Quocirca's Straight Talking: Service management

Service management of corporate IT will never work without solid operational processes, argues Quocirca analyst Jon Collins...

We hear a lot about how we should organise our IT infrastructures to provide an effective service to the business. Indeed, which CIO in his right mind would not agree that it was one of their strategic goals? All the same, while the theory may be fine, it's not necessarily that easy to deliver.

There are all kinds of issues that get in the way. Conflicting priorities, competitive pressures and even corporate politics all conspire to push the goal of service-centric IT ever further into the future.

For the largest organisations, the infrastructure itself can be just so huge that it becomes almost impossible to take a holistic view. As for smaller companies, they are often far too busy getting on with their business objectives. There is little time left to get strategic about IT.

All the same, research recently conducted by Quocirca on behalf of EMC suggests companies really do want to achieve the goal of aligning IT with the business. The research focused on the opinions of 250 UK and Irish IT decision-makers in larger companies - with revenues in excess of €100m.

The findings are very positive. For example, more than 80 per cent of respondents were confident that such alignments would result in improved business processes, better support for customer-facing activities and reduced overall costs. Clearly these are goals worth striving for.

The research shows that such intentions are turning into action. An efficiently run infrastructure must first be structured coherently. Second, it must be well-managed. Regarding the former, many organisations are looking to make efficiency improvements through the consolidation and rationalisation of their servers and storage hardware - more than half of businesses are looking to reduce the number of data centres they have over the next two years, and in certain sectors this figure is as high as 80 per cent. We also know from other research that there is much on-going consolidation going on inside the data centres.

Reasonable, yet lesser impetus is being put behind the implementation of resource management software, for example storage virtualisation and grid-related technologies. Perhaps this disinterest is unsurprising given the frequent misinformation surrounding these facilities - both virtualisation and grid are terms used in different ways by different vendors and it can be difficult for any end user organisation to make an informed choice. Still, a full 79 per cent of respondents did see the usefulness of server virtualisation technologies, increasing to 91 per cent for storage virtualisation.

Yet there is only so much that can happen automatically. While the vision for infrastructure may involve it thrumming away of its own accord, handling requests and allocating resources without need for human intervention, the reality of management software is that nobody's going to be put out of a job any time in the immediate future.

In some ways this is a shame - the research presents a number of indicators that humans aren't always doing that good a job.

Consider the old chestnut of backup - a full third of companies surveyed did confess to being less than perfect in following back-up processes. This is nothing new. Repeatedly, Quocirca research finds that IT management policies are not being kept to or are out of date, be it in storage, security, disaster recovery or any other topic. Maybe there will come a day when such operational activities can be fully automated (or autonomic, as IBM would have us say,) but we're not there yet.

With this in mind, let's think about the delivery of said IT to provide an effective service. This is the next level up and is similarly littered with confusing and often contradictory terminology from the vendors, which often tells us more about the origins of the terms than the problems they are trying to solve.

So we have business service management from the management software companies, project portfolio management from the planning software companies and corporate performance management from the business intelligence software companies. From storage companies we have information lifecycle management, of course.

There is nothing wrong with any of these terms per se but none is an end in itself. They are all tracks up the same mountain.

There is a risk, however, that we will never be able to climb the mountain at all. A service must first be managed before it can be delivered - it's about supply and demand. In order to be confident about satisfying demand, one must first be able to guarantee supply - something providers of hosted services know full well, as it was a contributory factor to the demise of the application service provider market just a few years ago.

Unfortunately, for many organisations managing their own IT, the supply side of the equation is significantly weakened by the inability to do the right thing operationally. This is not a dig at the human factor: the people that run our data centres often have to work extended hours under enormous pressure to keep the systems running, which can be a thankless task in the extreme. All the same, there can be no excuse for not implementing the operational basics - good back-ups, for example. It is negligent for any organisation to assume the worst will not happen, and lax organisations may well be contravening regulatory requirements such as the Data Protection Act.

While we fail to manage our IT effectively, we are also failing to deliver an effective service - there is little point in putting in place measurement technologies as they will only indicate how far we have to go.

In the meantime, such software as project portfolio management, business service management and so on will only be able to solve niche problems for the majority of organisations. Or achieve great things for the minority that have got their operational capabilities right across the board.

Let's not get too despondent. There are signs of progress and service delivery software packages will have their day. It's just that the day isn't coming any time soon. In the meantime, we've all got plenty to be getting on with, by working on the basics.