Recently, in Toronto, Canada, I had the pleasure of meeting a number of IT professionals from a wide range of industries who have a common passion, common challenges and a common opportunity to bring their IT organizations to the next level of excellence.
Their common passion? Hockey. And they played a lively CA Technologies-sponsored game on the Toronto Maple Leaf’s rink at the Air Canada Center.
Their common challenge? Juggling increased business demands and getting squeezed by tight IT budgets in a tough economic environment.
Their common opportunity? With a modest investment in new game-changing IT management technology, they can tweak their operational processes to get a huge uplift in IT efficiency and service quality.
Take a walk through hockey history, and you’ll come upon two game changers. Gerry Cheevers (Figure 1) changed goal-tending from hugging the net and deflecting the puck with stick and skates alone to using the whole body and pads. Bobby Orr (Figure 2) changed strategy and plays by revolutionizing the role of defenseman with his aggressive and exquisitely-timed rushing.
Building upon old skills, they introduced new ways of looking at the field of play and how to apply them to their team’s advantage in the heat of the game. IT operations has the same game-changing opportunity today. Consider common IT team positions today (Figure 3) and the classic processes of event, incident and problem management (Figure 4). 
As I had noted on last week’s blog The Illusion of ITIL, many IT organizations are either strictly implementing ITIL processes soup-to-nuts or they are implementing ITIL-inspired processes by picking and choosing aspects of ITIL to suit their needs and their organizational realities.
As an accomplished IT Director recently told me, “We’ve had our event, incident and problem management processes in place for some time, but we don’t think about them. They are just part of our DNA – what we do daily as a matter of course.”
Like many organizations, they built processes that reflected parts of ITIL and they weren’t religious about it.
Today, there are three key IT management game-changers: (1) proactive, application-aware infrastructure management, (2) proactive, transaction-aware application performance management and (3) cross-domain service operations management.
For example — Like Gerry Cheevers’ and Bobby Orr’s innovations in sports — Service Operations Management lets you and your team look at the game differently, make new plays and score higher. The innovation is the new ability to see the IT environment (Figure 5) in real-time in terms of how it supports and impacts business services. The new play is ‘inserted’ into your existing event, incident and problem management game-plan (i.e. processes) (Figure 6).
Figure 5 is a real-time cross-domain (i.e. cross-silo) model of a business service. The model’s underlying engine dynamically calculates the relative impact that service components have on service quality/availability. It bases its calculations on the actual state of the components in the model and it gets change-of-state alerts from tools that directly monitor the infrastructure and application domains.
For example, the red circles and dotted red line indicate that a server incident is having the greatest impact on the business service, and that business transactions performance degradation (i.e. poor user experience) is the symptom.
The yellow circles indicate that another server is in trouble, but unlike the server in red, this server’s incident is due to a network issue, not the server itself. And yellow means that it is impacting the service (i.e. transactions) less than the red component.
This dynamic calculation of service impact (i.e. the yellow box in Figure 6) can be seamlessly inserted into your current operational processes. This enables Level 1 support teams to triage service incidents faster, prioritize the order incidents they address, resolve more incidents themselves and therefore escalate fewer incidents to Level 2 and 3 experts and improve mean-time-to-repair.
Examples of results? As Nalco Company (a world-leading environmental sustainability company) stated at CA World 2011, game changers like this support current best practices, can bypass incident management war room meetings and can reduce problem management from months to one week.
As covered in a previous blog on Systems Thinking, game-changing technologies and ITIL/ITIL-like processes “put more science into the art of IT Operations.” I’ll add to this perspective in future blogs.
In the meantime, consider the following three questions.
- How well-documented are your event, incident and problems management processes?
- How are siloed operations and support impeding your ability to “see” business services end-to-end in real time?
- Where in your operational processes could you use a game changer to speed triage and resolution?
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