In this track, we’ll introduce the concept of joined-up, or ‘integrated’, management. Integrated management is where different devices, operating systems and applications are managed by tools and processes that look across all the elements together. These tools and processes can exchange information seamlessly. They enable changes and actions to be implemented in one place and then enabled throughout the ‘stack’.
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For many companies, IT has grown haphazardly, accumulating a patchwork of applications, infrastructure and tools. The end result is that it takes a lot of time, money and resources to manage, and change is difficult to implement. Few companies can claim to have a joined-up management approach. Most report either quite a few gaps in integration or no integration at all. Yet getting systems to work effectively together is core to gaining a coherent view of the components that make up a service. This is a key barrier to process automation and means wasted time moving between physically separate systems. Putting in place modern, capable and effective systems management offers multiple benefits. Companies with better integrated management are generally more responsive to business requests for change. They are often better aligned to the needs of the business. And they tend to also have a service-centric approach to IT. The result is that both the business and end-users are generally much more satisfied with the performance of the IT department.
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Disjointed IT systems management increases both cost and inefficiency. Many of these problem areas are central to day-to-day IT systems management. Using multiple tools to manage complex environments results in elevated overhead. It creates difficulties in gaining a true picture of the operational and services status. This results in staff inefficiency as it makes prioritisation difficult. And it leads to a fire-fighting approach to IT management. Added to this is the challenge of keeping servers and applications current. This is being made more acute by the move to virtualisation and the need to ensure the proliferation of virtual machines is kept up to date and compliant. Many companies still have a manual approach to patch testing and application. This means it takes a long time, costs a lot and ties up people who could be doing more valuable tasks for the business. It’s no surprise then to see that staff struggle to keep pace – both with requests for additional services and changes to existing ones. Yet it is often the ability to deal with change requests effectively that results in the highest satisfaction rankings for IT.
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Maintaining a highly controlled environment is operationally taxing. The number of staff required to manage IT systems increases quickly as more policies and process are added. This is particularly noticeable as companies increase in size. Despite having a highly integrated and structured environment, the integration is still dependent on people to monitor and manage the various systems. There are a number of approaches today’s companies take to manage this situation. The first is an ad-hoc approach. Companies that adopt this tend to have the fewest number of people managing resources. They also usually have the lowest level of investment in IT and very low satisfaction ratings. The second is semi-structured with a good degree of flexibility. This tends to take some of the concepts of service management frameworks such as ITIL and implement those that make sense. It allows things to be managed well enough and focus resources on other areas. The third approach is highly structured with strictly defined policies and processes. This people-intensive route is the one taken in industries where regulation and compliance are paramount. Or where IT services are the primary method of how the company does business and where any interruption in service could have devastating effects. Increasing the levels of structure and process requires a lot of human effort. As process increases, systems management splits into separate domains with dedicated, specialised staff. They are then responsible for implementing day to day operational management and change control. The number of people needs to be increased as there is little in the way of assistance or automation in place.
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Even if we’ve got the processes and integrated tools we need, progress will be problematic unless we can change the way management works in practice. With virtualisation, many companies now have the same number of workloads running on fewer physical servers. However, they tend to be managed in the same manual way as before. This limits the true potential of virtualisation, which is to have a dynamic and responsive infrastructure where workloads can be set up, moved and taken down as required. Changes and processes are generally implemented by people, not systems. And people work in human timescales and are prone to error. Without automation, a company is unlikely to be able to move to a private cloud model. We can help IT see the benefits of automation. Executed correctly, automation can help to add value to IT by enabling staff to work on high value services rather than being stretched beyond their limits on routine work such as patch management and performance monitoring. But trust is also a big element. Many IT managers feel uncomfortable having systems make automatic decisions in real-time. Putting in place service monitoring and alerting systems can help to begin the process of automation by alerting managers to issues and recommending courses of action.
