are increasingly called upon to justify every rand spent on IT infrastructure.
Thus they face significant challenges as they meet the corporate demands to provide sophisticated services and support functions to customers, while formulating disciplines, processes and procedures to guarantee that these are performed to the highest levels of quality and reliability.
What is a service?
To ensure these levels are maintained, IT managers are looking to service management solutions which unify the functions and processes that deliver live business services.
And these services can cover a wide range of possibilities, from the weekly payroll to complex supply chain management applications and global infrastructures.
To cost-effectively build management solutions of this nature, it is essential to know the criteria upon which the quality of the services is to be measured.
Service level management technologies help by giving IT managers the ability to document user requirements and performance targets via service level agreements (SLAs).
To build truly effective SLAs, solutions need the ability to collect metrics from multiple sources and measure them from a discipline-based perspective (eg performance from the user browser to the application).
It is one thing to be able to collect data, another to analyse it effectively, so that SLAs are based on fact - not instinct. In a worst case scenario, SLAs based on instinct would lead IT to set unrealistic service level targets and drive it back down the road of tactical, reactive infrastructure management.
Service level management solutions need to constantly monitor and report on the levels of service being delivered against set objectives. This means dynamically making refinements and adjustments. It is a "given" that users will always need greater levels of service, so solutions need to be flexible enough to respond and adapt to changing business circumstances.
Counting the cost
Ideally, customers should be able to select the services required - and the SLAs to support them - on an as-needed basis. This service-centric approach can avoid many of the problems associated with provisioning applications and services.
If users only select what they want (and the kind of service they need) then IT managers will avoid the cost burden associated with over-provisioning, while eliminating the quality of service (QoS) problems that inevitably transpire from under-provisioning user services.
In order to reduce costs, justify expenditure and measure return on investment, IT departments must be run on business-like lines.
If IT departments have the ability to measure usage from the perspective of the user, it becomes simpler to accurately allocate costs and billings for services delivered.
Without this ability, IT departments have tended to allocate costs on an IT resource basis (ie percentages for hardware, software, operations expenditure, etc).
Without accurate usage measurements it is difficult - if not impossible - to ascertain where future spending is required to better support certain groups.
This leads to inaccurate cost analysis and poor budgeting.
The answer
To correct these problems, costs need to be associated with levels of service and allocated by department, business unit or individual user.
By leveraging new technology and disciplines, the IT department can significantly improve its visibility into exactly how much it needs to spend to support specific groups of customers and/or services and where IT resources should be deployed for the most business gain.
Key to an understanding of the bridge between business and IT, is the translation of complex technical status and performance information from multiple sources - such as business applications, servers and networked devices - into reports that are understood by business users.
New generation solutions are now available that help IT departments to manage IT as a service, and transform and operate as a business-within-a-business.
These solutions can contribute to customer satisfaction, enhance the strategic standing of the IT department and elevate capability beyond the age-old tactical-based operations and support methodologies.
Comprehensive functionality
For example, rather than report using traditional metrics such as network utilisation, CPU cycles and similar criteria, it is now possible to track and report IT functions in aggregate - and demonstrate the end result of this activity in terms more meaningful to business decision-makers.
Reports can now include e-mail activity, storage capacity, and response times to queries. Pre-defined SLA packages can be tailored to support a range of business objectives, with on-going performance tracked by department, account, business unit or customer.
As IT moves from a supporting role to actually enabling business, it is key for IT to take a more strategic business role, optimising costs, allocating resources where they are needed and verifying external services provided to the organisation.
Service-centric management is about to take its rightful place, centre stage, in the business arena.
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