The Evolution of IT Operations

The Evolution of IT Operations
Providing Critical Workload Automation Status to Support Business Service Management
A WHITE PAPER
www.asg.comThe Evolution of IT Operations
Over the last five years, IT professionals' need to show measurable business results and their desire to raise their credibility in "While IT budgets are largely flat, end users and the enterprise have resulted in IT operations becoming more lines of business reliant on computing resources and business-centric. Consequently, new IT roles have emerged, services to get jobs done are making more demands. including relationship and process managers. This shift in focus has resulted in IT organizations defining more standardized, To best meet these rising demands, IT should act business-relevant products and services, delivered to customers like a service provider with the continuous goal of with concrete, service-level assurances. Delivering high-quality providing better and faster services to its clients services requires mature, disciplined, and well-designed IT 1 operational processes that are in lock-step with business while reducing costs and improving efficiency." needs and issues. As a result, IT, and specifically, Operations Management, is changing its infrastructure to focus on BSM.
Fusing Business and IT ObjectivesExecutive Summary Organizations continually work to fuse their IT efforts with the overall goals of the business. The main obstacle in this effort is the cultural IT operations have moved from backstage to divide between business and IT functions. While executives and center stage with the increasing importance of business managers are accustomed to focusing on business results, business service management (BSM). Effective IT has traditionally focused on technology and system performance.IT service delivery is the baseline for successful Executives and business managers identify and understand IT business service delivery. Improved management services by how they support business objectives, and they define their business needs based on specific services and service levels processes based on the Information Technology that they, and their customers, expect. IT must deliver, based upon Infrastructure library (ITILŪ), along with the these business-defined metrics. Rather than traditional IT service-strategic use of configuration management level agreements (SLAs) that measure performance based on the availability of systems and applications or IT-centric response time, databases (CMDBs), have driven IT management new performance expectations and SLAs are business-focused processes into completely new territory. This (e.g., "We guarantee completion of customer payroll processing development has been an evolutionary process. by close of business every day"). If the payroll processing is not completed, the SLA is not met, regardless of the fact that the The first step was a shift away from a purely IT hardware and software delivering that service are up and running.infrastructure-optimization focus to a more IT IT operations must proactively manage mission-critical services service-optimization perspective. This initial shift by integrating real-time IT and business impact information, necessitated more automation in IT operations along with root cause data, into incident tickets for improved to support service-level agreement (SLA) customer satisfaction. This management requires IT metrics to be based on business needs, priorities, and objectives. ASG's expectations and has ultimately resulted in IT Business Service PlatformT (BSPT) can provide this kind of operations management processes actually driving real-time BSM. ASG's BSP harnesses operations information overall business service solution processes. and other IT data, aggregating enterprise-wide information into a meaningful dashboard that simplifies BSM administration. As IT organizations are increasingly expected to improve Within ASG's BSP dashboards, organizations can better business service delivery, they must also focus on presenting manage assets, optimizing business value by identifying and their business value more positively. IT organizations supporting business-critical IT services according to SLAs.are accomplishing these objectives in two ways: A true BSM solution must automatically identify which physical and . By understanding the metrics that successful logical elements (service, routers, switches, ... [download for more]