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IT services are composed of a number of individual service elements. Many companies manage each element as a silo, with separate management tools and an individual service level agreement for each system. This results in systems that are generally pretty good when considered from the outside but, when combined, often result in a poor service delivered to users. In the example shown, taking a systems approach shows all systems meeting their agreed SLA. However, in a service-centric view, the end-user experience is not at the required level. This is often called “Watermelon Metrics”. All the systems outwardly show green, but it is hiding red for the service underneath. Today, a growing number of companies focus on what must be delivered first and then manage the systems in such a way as to guarantee – as far as practical – the quality of the service regardless of the systems that make it up. This demands that a holistic view must be taken across all systems. It means they must be able to alert managers when the service starts to have issues. It involves looking at application performance and proactively testing the individual systems. And it enables immediate remediation to be put in place before a problem becomes noticeable to users.
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When a user calls to report a problem, they are primarily concerned about the experience they receive at the point of delivery. It’s a service issue. Thinking about IT as an end-to-end managed service is challenging. In fact, it may seem unattainable when there are other pressing priorities. But let’s consider this from a “feet on the ground” perspective. However IT is delivered, a problem is a problem and must be resolved. Otherwise users become unhappy and the business suffers. The issue then becomes how efficient and effective IT can be at resolving problems and whether this is valued by the business. What often makes the biggest difference to the satisfaction of users – and the value of IT to the business – is the overall approach to IT service management. The starting point is getting IT more closely engaged with the business. This is predominantly about getting to know the issues and drivers that the organisation as a whole is facing. The next stage is to take this understanding and translate it into the specifics of what’s required from IT. The ideal result is a mutual agreement on the portfolio of services to be delivered and the recognition of the investment needed to underpin it.
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Traditionally, product enhancement has been about continually adding new features. But this approach is not the preferred way for IT systems management. Instead, the focus should be on improving the interoperability and openness of the available tools. Doing so has a big impact on your ability to control the quality of IT service delivery to the business. Those companies that have implemented the most effective management tend to have two things in common: The first is the use of a consolidated set of tools. One with a single main management suite that’s supplemented by a limited set of “best of breed” solutions. The second is they make regular, rolling investments in keeping those tools up to date.
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Those companies that have implemented the most integrated IT management tend to keep it in a state of constant renewal. Typically they will refresh it within a three year time span. However, those companies that suffer a lot of fragmentation put almost no investment at all into management. The result is that only default tools that come with products tend to be used. As such they tend to be faced with a multitude of old, inefficient tools that lack functionality and integration. The good news is, that this means that even a little investment in a consolidated management toolset can start to work wonders on the ability to manage IT and improve the effective service delivery. This is a tangible area where IT on its own can make a unilateral investment in management tools and, in doing so, start to put some structure and process around important elements of IT delivery. Starting small with realistic goals is important, as a full blown project looking to consolidate everything is more likely to result in nothing of value being implemented.
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So let’s focus in on how Microsoft System Center 2012 helps you deliver IT as a service. Microsoft System Center 2012 offers the critical capabilities you need. App Controller allows application owners to manage their apps across private and public environments. Service Manager offers the standardised self-service catalogue that defines “templates” for your applications and infrastructure. Microsoft System Center App Controller, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft System Center Service Manager and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager work together to maintain the service model. Orchestrator and Service Manager enable orchestrated automation for the process workflows required to drive your provisioning and monitoring tools. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager provision physical, virtual and cloud environments. And Microsoft System Center Operations Manager monitors your application services to help you deliver predictable service levels. Importantly, it doesn’t matter where your data centre resources are deployed – from physical boxes to public cloud, the common management experience helps deliver IT as a service with System Center addressing all the capabilities required to deliver private and hybrid models of computing.
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To finish, we’ll look a little closer at Orchestrator 2012, the process automation component of the System Center solution. This is what enables you to build a cost-effective and flexible infrastructure using what you already know and own. With Orchestrator, you can make the most of your existing data centre investments by integrating, extending and interoperating with a variety of tools and systems. This helps you deliver flexible and reliable data centre services. It does so by orchestrating process workflows across multidisciplinary silos. Ultimately, it lowers costs and improves predictability by automating your private cloud, reducing error-prone manual activities.
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