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Service management on a platter

The role of service management is accepted amongst Indian enterprises across business verticals, largely because of the fact that CIOs and top management are well versed with the need for IT infrastructure and how it contributes to the top and bottom line. By Faiz Askari

Organisations wants to optimise their IT investments so that they are in a position to rapidly and flexibly change and respond to business conditions, improve customer satisfaction and comply with both internal policies and external government regulations.

The interdependency between business and IT is becoming critical as businesses are under pressure to innovate or die. Service management is yet another weapon in the corporate arsenal to address these challenges.

Arup Choudhury, General Manager IT at Eveready says, “The role of service management is accepted amongst Indian enterprises across business verticals. This may be due to the fact that CIOs and their respective top managements are well versed with the need for IT infrastructure and it’s importance as a key driver for business. Service management is not a new concept, vendors have discussed it, the market has accepted it and people know about it.”

Evolving needs

Today’s IT environments are complex, and they often include resources from multiple vendors and platforms. To understand the status of a particular IT resource is to comprehend only a tiny part of the picture. To maximise the business value of an IT investment, a CIO must see how each resource affects the applications and the business processes that it supports.

R Dhamodaran, VP, IBM Software Group and ISV & Developer relations, IBM India says, “The demands placed by business on IT are escalating, with IT expected to be an integral contributor to meeting business objectives and not just a technology provider. Although 78 percent of CEOs surveyed by IBM believe that integrating business and technology is important to business growth, only 45 percent believe that their organisations have successfully achieved this goal.”

"IT manpower is a considerable expense for most companies and service management solution providers must create solutions that manage distributed IT networks with minimal manpower" - Rajesh Sharma DGM IT Television Eighteen India Ltd

Rajesh Sharma, DGM IT, Television Eighteen India Limited says, “The principal challenge is to integrate service management into an existing IT infrastructure. Companies seek IT service providers to develop, implement and manage new technologies and integrate them seamlessly with their existing IT infrastructure. Companies want more for less. IT manpower is a considerable expense for most companies and service management solution providers must create solutions that manage distributed IT networks with minimal manpower. When IT components go down, productivity is lost which is why companies are looking for solutions that depend less on manpower and at the same time can rectify a problem in the least possible time. Service management solution providers have to work on developing solutions that automatically detect faults, take the required action to rectify said fault and send information about the fault rectification to the central monitoring system.”

CIOs are finding that it’s harder to manage an in-house IT department. Arup Choudhury General Manager IT at Eveready affirms, “The rationale behind organisations choosing solutions such as service management is that the attrition rates of IT professionals are on the higher side. To maintain an IT department in such an environment isn’t easy. The availability of service management and other such solutions offers hope for organisations.”

About the technology

IT Service Management is a discipline for managing large-scale information technology systems. Philosophically it centres upon a customer’s perspective of IT’s contribution to business. Service management solutions stand in contrast to technology-centric approaches to IT management and business interaction.

Elaborating upon service management offerings, these are generally concerned with backoffice and not technology. For example, the process of writing computer software for sale, or designing a microprocessor is not the focus of this discipline, but the computer systems used by marketing and business development staff in software and hardware companies is. Many non-technology companies, such as those in the financial, retail, and travel industries, have significant information technology systems that are not exposed to their customers.

An option to be considered

Service Management solutions can be employed to help a CIO understand how the performance and availability of IT resources affect applications, processes, and services that power a business. These solutions also prioritise IT systems supporting business processes that have the greatest value, and not just the latest problem that crops up. However, revenue-generating activities, such as order processing—rather than internal processes, such as your human resources system—are prioritised in the event of a problem or outage occurring.

Choudhury says, “We have implemented service management for infrastructure and network management at Eveready Industries. Tracking SLA parameters that vendors have committed to is our biggest challenge. Most of the time the SLA is violated by the vendor and deducting money does not help, as business continuity suffers.”

Giving an insight into the status of service management in India, Sharma at CNBC TV 18 says, “The role of service management is becoming critical in managing IT operations in various industries. IT infrastructure is being used across the breadth of industries to achieve high productivity, increased customer satisfaction and lower cost. The effective use of IT infrastructure requires regular maintenance and support and that is where IT services come into play. In today’s world, IT infrastructure is being used in almost every industry and hence industry-specific service management is the need of the hour. Industry-specific technologies and processes can help reduce the cost of IT services and raise customer satisfaction through a professional approach to service delivery and reduced dependence on manpower.”

A panacea

Asset, network, application, configuration and performance as well as security are key areas of IT infrastructure that throw up problems on a day to day basis. Service management solutions effectively tackle issues and problems that arise in these areas.

Sharma says, “Cost savings are a primary focus area. In the context of IT infrastructure, manpower and downtime can prove expensive to a company and it is a challenge for IT service providers to provide more for less. Using service management solutions, the complete IT infrastructure and health of various components can be monitored continuously. Many activities that normally require the involvement of a lot of people can be accomplished remotely by a few people. Also service management solutions give alerts in advance regarding the health of system and network hardware and so on. This helps in taking preemptive action to avoid downtime.”

Integrating core business applications

Since businesses are not created at one go, it is unlikely that supporting IT processes are executed consistently and efficiently. Take, for example, the challenge of managing the availability of an e-mail application. To do this you must manage the server and storage. Now the server could be several Unix boxes or Windows and Linux machines. The storage set-up may consist of NAS boxes or just plain old DAS.

Dhamodaran adds, “To respond to rapid change and tap opportunities in a way that supports business goals and priorities, cross-enterprise IT processes must be integrated and automated. An organisation must be able to manage the relationships between people, processes, technology and information if it is to take control of IT process complexity and do away with inconsistencies.”

Service management solutions must also be comprehensive in terms of integrating business applications. Sharma says, “I think that service management does not offer seamless integration. There are multiple technologies, products, processes and solutions being used in the industry when it comes to IT infrastructure. Service management offerings that cater to the full spectrum simply aren’t available. Existing solutions lack one or more components hindering seamless integration.”

Sticking to core competencies

To help companies achieve optimal integration between IT and business, organisations are delivering on a progressive and actionable vision of IT service management—enabling clients to manage relationships between people, processes, technology and information to help deliver business benefits such as:

• Increasing revenue by bringing new and updated applications faster to market.
• Reduce costs through the rapid resolution of disruptive business problems.
• Improve change management with the ability to predict the impact of changes before they occur.
• Support compliance activities with detailed IT tracking and auditing tools.