service level management summit strategies paper

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summitstrategies

Six Stepsto Service

LevelManagement

Success

December 2004

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w w w . s u m m i t s t r a t . c o m


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Table of

Contents

Six Steps to Service Level Management Success | December 20042004 Summit Strategies, Inc. Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

NOTE: This report is based upon information believed to be accurate and reliable. Neither Summit Strategies,

Inc. nor its agents make any warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information or the opinions

expressed. We shall have no liability for any errors of fact or judgment or for any damages resulting from reliance

upon this information.

Trademarked names appear throughout this report. Rather than list the names and entities that own the trademarks

or insert a trademark symbol with each mention of the trademarked name, Summit Strategies uses the names only for

editorial purposes and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringing upon that trademark.

2004. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited except with the written permission of the publisher.

Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

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Six Steps to ServiceLevel Management Success

Sections Service Level Management Puts Business Priorities First .............................. 1

Six Steps to Successful SLM Implementation ................................................ 3

BMCs SLM Portfolio Supports All Levels of SLM Monitoring ......................... 6

Figures Figure 1: Enterprise Timelines for Implementing Service Management ......... 2

Figure 2: Six Steps to Successful SLM Implementation ................................. 5


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Executive Summary

Six Steps to Service Level Management Success | December 20042004 Summit Strategies, Inc. Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

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Six Steps to Service

Level Management Success

Service level management (SLM) is a set of processes and tools that tightly align IT priorities andbudgets with business objectives in real time. Implementing SLM requires CIOs and their seniorleadership teams to take a structured, modular approach to change how they track and report ITservice levels and performance. SLM strategies are enabled by sophisticated IT monitoring andreal-time analysis tools that report on the health and performance of IT resources using a busi-

ness-focused point of view.

Using SLM, IT and business leaders can better negotiate and define business-relevant servicelevels. They can also use SLM data on IT performance, cost and utilization as the basis of budgetprioritization and trade-off discussions. SLM keeps IT top-of-mind with business sponsors andincreases the awareness of just how important IT is to the overall success of the business.

Most organizations start with a handful of key applications and business processes, and movetowards enterprise-wide use of SLM over time. Summit Strategies recommends a six stepapproach that begins with a comprehensive readiness assessment and builds on a solid base ofIT component level monitoring capabilities. Over time, CIOs should shift the service level report-ing emphasis from looking at the health of individual IT components to tracking the end-to-end

user experience metrics. Ultimately, SLM should be applied in an integrated manner across theentire IT environment, allowing IT and the business to make prioritization and investment deci-sions based on a shared understanding of how their choices will impact the total performanceof the business.

BMCs SLM Route to Value offers CIOs a modular set of service level tracking and reporting toolsthat can support this type of incremental SLM ramp up, at a pace that matches the organizationsability to change the way IT is managed. For customers planning to reap the benefits of BMCs fullBusiness Service Management strategy, SLM should be one of their first steps, since the policiesand metrics defined by SLM are needed to drive prioritization and automation of most other ITservice management activities.

Mary Johnston [email protected]


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Six Steps to Service Level Management Success | Page 12004 Summit Strategies, Inc. Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

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Six Steps to ServiceLevel Management Success

Service Level Management Puts Business Priorities First

CIOs continue to be held to higher and higher standards for justifying their IT bud-gets and documenting ITs contribution to ongoing business performance. ServiceLevel Management (SLM) software and tools are used to collect, analyze andreport on IT performance and its contribution to the business. The information pro-vided by SLM can dramatically improve the quality of the CIOs relationship withthe business, help to improve the way IT staff sets day-to-day priorities, and sup-port better alignment of promised IT service levels with the cost of IT operations.

To be successful, implementation of SLM tools need to be executed in conjunc-tion with a strategic transformation of IT planning and operations processes.SLM requires that IT staff shift from thinking about IT as stacks of compo-nents, to viewing themselves as internal service providers who use integrated

IT resources to deliver business services. Depending on the organization andits level of SLM maturity, these IT-enabled business services might be definedin different ways ranging from:

Logical groups of IT applications and capabilities that users view as inte-grated solutions, such as desktop connectivity and messaging services;

Business transactions that use information and IT resources spanning mul-tiple applications, databases, and/or servers, for example, new accountactivation transaction services; or

Logical groupings of business applications that together represent a key

set of business functions, such as supply chain and inventory manage-ment services.

