Introduction:
The Importance of a Proactive, Profit-Driven IT Department
In an article entitled "Disillusionment" in the February 16, 1998 issue of InformationWeek, author Caryn Gillooly reported Gartner Group’s estimate that "70% of enterprise management software packages fail to be fully implemented, even after three years of work." The culprits behind the failure of these IT projects include a number of things including poor planning on the part of users, overselling on the part of vendors, complicated and misunderstood products, missing features, and mistakes made by users to cut costs or speed implementation, Gillooly writes in a June 10, 1998 issue.
Too often, IT staffing, money and time are in short supply, particularly in small- to mid-tier companies. And, because IT projects are viewed with a critical eye due to the reported failures, there is an increasing pressure for IT departments to be viewed not as "overhead," but as a strong contributor to bottom line profitability.
To help its customers proactively manage their IT resources, Forsythe Solutions Group developed its Enterprise Systems Management Services (ESMS) , an remote offering that helps to improve, control and facilitate a proactively managed IT environment while satisfying both business and IT service objectives. ESMS is a proactive management methodology that provides small to mid-sized companies with day-to-day remote network, systems and desktop service support necessary to optimize technology infrastructure uptime. It allows corporate executives CIOs, CFOs and directors to focus on "big picture" strategy by shifting the responsibility and burden of managing IT systems, network resources and technical support staff to Forsythe.
The foundation of ESMS is Hewlett-Packard Company’s IT Service Management software suite (ITSM). Service Level Management (SLM), the cornerstone of ITSM, essentially, is the strategy of defining, achieving, and maintaining required levels of IT service to the business user population with in the enterprise. SLM is an effective strategy because it focuses on the needs of the business user as the primary driver for the development of the IT infrastructure (According to HP's Doug McBride). Forsythe Solutions Group has built on ITSM by integrating ITSM with HP Openview Network Node Manager, ITO, ITA , DTA and ManageX products to provide a remote network, systems and desktop management services offering.
This paper will examine more closely the market dynamics that create such high demand for ESMS. We will also discuss how ESMS works and how it was developed. We will focus on the IT Service Management Institute and how they help Forsythe Solutions to implement Hewlett-Packard's ITSM product.
The Market Today
As IT departments begin to make the transformation from being "overhead" to making a more significant contribution to the bottom line, they are faced with a daunting set of challenges, regardless of the company size. To address those challenges, it becomes critically important for IT departments to abandon the reactive "firefighting" mentality that often accompanies the implementation of new technology and instead approach challenges from a proactive stance. In a successful and strategically aligned IT department, the use of planning and setting objectives based on a clear organizational vision leads to the development of clearly defined strategies. From there, the appropriate tactics, Service Level Management, for example can be applied (source: Doug McBride, HP). Service Level Management will be discussed later in greater detail.
As IT departments struggle to become proactive in their approach, they are also faced with a significant dearth of IT talent. Not only are skilled employees difficult to find and keep, working in a fast-paced environment also makes training time scarce, and financial resources are often stretched thin. Through mergers and acquisitions a growing number of smaller companies become part of larger, global companies, time zones often require 24-hour monitoring and management capabilities, tasks that require additional employees, or worse, additional hours on the part of existing employees. Increasingly, IT departments are called upon to do more work with fewer resources. Without those resources, an IT department cannot possibly align its efforts with the business objectives of the company.
In addition to staffing shortages, the technology itself poses a challenge for a typical IT department. The move from mainframe to open system environments has necessitated the need to manage a "heterogeneous" enterprise . These heterogeneous enterprise environments and the unique support requirements that accompany them have made servicing and monitoring network systems increasingly difficult.
Today, as open-systems applications like SAP become more prevalent, the business risks associated with IT increase significantly, simply because so many more functions throughout the company are affected by technology.
The presence of these risks, along with the staffing shortages and the need for IT departments to focus their efforts on the bottom line, points to the need for these companies to organize their standards, operating systems, servers, networks and desktops. ESMS offers the methodologies to allow a company to do just that. Specifically, implementing ESMS can result in significant benefits, enabling a company to:
Recognizing the challenges its customers were faced with and realizing that Service Level Management could greatly improve its customers’ handling of their IT systems, Forsythe Solutions Group began working with Hewlett-Packard to integrate its ITSM offering into the broader ESMS service offering. By doing so, Forsythe Solutions Group has taken the suite of HP OpenView components – HP OpenView Network Node Manager, HP OpenView ITO (IT Operations), HP ITA (Administration), HP DTA (Desktop Administration) , HP Manage X and HP ITSM -- and integrated them, creating an optimum Service Level Management solution with reporting capabilities supplied through Forsythe's web page.
Service Level Management: The Foundation of ESMS
All ESMS solutions are built upon the foundation of Service Level Management (SLM). The goal of ESMS is to establish and implement SLM methodologies and processes to deliver mission-critical applications at agreed-upon service levels. The primary focus is to establish proactive management principles based on meeting business objectives. These principles are intended to deliver the following:
SLM is a strategy of defining, achieving, and maintaining required levels of IT service to the business user within the enterprise. The IT organization has a strong influence on the strategy of the business and how the business results are achieved. Understanding the relationship between the IT organization and the business as a whole is essential to implementing the right solution.
SLM is an affective strategy because it focuses on the needs of the business user as the primary driver for the development of the IT infrastructure. An effective SL strategy takes into consideration the needs of the user population for any given application area when designing and implementing the portion of the IT infrastructure, instead of arbitrarily deploying computers and networks of various capabilities and capacities. It can also be used to help control burgeoning costs created by uncoordinated acquisitions of IT materials to support the distributed enterprise by focusing on providing required levels of service, rather than building infrastructure, according to Hewlett-Packard’s Doug McBride.
The Power of Service Level Agreements
While a SLM strategy is the foundation on which ESMS is built, development of a Service Level matrix made up of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is the first and most critical tactical step in defining that strategy. According to McBride, "SLAs are documents prepared explicitly to define the various service levels IT is expected to deliver within the enterprise. As part of the overall problem decomposition process, SLAs are written to focus on individual applications and the resources, hardware, software and personnel that support those applications as well as the service levels required by the application users, usually mission critical applications (those which are vital to the day-to-day operation of the enterprise and without which the enterprise would suffer significant business stress, mission sensitive applications (those whose loss or delivery of inadequate service would impact normal productivity), and those which have a high level of visibility within the organization (political)." (Successful Deployment of IT Service Management in the Distributed Enterprise, Doug McBride, HP).
Once SLA expectations have been defined, the agreement will result in producing actual metrics management needs to collect, monitor and report on. Fundamental to developing an effective methodology is the determination of acceptable standards for which information, support processes, events or activities can be managed on a continual basis.
SLAs can set requirements for IS and network services and weigh them against costs; chargeback systems may be employed to further this effort by making the costs well-known (Demonstrating How Your Network Meets Business Objectives and User Expectations, Network General). The methodology for establishing an SLA involves eight key steps:
SLAs have multiple benefits for CIOs, end users and network managers, according to Network General (Demonstrating How Your Network Meets Business Objectives and User Expectations). CIOs benefit from improvements in the evaluation of resources; improved relationships between users and senior management, and improvements in their job performance. End users see improvements in IT responsiveness, service to critical applications and cost control. For network managers, the benefits are as follows:
"The most important by-product of the SLA is the ability to
accurately define service-level objectives for the IT organization against a particular
application," writes McBride. As a result, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are a
natural by-product of the service levels determined and articulated through SLA process.
They are derived from what the stated business user service levels need to be based upon
the development of the SLA. SLOs allow for development of the actual metrics IT management
needs to collect, monitor, store and report on to determine if IT is meeting the agreed
upon service levels for the business application user, McBride says. Examples of metrics
include:
Forsythe, HP and the IT Service Management Institute: Working Together to Develop ESMS
From conception to completion Forsythe Solutions Group developed ESMS in a phased and flexible development approach. A flexible approach allows concept development to proceed in conjunction with implementation in order to reduce the overall period of time from project start to finish. ESMS followed five phases of development: Product Selection, In-depth design, Customization/Programming, Implementation and Personnel. Although this is a remote offering to our customers the methodologies used would apply to onsite enterprise management solutions as well.
Phase I: Product Selection
From the beginning, Forsythe Solutions Group felt it was extremely imperative not to lose site of the major business objectives driving this offering, which is the ability to provide our customers with a superior cost affective alternative to internalized IT management. In addition, it was important that the process of selecting the tools to provide the framework of ESMS not be resolutely influenced by vendor affiliations currently in place.
After reviewing and defining the high-level objectives and business requirements of the development project, product selection began in late September 1997 and continued until October 17, 1997. The framework selection was narrowed down to two providers. To determine which would be the final framework, an onsite side-by-side platform review of these products was conducted in Forsythe’s benchmark facility from October 6- 17, 1997. Consultants as well as directors and managers of the different product areas were able to review both platforms and the advantages and disadvantages. The Framework products were tested in 10 categories:
Installation, Discovery, Device management, Application Management, Traffic/performance management, Troubleshooting/fault Management, Service Desk, Web based reporting/Third party integration, look and feel/documentation, and Pricing and pricing structure. With in the Service Desk component it was essential the SLA be able to be associated with enterprise resources both on the human and component level.
By October 20, the HP OpenView framework and other associated products to be deployed initially by ESMS had been selected. The recent acquisition of Prolin by HP was a major factor in the selection of the HP openview suite of tools. Others in the field had explored the strategy behind enterprise systems, none had developed much detail about how these systems actually work, and real-life examples were essentially non-existent.
The Prolin product now known as HP ITSM originated in Holland therefore, little experience on ITSM existed in the United States. This is why Forsythe relied on the IT Service management Institute to successfully implement and integrate HP ITSM. The IT Service Management Institute is a membership-based business alliance network which provides proven consulting and education services to enable the practical alignment of IT Operation and Business processes. Forsythe Solutions and The IT Service Management Institute have since formed a strategic alliance based on the overwhelming value that the IT Service Management Institute brought to this project.
Phase II: In-depth Design
The in depth design phase was segmented into four categories: First the service offerings slated to be rolled out in the initial release of ESMS were defined and preliminary Service Level Agreements were developed. A service level matrix was established (means for matching service capabilities and functionality with service providers and service objectives). A service level matrix was organized into four groups: network, systems, desktop, and general. The service matrix resulted in the starting point for which the SLA framework was developed and the basis to document subsequent changes to the IT environment. This was necessary since, SLA’s are living documents and they will change as an IT environment changes. Initial SLA performance metrics were mutually agreed upon and often set at manufacturer recommended thresholds for reliability.
Secondly, Forsythe identified and acquired all the necessary components to enhance the existing management framework to support ITSM management capabilities.
Thirdly, a redundant, scalable and centralized network infrastructure was built to accommodate and deliver the functionality required by the customer including hardware, software and internet connectivity capabilities.
Finally, the environmental considerations for which the personnel and components of ESMS would function were defined and focused on centralized security, functionality and personnel working conditions. Many elements related to the environment were addressed in this phase. The most important being systems up time, customer data security and the reliability and delivery of management information to the customer. Forsythe planned for and secured space to support the consolidation of personnel and systems and made provisions to handle additional growth. All ESMS functions and systems had to be isolated and have no dependency on the internal Forsythe network infrastructure. All ESMS functions and systems were required to be self-sufficient and capable of 7 by 24-hour utilization without any downtime. To satisfy this, a UPS system and an external generator was acquired.
Phase III: Customization/Programming
The initial systems were built and tested in a controlled pilot environment All hardware and software integration were tested on the same components utilized during the product selection process.
The web-based reporting system is the differentiator between Forsythe Solutions Group and those of its competitors. This requires a great deal of customization to implement and must be maintained on an ongoing basis. Keeping the majority of customization and programming issues relegated to the development and enhancement of the web-based reporting system continues to be an ongoing priority. This is integrally linked to the choice of framework; the amount of integration available from within the framework has manifested itself in the amount of personnel and effort required to build and maintain the management systems.
Phase IV: Implementation
Forsythe began to migrate existing customers as well as new customers onto the new ESMS systems. This process was accomplished in phases. It was imperative that adequate time be dedicated to the design and customization phases to allow for a seamless transition
Phase V: Personnel
Forsythe identified personnel as the most important ingredient of ESMS. Acquiring and retaining technical staff is the greatest challenge most IT organizations face today. Forsythe Solutions is part of a fast-paced and rapidly changing industry where success is never permanent. ESMS success requires employees to embrace and excel at managing changing technology. Sharing knowledge amongst other team players to enhance ones technical ability and providing the leadership to foster a learning environment had never been more apparent than during the development of ESMS.
"The role of leaders at all levels is to demonstrate to people that they are capable of achieving more than they think they can achieve and that they should never be satisfied with where they are now. To change behavior and unleash new ways of thinking, a leader sometimes has to say, ‘Stop, you’re not allowed to do it the old way,’ and issue a challenge," according to British Petroleum’s John Browne.
How Customers Benefit
Customers can benefit from Forsythe Solutions Group ESMS services in multiple ways:
Conclusion:
With ESMS, Forsythe Solutions Group takes a company through the development of strategy and expectations, and uses that information to manage a company’s network, systems and desktops remotely. The ultimate result is a more effective deployment of IT resources and the ability to maximize the effectiveness of the technology infrastructure that supports mission-critical applications. Because ESMS enables IT departments to add significant value in the form of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, ESMS emerges as an invaluable tool for any proactive, profit-driven IT department.
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About the Author
Daniel J. Gallagher, Director of Enterprise Systems Management Services (ESMS) for Forsythe Solutions Group, spearheaded the development and creation of this unique new service offering. ESMS is the remote management of customer enterprise system environments designed to maximize technology infrastructure up-time. Prior to this new leadership role, Gallagher served in several key technical positions at Forsythe including Manager of Technical Services and Network Consultant. He also served as a Datacom Specialist with Sentinel Computer and Ameriplus. His background includes a number of certifications and extensive technical training. He earned the title of Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) in May 1998.
About Forsythe Solutions Group
With 25 branches throughout the United States, Forsythe Solutions Group is a nationwide value -added reseller for many "best of breed" manufacturers. Forsythe has been Hewlett-Packard's Top Performer for two consecutive years. The company also provides leasing through Forsythe McArthur, one of the nation's leading independent technology lessors. As a total solutions provider, the company has teams of technical experts that design and provide a wide range of implementation services for: UNIX/Open Systems, Networking, PC/nT, Storage Solutions, ERP Solutions and Enterprise Systems Management Services. Forsythe also has a multi-vendor benchmark lab facility at the company's headquarters facility in suburban Chicago.
Forsythe has a 27-year history of providing technology leasing, consulting, product distribution and management services to over 1,200 customers -- 25% of whom are Fortune 1000 customers -- at over 6,000 locations throughout the United States. The company reported 1997 revenues of $280 million and has over 300 employees.
For more information on the Forsythe Solutions Group, visit its Web site at: http://www.forsythesolutions.com.