The term ITIL (Service Management) is becoming more familiar to business management every day. But do they really understand that it is a collection of best practices and not a standard? Do they want to be ITIL compliant while not knowing that it is not possible? There is a lot of misunderstanding regarding the framework.
ITIL Service Management has five major areas of focus: Strategy, Design, Transition, Operations, and Continuous Improvement. In the majority of cases, the IT group will focus on the first three areas as they are the most visible to Business Management. This is understandable, but the last two areas are where most of the IT cost is located. There are six Key Performance Areas (KPAs) associated with them: Budget, Life Cycle, Business Activities, Functional Processing, Operational Processing, and Continuity.
Generally speaking, most installations will use a monitor to address the needs of these six KPAs. In reality the monitory will only address some of the needs of Operational Processing. The reason for this is simple: Monitors are not designed for Capacity Management!
RG Solutions® will not only provide information about Operational Processing, but will address the needs of the other five KPAs– all for less than the cost of a monitor.
Key Business Values
- Provides cost and technical measurement for the KPAs that relate to the Operations and Continuous Improvement areas of the ITIL Service Management framework.
- Integrates business and technical information for informed reporting and decision making.
- Automatically calculates the “Green Costs” of system based on local power rates. Cost amounts include the related infrastructure costs (i.e. cooling, etc.) as related to the system.
- Incorporates a standardized metering model that allows for “back of the envelope” continuity planning.
Key Performance Areas
KPA - Budget: RG Solutions® has a built in asset system (Resource Catalog) that allows for the cost of Capital Assets, Capital Expenditures, IT Budgets, and other expenses associated with the systems. The cost and usage is based on projected demand levels and the Total Cost of Ownership for the system. The resulting measures use a standard metering unit that allows for the comparison of unlike systems and platforms. This methodology allows for a common cost calculation and a comparison of all capital assets.
KPA - Life Cycle: RG Solutions® provides Life Cycle measures for the individual underlying systems. The current life position of the system can be determined and then compared with the forecasted expectations from the Resource Catalog. Using this information along with the information from other KPAs, make it easy to determine the needs and costs associated with any future requirement.
KPA - Business Activity: RG Solutions® provides Business Activity measures that gauge system(s) use in regard to business processes. This is undoubtedly its strongest feature and allows for the coalescing of technical (and cost) information into business centric groups. The scope of these business groups is only limited by the scope of the incoming data. Results allow the business management to see the delivery and cost of services to the business.
KPA - Functional: RG Solutions® provides Functional Processing measures. Functional Processing is the system processing aggregated by logical type (i.e. SQL, Online, Batch, etc.). This form of segmentation allows for better demand analysis.
KPA - Operational: RG Solutions® provides Operational Processing measures. Operational Processing is the processing that is specific to a given system. While the cost of the processing is also provided, technical measures are generally the most widely used for this KPA.
KPA - Continuity: RG Solutions® provides Continuity (Fail-Over) measures. One of the biggest risks that a business faces is that the backup resources will not be able to handle the mission critical processing in a fail-over situation. While there are many reasons for contingency failure, one unforgivable reason is that not enough resources have been allocated to the backup environment. RG Solutions® can help prevent this type of situation.
