Crossing the Chasm

Forward-thinking IT professionals are familiar with the idea of enforcing best practices using methods such as information technology service management (ITSM). Yet new research suggests that such a mission won’t transform any business until it has succeeded in uniting two interdependent and yet divided elements – IT operations and service desk. The divide is an “abyss between radically separate cultures, toolsets and processes,” according to Dennis Drogseth, Vice-President of Enterprise Management Associates, who recently published a white paper on the subject.

While Drogseth is quick to acknowledge that ITSM has become “a near-panacea for information technology,” its best practices weren’t necessarily adopted with the intention of forging harmony within IT. Rather, ITSM was initially viewed as a means of encouraging improvement within enterprise service departments, which, advocates felt, needed to develop customer relationships and improve quality of service. As a result, many enterprises used ITSM as a framework for managing service quality at the helpdesk level.

This would perhaps have sufficed, had the definition of ‘helpdesk’ not exploded beyond simple incident reporting. Scaled up to take on an all-encompassing ‘service desk’ role, today’s helpdesks frequently provide service, deploy assets and monitor service-level agreements. But according to EMA, they are not drawing sufficiently on the resources – nor applying the checks and balances – of IT operations, which delivers the performance and functionality that is critical to customers both within and outside the organization. One must feed and support the other.

Recognizing this as an opportunity as well as a challenge, many enterprises are taking an interest in other aspects of ITSM beyond its service-improvement capabilities, and vendors such as HP have stepped up to the plate in a bid to minimize the divide.

A call for convergence
“The need for integration and linkages into intelligence from both operations and the service desk is exactly where the rubber will meet the road for ITSM,” writes Drogseth in his white paper entitled Bridging the IT Operations Divide with ITSM. “With more complete, more relevant and more effectively shared information, IT is capable of raising its stature [internally] by supporting important business objectives.”

Why is integration so important? Drogseth notes that each side of the IT equation has valuable data, insight and perspective to share. Operations, which has already established quality objectives, boasts more automated diagnostic capabilities and proactive analytics than the service desk, which tends to deal more loosely with internal customers but is more process-aware. “By working together,” Drogseth observes, “value is created within both groups.”

The imperative to unite service and operations has not gone unnoticed by adopters of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a de facto industry standard for IT management that originated in Europe and is now gaining traction in the US (in a recent survey of enterprise customers, EMA discovered that best practice usage grew last year, with more than 60 percent of respondents now using ITIL for the basis of ITSM). “Organizations are now regrouping, evaluating options for best practices, and crossing the cultural boundaries in the enterprise,” writes Drogseth.

Most IT professionals will already recognize ITIL’s service support and service delivery models. Service desk (incident/problem management) and service-level management have been the most popular areas to apply best practices. Now, however, interest is escalating in ITIL’s centerpiece, configuration management database (CMDB), for managing change and integrating management investments. CMDB presents a one-stop shop repository that contains information on all relationships between system components, including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases. At the same time, it houses data about employees, locations, suppliers and business units. It offers a logical way to allow the different disciplines of problem and incident management, and performance and availability management, to intersect. Key among CMDB’s attributes is that it has sparked discussion within the industry and between vendors around collaboration and data exchange – in areas such as change management, accounting and billing, governance and visualization.

The HP approach
One of the more experienced vendors involved in ITSM is HP, which offers a methodology derived from extensive experience in delivering high-quality services for all kinds of IT environments. HP embraces best practices as defined by ITIL and helps its customers implement HP OpenView management solutions to more effectively monitor, manage and measure the performance of your IT infrastructure. New ITIL-friendly HP OpenView features include:

• HP OpenView Business Process Insight – tracks critical aspects of business processes that have been deployed, such as financial, customer experience and transaction volume
• HP Openview Service Desk and ServiceCenter – the flagship ITSM toolset provides service-level management capabilities as well as comprehensive service desk management. HP recently acquired Peregrine Systems’ ServiceCenter to enhance those capabilities
• HP OpenView Asset Management – HP has acquired asset management capabilities in the form of Peregrine Systems’ AssetCenter
• CMDB – a large portion of HP’s installed base uses ITIL’s CMDB model in its traditional HP OpenView Service Desk offering, as well as the new HP OpenView ServiceCenter.

Using HP OpenView, events are passed from operations to the service desk, where they’re handled automatically by service desk staff and then sent back to operations once the incident has been closed out. Synchronization occurs at several levels during the process. Problem resolution commentary is made available to the service desk as well as the operational owner. And because both HP OpenView ServiceCenter and Service Desk can gather specific asset information such as support contract and warranty details, and send it to the HP OpenView AssetCenter, it cuts down problem resolution time.

Drogseth concludes that HP “has a breadth and history in understanding the dynamics and evolution of the ITSM marketplace,” largely because of its “on the ground” experience via its professional services organization – which offers “valuable customer insight to help HP understand real customer needs.” The company has built a broad and balanced portfolio that supports infrastructure, service and business initiatives. Its open and modular product strategy uses web services as a vehicle for integrating different management solutions, and focuses on integrated security and compliance.

That said, buyers are easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of management software products, and HP is challenged, based on the complexity of its software portfolio, to deliver and market a simpler and more consistent value proposition – but “this is a hurdle experienced by all of the large management solutions providers,” says Drogseth.

Most importantly, HP’s efforts underscore the fact that ITSM stakeholders are reaching toward a common goal: to cross the chasm between service and operations, and to better enable IT to meet service-level agreements with the business, addressing the needs of both internal and external customers.

While uniting two different groups in any organization is a daunting task, especially when their priorities are different, ITIL and other forms of process development can help ease the tension and uncover common objectives. As Drogseth observes: “IT evolution is driven by the intersection of people, processes and technology, where all work together to meet service expectations.”

To read the entire white paper “Bridging the ITSM Operations Divide with ITSM” authored by Dennis Drogseth, please visit http://openview.hp.com/solutions/itsm under “What’s New.”