As a result, organizations are transitioning to a Service Management approach by simplifying, standardizing, and automating IT processes in order to efficiently manage business services throughout their life cycle.
Failing to understanding how IT infrastructure supports business services results in a high number of unplanned outages due to change —and subsequently, in service desk targets being missed due to poor prioritization of incidents and inefficient investigations. As a result,service desk staff are overwhelmed by constant firefighting, and end users are frustrated by regular outages and performance issues.
What’s more, the increased infrastructure flexibility and agility that virtualization and cloud computing brings introduces higher levels of complexity, coexistence, and dynamism to the service management process. As a result, the traditional manual approach to maintaining a map of which IT infrastructure supports critical business applications and services is no longer feasible.
IT organizations need a solution that can maintain an accurate map of the underlying infrastructure and its changing dependencies. Automatic application dependency mapping is a critical step toward effective service management, providing the link between business services, applications, and the supporting infrastructure.
Today many of the challenges facing organizations undertaking this effort occur as they transition to a modern data center. One of the solutions to these challenges is how organizations can utilize dynamically maintained Discovery and Dependency Mapping to create business-aware change and incident management service models.
The goals of moving to a Business aware process at a high level are:
- Reducing the business impact of change
- Better prioritizing incidents
- Reducing incident resolution times
The Business Benefits of A Business-aware Incident and change management process
Organizations that have made the transition to business-aware processes report the following benefits:
Incident Management
- Reduce mean time to repair (MTTR)
- More effective and faster decision-making by providing accessible and accurate configuration information to service desk and IT operations staff
- Improve operational efficiency; delivering high quality service while controlling costs
- Better estimations of the time and cost of implementing a change
- Higher change success rate by improving the impact and risk assessment of change.
- Increased service availability by scheduling changes outside of business hours minimizing risk from unexpected consequences and reducing outages caused change conflicts
- Increased productivity by reducing failed changes and therefore unplanned work, service disruption, defects, and re-work for IT staff and the business.
- Increased confidence that a change has been implemented correctly, preventing errors and the unintended side effects of change that can increase risks building up over time.
Change and Release Management
- Better estimations of the time and cost of implementing a change
- Higher change success rate by improving the impact and risk assessment of change.
- Increased service availability by scheduling changes outside of business hours minimizing risk from unexpected consequences and reducing outages caused change conflicts
- Increased productivity by reducing failed changes and therefore unplanned work, service disruption, defects, and re-work for IT staff and the business.
- Increased confidence that a change has beenimplemented correctly, preventing errors and the unintended side effects of change that can increase risks building up over time.
Learn more by checking out these great videos on the power of Discovery and Dependency mapping and how to integrate into your service management strategy
By: ITSM Guy