How IT Operations Can Dramatically Improve Service Quality, Reduce Risk, and Drive Down Costs

Imagine you’re going on a trip. Not just any trip, but a long-distance adventure. You pick a random destination, pack up the car, fire up your GPS, and away you go. You turn on the radio to get the local traffic report. Later on, you listen to the weather forecast—heavy snow to the north, so you decide to take the southern route. The world is your oyster—you know where you’re going, you know how to get there, and the passing scenery sets your heart singing.

Now, think about a world with no maps, no GPS, no traffic reports, and no weather forecasts—in fact, no way of knowing where you are or how to get to your destination. It’s completely unthinkable. That’s the thing about travel—unless you can see where you’re going, you’re not going anywhere at all. You might as well be driving blindfolded in that snowstorm.

So, what has this got to do with IT Operations? In many ways, it’s exactly the same. If you have zero service visibility, you can’t deliver high-quality business services. Once again, you’re going nowhere. For example, when a server goes down, how do you know which business services are affected? Will that scheduled change just take your payroll system offline for a few hours—or will it also shut down your e-commerce website? These are critical questions—in the worst case, millions of dollars hang in the balance.

Exactly What Is Service Visibility?

Picture a city map. It shows all of the roads and how they are connected—but it doesn’t tell you how to get from point A to point B. You can see the roads, bridges, and so on—but there’s no service-level view. For instance, there may be 100 different bus routes in the city, but the map doesn’t show this. When there’s construction or a traffic accident, there’s no way to figure out which bus routes are affected.

IT organizations usually have a similar map that shows how their IT infrastructure is connected. These maps are relatively easy to build using traditional discovery tools. However, just like the city map, there’s no service-level view. IT doesn’t know how their business services are routed over their IT infrastructure—they have no visibility of the “bus routes” that their business services use. And, when there’s construction or a traffic accident—a change or an outage—they don’t know which business services are affected.

Why Don’t IT Organizations Have Service Visibility?

It is not IT’s fault. Until recently, mapping business services was incredibly hard. Many IT organizations have tried to map their business services manually—and most have failed. To start with, mapping a single business service can take weeks. No one person has the end-to-end picture— instead, you have to extract, verify, and correlate tribal knowledge from multiple domain experts. Multiply that effort by hundreds of business services, and the work required is phenomenal. Even if you manage to map your business services manually, you’re still no further ahead. With today’s agile cloud environments, IT infrastructure and business services are incredibly dynamic. With manual mapping, there’s just no practical way to keep up with the increasing pace of change. As soon as you’ve mapped a service, the service map is probably already out of date.

Is There an Easier Way?

Imagine if you could map your business services automatically. Even better, what if your service maps were automatically updated every time there was an infrastructure change? You’d have an accurate, up-to-date view of how all of your business services are delivered—without all of the pain of manual mapping. There are now automated service mapping solutions that make this a reality. However, it’s important to choose the right service mapping technology. Look for a solution that:

• Automatically maps complete business services within a few hours.

• Does not require any significant input from your domain experts.

• Traces business services across your entire IT environment, not just one or two technology domains.

• Maps your custom-built business services, not just standard services such as email or ERP systems.

What Are the Benefits?

With automated service mapping, you’ll get complete service visibility—so you can answer the really tough questions. You’ll be able to:

• Get to the root cause of business service issues, rather than pointing fingers in the war room.

• Instantly see the business impact of planned changes, rather than spending days figuring out which business services are affected.

• Easily optimize the architecture of your business services, reducing costs and improving reliability.

• Dramatically de-risk and simplify major transformation initiatives, such as data center consolidations and migrations.

Recap

Your business depends on you to provide high-quality, cost-effective business services. But, if you don’t have service visibility, you’re driving blind.

Automated service mapping gives you the service visibility you need. It’s fast and intelligent—so you always have an up-to-date, accurate view of your business services. As a result, you’ll resolve service issues more quickly, understand the business impact of changes, and reduce service delivery costs.

Discovernet.ca is always here for you every step of the way when it comes to improving service quality and reducing risk. If your IT team has questions, we’ve got answers. Reach out to one of our solution engineers today by calling 905-814-8383 or visiting http://discovernet.ca/contact-us

Thanks to ServiceNow for their white paper on automated service mapping, “Service Visibility, Your Green Light to a Clear Road Ahead”.