The most important element in defining a SLM strategy is gaining joint IT andthe business leadership agreement on the definitions of the business servicesand the metrics that will be used to measure service level delivery. Most often,companies will need to shift from focusing on IT-oriented metrics such as com-ponent uptime or availability to business-oriented service level agreements


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Page 2 | Six Steps to Service Level Management Success

2004 Summit Strategies, Inc. Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

(SLAs) that use business-oriented metrics such as application response time,mean time to complete a business transaction, or lost e-mail recovery times.

Once both sides agree to SLA definitions and metrics, they must also agree thatthe cost justifies the benefit and that they will fund the required budget in full. In thepast, CIOs have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to effectively link IT costs to

an associated business impact. As a result, many IT organizations were continu-ally asked to do more without receiving adequate funding to get the job done. And,beyond simple spreadsheets and manual data collection processes, they had fewtools available to produce the types of service level and cost reports needed tosupport negotiations and tradeoff discussions with the business leadership.

Over the next several years, forward-looking CIOs plan to use SLMandrelated service management toolsto provide better, more cost-effective busi-ness services to their end users (see Figure 1). SLM strategies provide CIOs

Over the next three years, a majority of enterprises surveyed by SummitStrategies expect to invest in tools to support more comprehensive servicemanagement and operational automation.

Source: Summit Strategies, Inc., www.summitstrat.com

N=129

Current (today)

Future (1-3 years)

Configuration dependency mapping to understand structure of applications, dependency/configurationdetails/changes and aid planning and troubleshooting

Automated correlation, predictive analysis/monitoring of events support problem resolution in real t ime

Operators analyze/synchronize information from multiple domains

Each element of IT infrastructure managed independently

Dont know where we stand on this topic

Third-party management service providers/outsourcers

Day-to-day resource sharing, capacity planning, configuration, provisioning/workload balancing

managed on automated/policy-driven basis

Q. Which statements best describe your organizations

current and future IT management software and tools strategy?

7%

54%

32%

33%

41%

25%

36%

19%

32%

31%

26%

18%

7%

8%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Figure 1 Enterprise Timelines for Implementing Service Management


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and business leaders with common service definitions, SLA targets and sup-porting budget calculations. If the business desires a higher service level thanthe current budget can support, SLM provides the CIO and the business lead-ership with a model for understanding both the cost and business impact ofadditional spending.

Over time, these business choices can be defined in terms of IT automationpolicies and used to drive many real time resource allocation and dynamicprovisioning choices. However, most organizations choose to walk beforethey run. The following section describes the six key steps to successful SLMimplementation.

Six Steps to Successful SLM Implementation

Because SLM generally includes as much cultural transformation as it does

deployment of new service level monitoring and reporting tools, several of

the most important steps for SLM success involve planning and process

changes, rather than simply purchasing new software tools. Early SLMadopters consistently report that spending time at the beginning of a proj-

ect to complete a comprehensive readiness assessment, craft service level

objective definitions, and define joint business/IT planning processes make

the total project flow much more smoothly over time. The following six steps

are the keys to successfully deploying SLM (see Figure 2).

Step 1

Assess organizational willingness and readiness to fund and deliver IT

as business services. This assessment should include an analysis of

existing monitoring tools, the ability to associate costs with services,

and an identification of business partners will ing to pilot a business ser-

vice management (BSM) SLM initiative. Depending on the current state

of affairs and the current level of IT and business trust, some general

education may be required to get the key business and IT staff members

on board. During the readiness assessment phase, many organizations

find they have gaps in their ability to track and report on the health of

their IT components.

Step 2

Implement comprehensive network and systems monitoring and report-

ing tools. Since accurate and timely data about the availability and

performance of individual IT components is required to support higher

level BSM SLM reporting, it is important to have a comprehensive baseof monitoring capabilities in place and to have developed a comfort

level with the use of these tools. Filling in the gaps early assures that

the required data will be available when requested by higher level sys-

tems and will have the immediate benefit of providing operational IT

staff with better status and health information about their individual

technical environments.


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Still other organizations will find they have solid service models and a moti-vated staff, but lack the tools required to get the job done. For those who areready to deploy SLM tools, three major types of tools are needed:

IT component health monitors. These tools are designed to measure thebasic health (e.g., uptime, availability, utilization) of individual network andsystem elements. They help IT staff detect problems at the componentlevel but the data collected by these monitors needs to be available to ahigher level tool to support business service-oriented SLM. They are notable to associate system level performance with the end-to-end business

service impact or end user experience.

