infoTECH Feature

September 29, 2015

Mind the Gap: Eluding the ITSM Slippery Slope

By Special Guest
Antonio Piraino, CTO, ScienceLogic

Administering ITSM comes with some slippery rabbit holes, and is much like the famous Alice in Wonderland quote: “If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there.”  We’ve heard a lot about the gaps between ITAM (IT Asset Management) and ITSM (IT Service Management), the gaps between ITIL and ITSM, and more recently the gaps between ITSM and ITSSM, and even the more nuanced maturation levels of your ITSM.  What they all have in common from the outset is reliance on appropriate, accurate, immediate and contextual data.  Without timely and relevant data, your processes, people, governance, and your entire IT vision all become manipulated and bent in imprecise manners, yielding your ITSM ineffectual.  

The problem of discovering, capturing and processing IT relevant data is hardly a new one, but it’s getting bigger.  We’ve seen it through the waves of change in the IT industry – as we went from mainframe to server client, to virtualization, to cloud, and to Big Data; so too came the wave of massive volumes of data, requiring processing at more onerous speed.  Layer on top of that data, a system that manipulates the data for purposes of risk and compliance, it’s easy to see how inaccuracies and untimeliness can manifest themselves in corroding the investment in your ITSM system.  

More specifically, If ITSM is expected to carry out policy, and align costs to a service, for example, it is reliant on understanding the assets on which the service depends – including configuration, processes, licensing, interdependencies and performance, to name but a few data points. Now consider the fact that today’s average enterprise has hundreds of combined public cloud and private cloud services, and the compounding of the problem becomes evident.

Antonio Piraino, CTO, ScienceLogic (News - Alert)

 The real issue starts at the grass roots level: discovery techniques and visibility is becoming more and more critical to the control and integrity of these systems.  Having the ability to provide the discovery of assets and services (for ITSM catalogs), and their dependent infrastructure resources, as well as the population of incidents and even ticket updates is a request that we’re seeing daily on a global scale.

 Enterprise Service Management (ESM) technologies in general, are reliant on efficient mechanisms for discovering and populating assets in databases, and making changes to inventory on a live basis. This notion of database population is as relevant in ITSM (a subset of ESM) as it is in HR Service Management or Finance Service Management.  Without such a real time input mechanism, Configuration Management databases can rapidly become outdated, and incorrect, putting the integrity of the entire system, and business policies at risk.  

Beyond having an updated repository of configuration and asset data, is the ability to inform the Service Management Database hosting the inventory of any incidents or changes in state associated with those assets or services which, in turn, drives actions as predicated by a company’s business policy.  Without a consistent and meticulous detection of fault and health issues, the list becomes sedentary and meaningless – something that most enterprises, when pressed, begrudgingly admit to having as their status quo inside their datacenters.

The integrity of business policy and expectations typically manifest through some form of SLA associated with the more modern version of ITSM (namely: ITSSM, IT Service Support Management), that can only be measured once data points are captured around breaches of that SLA, and of equal importance, when remediation to those breaches in state or performance take place.  Having a method for continuous monitoring of both the state and health of assets and services is a critical input into such SLA’s.

As a further example to the criticality of data capture and management in the ITSM or ITSSM system, in some cases, particularly internationally, there is a discomfort with data being provided solely to a US based SaaS (News - Alert) platform – whereas the ability to feed or retain many of the salient configuration and performance data points through other on-premise systems, is something that is gaining a lot of traction.

In summation, the timely and complete visibility of data is a gap that has become a major headache for ITSM operators that need resolution. There’s no point in making decisions against old and inaccurate data.  As Alice in Wonderland says: “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”  




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers