By
Mary Nugent, Vice President, Software Consulting, BMC Software
and
Dr. Thomas Struck, Consulting Manager, BPM, IDS Scheer
We've been hearing about it for years now. That communication gap between IT and
the business. IT people traditionally view the IT infrastructure from the inside
out; that is, from the perspective of the hardware and software components that
provide services to the business. Lots of business managers view that same infrastructure
from the outside in, as a collection of services that support business processes.
The gap in the way they view technology and how they talk about it threatens business
success. Why? Because it prevents companies from unleashing the power of technology
to enhance efficiency, gain a competitive advantage, and drive business goals.
Fortunately, the landscape is changing. New solutions are making it possible
to reach common ground that promotes effective dialog between IT and business
owners. The solutions give business owners a better understanding of the IT
environment, and give the IT staff a better understanding of the business. A
major European bank, for example used such solutions to reduce its online credit
application lifecycle processing to 30 minutes - giving the bank a competitive
edge in an environment where the average processing time is two hours. A large
manufacturing firm used them to increase availability of key revenue and customer
satisfaction business services that support the sales process. If you'd like
to bring this same type of success to your business, read on.
It's an Evolution
In case you haven't noticed, there's been an evolution. IT service management
solution vendors have been working from the bottom up to develop tools that
improve service management and enable IT to align the infrastructure more closely
with the business. At the same time, the business side has been evolving business
process management (BPM) tools from the top down.
On the IT side, three technologies are fundamental in this evolution: Configuration
Management Database (CMDB), automatic discovery, and service impact modeling.
The CMDB maintains information about technology assets, IT processes, and people,
as well as descriptions, such as hardware and software configurations. Perhaps
the most important function of the CMDB, though, is to maintain the physical
and logical relationships of infrastructure components to each other and to
the business services they support.
Automatic discovery solutions have evolved to discover not only hardware and
software resources, but also the interconnections among IT assets. The result:
IT professionals now have a view of the physical dependencies of assets, which
helps them understand the impact assets have on each other. The solutions are
now able to discover the logical relationships of the assets, providing visibility
into the impact of physical assets on the logical assets they support.
Performance and scalability testing of business applications is typically conducted by testing experts late in the development cycle. For services...Learn More
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Performance and scalability testing of business applications is typically conducted by testing experts late in the development cycle. For services...