End-to-end user experience monitors for specific applications. These mon-itors include synthetic transaction monitors and agents capable of trackingactual desktop performance. They typically report SLAs for specific applica-tions but provide little or no insight into which underlying network or systemelement may be the source of problems.

Figure 2 Six Steps to Successful SLM Implementation

Successful SLM implementation requires a modular plan to introducebusiness and IT decision makers to the concept of business servicemanagement while gradually increasing the sophistication of the servicelevel agreements. Over time, SLM can become the CIOs primary strategy

for keeping IT spending and operational performance in line with expectedbusiness results.

Source: Summit Strategies, Inc.

www.summitstrat.com

Step 1:

Readiness

Assessment

Tools

Business support

IT staff perspectives

Step 2:

Comprehensive

Component Monitoring

IT metrics

Operational health

and stability

Step 3:

SLM

Education

ITIL Training

Business champions

Service identification

Step 4:

SLM Pilots/

Validation

End-to-end user

experience

Application specific

Step 5:

Integrated

SLM

Cross-business analysis

Service desk and

support metrics added

Executive dashboards

Step 6:

Predictive

SLM

SLM impact analysis

Policy-based

automation


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Page 6 | Six Steps to Service Level Management Success

2004 Summit Strategies, Inc. Unauthorized use or sharing of this document is strictly forbidden.

Executive SLM reporting and dashboard tools. These tools take data

from multiple sources (element monitors, synthetic transactions, actual

user response time monitors, etc.) and integrate it with performance

data from service desks systems and asset management tools. The

resulting analysis positions IT costs and performance in an executive

framework that both business and IT decision makers can use to drive

ongoing business service delivery performance and return on invest-ment. Most often this information is provided to the business in the form

of an executive dashboard.

BMCs SLM Portfolio Supports All Levels of SLM Monitoring

With the acquisition of Remedy, BMCs SLM portfolio provides customers with

a comprehensive set of capabilities to support a modular SLM implementation.

Specifically:

SLM Express with PATROL classic or PATROL Express collects and

reports on IT component availability and system performance across theenterprise using industry standard protocols to collect data from heteroge-

neous computing environments. The resulting SLM reports are suitable for

use by IT staff and provide a solid baseline of information to support future

discussions with the business.

SLM Express with PATROL End to End Response Timer enables the use

of synthetic transactions to monitor end-to-end user service levels on an

application specific basis. Tools from BMC partners, such as FineGround

Networks AppScope product, provide additional end-user focused SLA

reporting tools using desktop agents for measuring actual transaction per-

formance. These reports begin to provide the business and IT leadershipwith a common set of service definitions and business relevant metrics and

provide a solid starting point for introducing SLM concepts on an applica-

tion-by-application basis. Web-based dashboards allow IT management to

easily share information with business sponsors.

SLM Express with BMC Service Impact Manager and Remedy SLA report-

ing tools allow CIOs to integrate data from multiple end-user focused tools

with service desk performance data to build a more comprehensive view

of the over-all business experience. These tools enable more proactive,

predictive analysis that can assess the impact of changes on SLAs and

incorporate Quality of Service (QoS) information from IT component mon-

itoring tools and the Remedy Service Desk Quality of Response (QoR)reports to develop a complete picture of service performance and impact

before problems occur.

SLM is one of eight Routes to Value that BMC is developing to help its custom-

ers get started implementing a business service management strategy. Each

Route to Value addresses a specific operational pain point and provides a


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rapid return on investment by enabling more proactive IT management and

stronger business/IT alignment. Other BMC Routes to Value include Incidentand Problem Management, Identity Management, Capacity Management and

Provisioning, as well as several others.

Routes to Value are built on a common development interface, rely on common

user interfaces and share data via a common configuration management data-base. While each Route to Value can deliver value on a standalone basis, theSLM Route to Value is particularly important for BMC customers who aim todeliver IT as a business service and/or who want to make more aggressiveuse of automated provisioning and management technologies over time. TheSLM implementation process builds stronger business/IT relationships as theycollaboratively develop a common view of IT priorities, SLAs and budgets.

Beyond the near term, benefits resulting from improved business credibility,better aligned costs and higher end-to-end service levels, SLM lays the cor-nerstone of well-defined policies, priorities and business/IT decision makingprocesses that are needed to fully exploit the power of BMCs BSM vision and

the full menu of its Route to Value solutions.

Mary Johnston [email protected]

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