As people become increasingly accustomed to accessing applications to do things like review personal account information, track shipments, check on bank balances, rent cars, log hours for work-related projects, IT organizations are being tasked more than ever with coming clean on service availability and service performance. In the end, it's the availability of these business services that drive the business … not the availability of a database server, network device, or web server... And so it appears that the Age of Services has arrived.
In the spirit of the summer season, we'll posit that business service management could be likened to trying to survive a summer gathering with family and friends-- like a picnic or barbeque. It's easy to find parallels between coordinating smooth summer experiences and the challenges associated with meeting customer demands for business services.
Business service management is key to ensuring that your company is able to operate effectively and offer customers the services for which they pay and expect to receive. Similar to a summer gathering, effective relationship and event management skills can be used to make sure your summer picnic or barbeque is operationally "up and running".
In order for your summer activity to go smoothly, there are a host of variables that need to be favorably coordinated; the disruption of any one could result in a chain reaction leading to a disaster. For instance, friends and family will arrive at your home for a barbeque or party at staggered times throughout the afternoon, each with varying needs and requests. Once gathered, interpersonal relationships between different people come into play and you may be called upon to navigate multiple challenges simultaneously while giving your undivided attention to the group as a whole to ensure — at the end of the night — a successful gathering. In this analogy, the "gathering" is a business service, and the individual attendees are the underlying IT components.
The type of social skills required in this analogy is similar to the technology used in an IT service dependency mapping and monitoring solution — like ServiceWatch — that provides instant, accurate and complete visibility into service health and into the health of the individual IT components that underpin the service.
Think about it. If Uncle Steve trips over the barbeque grill and spills his mug of ice cold beer all over your neighbor's new girlfriend and her brand new dress, it can cause a chain reaction. And will end up affecting your neighbor, when he has to go over his new girlfriend's apartment down the block to grab a change of clothes for her. Your neighbor may have promised your daughter Lizzy to have a "catch" with her, but now Lizzy has no one to play with. By now, you too have been distracted and most of those burgers and hot dogs you've been nursing over for the last 20 minutes have been burnt to a crisp, and now, well… now the barbeque is just about ruined--all because Uncle Steve had one too many libations.
In complex IT landscapes, where business services are dependent upon a host of individual components, many of which are themselves associated with more than one business service, pinpointing the Uncle Steve component (whether retroactively or in advance) can be the difference between success and failure. If you had the foresight to know that Uncle Steve was going to trip, and either stopped him from having that third drink, the entire chain reaction would have never occurred. Lizzy would have played "catch" and the hamburgers and hot dogs would have been cooked to perfection.
It's the same with business services. Using an IT service health monitoring product that employs an inclusive yet easy-to-understand dashboard monitoring all the key business services in your data center, provides insight not only into overall application availability and performance but also into how each individual component or event affects the entire business service.
As we move forward into the Age of Services, it's actually a bit surprising to think that it's taken this long for companies to demand this kind of transparency from their IT teams. There is no question that innovative companies will continue to build new technology-enabled business services. To remain competitive, they will need to deploy solutions to manage service availability — both to avoid downtime in the first place, as well as to quickly restore services when the inevitable interruptions arise.
I know this was a long post, but the bottom line: have an awesome summer and try not to think of Service Availability until the barbeques and beach trips are done. And when you do, consider ServiceWatch!
Next: Effective IT — like any good road trip — "Starts with the Map."
