Step-by-step to superior service

How the ITSO five-step can help organisations recover from a disconnect between business and IT.

Country music fans dance the Texas Two-Step. Movie buffs have Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. Organisations wanting to recover from a disconnect between business and IT departments, on the other hand, need to learn the ITSO Five-Step.

By doing so, organisational departments will be able to coordinate better than well-seasoned dance partners, and the outcome will be far less suspenseful than the finale of a Hitchcock thriller.

IT Service Optimisation (ITSO) is a five-step, iterative process that optimises IT planning and service performance, while cutting costs and mitigating risks. Most importantly, it fully aligns the IT’s activities toward achieving the business objectives of the company. But achieving this requires knowing and following its steps in sequence, and having the tools needed to fully support the process.

Five steps forward
As mentioned, ITSO is a five-step process, four of which address the planning and provisioning of IT services, while the last one deals with its ongoing management.

Step one – understand business objectives
Failing to understand business objectives can be disastrous. The City of Shanghai, for example, spent US$1.2 billion building the world’s first magnetic levitation train. Running at over 400kph between the city and its airport, it makes the 30km journey in under eight minutes. It is a marvelous piece of engineering, but makes its trips largely empty. The city terminal is not located near where most travelers need to go, so it is quicker for them to make the trip by cab.

As IT departments don’t have billions of tax dollars to spend on their bright ideas, it is even more essential that business requirements, priorities and strategic goals are fully understood. This must be accomplished long before one even begins to look at what kind of hardware or software to deploy.

Step two – prioritise services and assess risk levels
Once one understands the business objectives, the priority of services becomes clear i.e. the organization can determine the important factors related to improving business results, and those elements which are less important or even trivial. This allows one to correctly allocate money, personnel and other limited resources.

Step three – establish services levels
Now comes the task of determining what levels of service are required for those priority services in order to meet business objectives. It is never the case that every process and every user requires six nines of uptime and limitless bandwidth with millisecond response times. Yet certain users and applications do merit such features. Service level requirements must, therefore, be set with care and should be documented in a service catalogue. In some cases, service level agreements (SLAs) may be negotiated between IT and the business unit. Such SLAs should be expressed in business terms that are meaningful to clients.

Step four – plan and provision services
Once requirements have been fully established using the first three steps – and not before – it is time to look at the actual applications and hardware. This applies both to building one’s own application as well as making purchases. In doing so, it is critical to not only look at an application’s functionality, but its speed and performance.

Recently, for example, a multi-billion dollar retail firm built an application in house, which ran beautifully in initial tests, but failed once it was deployed to the firm’s 600 locations. The company had to scrap its proprietary application and go with a commercial one that could scale to the necessary workload. Such a situation can also occur with hardware. A telecom, for instance, was switching customers to new billing software when, shortly before the go-live date, analytical modeling spotted a bottleneck on a server that had escaped notice up to that point. They were able to correct the problem the day before a batch of customers switched over to the new system.

Step five – manage service performance
There is a battlefield maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy – and so it is with IT deployments. No matter how perfect the planning, it still needs to be kept working in the hands of users and in a changing business environment. This requires constant monitoring of performance indicators and swiftly reacting to any problems or potential problems that could threaten service delivery.

Reaching step five, however, is not an endpoint. All it does is bring one back to step one. While continuing to maintain the existing scene, it is now time to take another look at the updated business objectives, reexamine risk levels and priorities, adjust and improve service levels, and work out how to bring IT and business into even greater alignment.

Four tools
Now, all that may sound fine, but ITSO is a process, and process is only half of any equation. Whether one is baking a cake, repairing a car or building a network, one doesn’t just need the instructions, but also the tools. ITSO is no different. In this case, four key toolsets are required. In many cases organisations already have one or more of these tools in place, even if they don't have the full complement.

Event monitoring – bare bones event monitoring is a reactive process of tracking customer complaints, service outages or other discrete incidents. More sophisticated event monitoring involves tracking trends and performance indicators that can point to a potential upcoming adverse event, and alerting IT staff so they can take corrective actions before the event occurs.

Performance management – These tools gather performance data on a routine basis and allow system administrators to drill down into the data and discover the root cause of a service breakdown or anomaly so the problem does not recur. Proactively, they can be used to spot trends to predict future needs or bottlenecks. They can also identify underutilised resources that can be repurposed rather than having to buy more hardware. There is a vast assortment of performance management tools available, some of which come from the hardware manufacturers, others from third party software vendors, and still others of which are open source. While these are better than nothing, they are most effective when used with a management console, which correlates the data from all these sources so it can be analysed as a whole.

Performance reporting – While event monitoring and performance management tools are used primarily within the IT department, performance reporting tools also act as a bridge between IT and the business and financial units of the enterprise. Reports can be automatically generated on a regular basis, or generated for a specific planning activity.

Capacity planning – These tools form the link between the data gathering and provisioning step of ITSO. Without the ability to accurately determine what technology is needed to meet the business targets and desired service levels, planning becomes a hit or miss proposition. Capacity planning tools take the guesswork out of the equation, delivering highly accurate predictions of exactly what a company needs to buy, so it doesn't overspend, nor does it suffer service breakdowns.

The right combination
Combining the ITSO process with the appropriate management tools unites the IT and business units in achieving common, agreed-upon objectives. By learning and using the ITSO Five-Step, company meetings about IT objectives can achieve the harmony of a royal ball, rather than the chaos of a boardroom brawl.