Inforonics' Blog

What was it about the IT Service Management strategy that was so vigorously trumpeted in 2008?  From my observations over the past nine months, there are two clear areas that outshine others: Configuration and Problem Management.  And while it may surprise you that Change Management is not included, through my experiences with the issues, these two are far more urgent and call for immediate attention.

Most companies struggle with the ins and outs of Problem Management on a daily basis.  Consequently, people are continually working on problems and not making progress, and the business is suffering.  Companies can never afford downtime and slowdowns from technology issues, but particularly with the state of the economy today. When there is an issue, systems must be up and running again promptly, and Configuration Management can assist with these issues.

So, What’s the Problem with Problem Management?

Major performance and availability problems have been the focus of my work for clients this year, which leads me to assume that asset mapping and documentation are two of the most common difficulties that companies find themselves dealing with.  These serious, revenue impacting operational deficiencies all came about as a result of a gap in the understanding of how the technology actually supported the business operation.

This fact alone argues that if companies are going to invest anything into Service Management initiatives this year, it would be wise to consider Configuration Management.  It’s important to remember that this program is not just about the assets, it’s about the business service, and how the assets support them.  If IT, the custodians of operational business technology assets, is going to add value to the business, we need to ensure that we have a handle on what the state of our operations truly is.  Not only must we identify the asset relationship, we must also guarantee that we can determine its health and ability to constantly perform at the highest level of operation.

Adding Insult to Injury

While Change Management does come into play here, alone, it is not getting the job done.  In each of my client organizations that struggled with performance and availability problems, there was a CAB, RFCs, etc…  However, there were no records of truth or current health state of CIs. Changes were being made against assumed configurations without any understanding of their current state of health.  In other words, there was no integration into event management.  The changes that were being made and requested were up against incorrect information and unstable CIs.  I explain to my clients that this process can be compared to stacking cue balls… just as each ball stacked causes the lower ones to topple, each change to the unsound CIs caused yet another break.

With a well thought out CMS strategy, including health monitoring and CI capacity analysis tools, Problem Management becomes much simpler for organizations. A clear picture of the assets in relationship to each other aids the process of elimination, providing a direct plan of attack to isolate root cause, as well as providing the necessary information to get the right people involved.

Because companies simply expect the Problem Management process to give them root cause, they find themselves struggling with more issues rather than finding solutions.  A business must understand that if proper data is not collected and managed in a meaningful way, problems will pile up and it will become much harder to break down the issues.  However, with the right Configuration Management tools and a strong understanding of just how the technology will support operations, the result will be a positive outcome for your business.