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Let’s take a glimpse at what your professional life could be like with totally optimized IT processes. We’ll view it from the perspective of three different groups in the IT organization.
Service Desk
Rather than being buffeted about by constant waves of incidents and raw event alerts, the service desk operates proactively and efficiently, prioritizing actions based on business impact. The service desk is equipped with an early warning system that automatically sifts through raw event data and generates “intelligent” incident tickets for exceptions that have business impact. These tickets contain rich contextual information to help diagnose the associated issues, and they are prioritized according to the severity and/or urgency of business impact.
Service desk technicians have at their fingertips an up-to-date, enterprise-wide view of the IT infrastructure, showing all IT resources, their configurations, their logical and physical interrelationships, and the business services and users they support. What’s more, the service desk is automatically apprised of all change activities, kept up to date on the status of changes, and notified upon successful change completion.
In this new world, the service desk can identify and resolve infrastructure and application incidents and events before they become larger issues, and prioritize staff and tool-driven activities according to business impact. This permits IT to reduce the number, duration, and severity of business disruptions, while at the same time, improving operational efficiency.
Data Center
No longer does the data center staff have to handle the deluge of change requests, armed with only manual procedures and minimal knowledge of the business impact or priority of the changes. No longer do staff members need to cross their fingers in the hope that changes have been completed successfully and have not violated the mantra of “do no harm” to the IT environment in the process.
When a change request comes in, the staff simply categorizes the change and the system does the rest, all according to policy and best practice processes within IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) guidelines. This system: > Prioritizes change requests based on business impact
> Adapts the approval and planning processes to the level of change risk, scope, and urgency
> Implements authorized changes according to policy
> Keeps the change management team updated on the status of the change process every step of the way
> Verifies successful change completion and closes the associated change request when verification is completed, thereby closing the loop
> Provides comprehensive tracking and reporting for regulatory compliance
In addition, the solution continually monitors the IT environment, enforcing standard configurations and automatically removing unauthorized software to ensure that servers don’t “drift” from standard configurations. That’s not all. Because of the level of automation and integration achieved in change and configuration management processes, the staff can now pursue initiatives to optimize the data center through the implementation of virtualization and utility computing technologies. Through these efforts, IT can eliminate the waste and resultant high costs of server underutilization, while at the same time, improve service and business agility.
Operations
The operations staff can keep every one of the hundreds, even thousands, of client machines (desktops, laptops, PDAs) scattered across the enterprise humming with the proper complements of authorized, up-to-date software, all while lowering the cost of client management.
When a new employee comes on board or a current employee changes roles, the BSM solution automatically springs into action, provisioning the employee with the appropriate machine, configured according to that employee’s role and conforming to corporate policy. When a new software patch or update is received, the solution automatically:
> Distributes the patch or update to the appropriate machines
> Verifies that the software has been successfully installed on all affected machines and closes the initiating request
> Provides comprehensive tracking and reporting for regulatory compliance
> Generates tickets to the service desk identifying any machines not successfully updated
> Continually monitors the configuration of client machines, detecting and correcting any variation from authorized configurations
The operations staff can quickly provide new employees with the productivity tools they need, and ensure that all client machines are fully protected with the latest updates and patches.
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