Hmm…I think your business health is in need of an accurate and up-to-date service mapping treatment.
Those of us who spend our days (and — too often! — nights) working to develop, improve, market, sell and maintain ServiceWatch have a habit of finding new ways, oftentimes through analogy or metaphor, to describe the importance and function of our platform. And so, in light of this, today we're going to present an analogy around human physiology and biological composition.
All of us have either personally experienced, or know people who have themselves experienced, health issues. And when these issues arise, we tend to turn to medically trained personnel to help resolve the issues. Doctors will oftentimes leverage a number of diagnostic tools or screening devices based on the manifested symptoms in an effort to isolate the root cause of the health issue. These diagnostics are rooted in an advanced knowledge of how the human body functions: individual components that compromise specific systems that — in turn — power one or more bodily functions.
For example, consider the cardiovascular system, which consists of the heart, pulmonary and systemic circulation loops, and blood vessels, and the approximately five liters of blood that the blood vessels transport. This system — responsible for transporting oxygen, nutrients, hormones and cellular waste products through the body — is considered mission-critical for supporting human life.
Drilling down more granularly, there are several types of blood vessels: arteries and arterioles, capillaries, and veins. Blood itself also consists of several individual components, such as white blood cells, platelets and plasma. There are also several sub-systems, processes and functions which are self-contained and yet are components in the overall cardiovascular ecosystem, including: coronary circulation and hepatic portal circulation.
All of these elements combine into a single system that is responsible for the sustenance, regulation and protection of each individual human. But — more importantly for the purposes of this article — the cardiovascular system can also be likened to a business service.
A business service is a service that is provided to customers or employees that depends upon the interdependent operability of IT components that can include, for example, applications, servers, network devices and storage gear.
So — as per our analogy — a business service can be thought of as a system that performs specific, and sometimes critical, tasks within a business landscape. Just as the cardiovascular system powers human functionality, a business service oftentimes powers critical business functionality. And just as the cardiovascular system is comprised of a number of individual components (e.g., heart, blood vessels, etc.) that each have their own sub-components (e.g., arteries, capillaries, veins, etc.), so to can business services be comprised of individual components that each have their own sub-components.
Okay, so you get it. So what's the big deal and why are we investing the energy to write this article? Right. Well just like there are medically trained personnel whose job it is to fix physiological issues, and who are assisted by various diagnostic tools in doing so, there are technically trained personnel whose job it is to fix IT issues, and who are assisted by various diagnostic tools.
One fundamental difference is that — by and large — human physiology is static across all individuals; there are few variations in normal anatomy. Systems are largely the same from one person to the next, which means that the diagnostic tools can, in most cases, be standardized and are accurate with a high degree of reliability.
This is quite different from business services and their constituent IT components. Taking a sample of five different banks, each offering online banking as a business service, will likely reveal five different hardware and software configurations that power their customer portals. So without uniformity in IT architecture and facing creative diversity in the underlying frameworks that power mission-critical business services, how can technically trained professionals diagnose and propose remedies for issues that impact business services? Without commonalities in symptoms from landscape to landscape, even the most knowledgeable and diligent IT professionals will struggle with providing timely and rapid responses to IT problems that can result in outages and lost revenue as the result of business services that are unavailable or deficient as a consequence of issues with an underlying component.
Medical personnel have textbooks, online resources and anecdotal support inasmuch as human systems lack considerable variance. IT personnel lack this same foundation, and therefore oftentimes resort of trial and error in their efforts to debug issues.
Queue ServiceWatch, hallelujah! ServiceWatch empowers IT professionals in just the same way as centuries of biological and physiological study have benefited medical professionals. ServiceWatch Business service management tools will create an accurate and up-to-date run-time service map. In short: you specify the business service, and we will map it out. Entirely. Completely. Comprehensively. And we'll update it over time in the event that any components that power the business service shift or change. Even better: we'll monitor it for you, and if a business service is suffering, we'll tell you exactly which underlying component is at fault.
Imagine walking into a doctor's office with a headache, and the doc — within minutes — is able to pinpoint the cause back to muscle tension in your left triceps. A quick massage, some "Icy Hot", and you're on your way … headache free.
Yep … ServiceWatch makes solving your IT headaches precisely that simple. Click to learn more about ServiceWatch.
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