Introduction
Separate systems for asset management, patch management or security management, are often implemented without a common framework for operational maintenance. This occurs more often in organizations whose growth is based on mergers and acquisitions because the replacement or integration of legacy systems is cumbersome in those situations. But also organizations with an organic growth often operate legacy systems in parallel.
Performance indicators about systems and the services they offer exist in various formats and places in such environments, resulting in inconsistent levels of management. IT Service Management is impeded by the lack of a holistic view on performance and of standard data representations. Providing such a view involves correlating data from various -often incompatible- sources, which is a manual, repetitive activity.
Provisioning IT was conceived to overcome this obstacle, by providing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and consistent information on top of incoherent IT management systems. Provisioning IT turns data from various sources into rich, integrated information in support of operational maintenance.
Provisioning IT System
The Provisioning IT System is built on BI technology. It consists of a data warehouse that consolidates individual sources of information about the infrastructure and services, and of a reporting service that allows for an easy integration of information in existing and new operational processes.
Configuration Maintenance Data Warehouse
The data layer of the Provisioning IT System consolidates raw data from systems and services in the IT infrastructure and correlates it into rich, meaningful information. It consists of these components:
- Data Collection procedures that link to, or copy data from the authoritative repositories of source data, such as the Active Directory, the asset management system, security tools, system logs, or the Help Desk.
- The Relational Database or Configuration Maintenance Database stores pre-processed information about the IT infrastructure, and metadata about authoritative data sources, the relations between information elements, their format and accuracy. It forms a data abstraction layer on top of existing management systems.
- The Multidimensional database or Configuration Maintenance Data Warehouse correlates information elements with each other and with time, location, or other dimensions, in order to uncover trends and patterns that would otherwise remain hidden in the sheer volume of available data.
Reporting Services
Consolidated information from the Provisioning IT Data Warehouse is exposed in several ways:
- As web-based scorecards and drill-down reports
- As downloadable files in familiar formats such as MS Excel
- As Web Services that can be integrated into existing or new service management applications.
The Provisioning IT system answers questions such as “who is consuming our network bandwidth and why” or “was the latest security patch distribution successful” in a comprehensible way.
Provisioning IT Framework
The Provisioning IT Framework provides architectural and procedural guidelines to optimize the management and provisioning of the infrastructure and services, and to integrate Service Management Functions (SMF) with the existing infrastructure and with the information flow of the Provisioning IT System.
Service Management Functions are both consumers and sources of data. Provisioning IT ensures that they do not become islands of data. The Framework provides standards and instructions on how SMF should integrate with the Provisioning IT information flow and with the IT infrastructure.
Conclusion
Provisioning IT increases operational efficiency in dispersed IT environments by:
- Providing the information IT staff require for various operational tasks
- Targeting the IT staff of all functions and locations with reports specific to their needs
- Ensuring maximum efficiency by offering information as a reusable service
- Leveraging existing operational management systems
Credits
My thanks go to Matthew Peirone and to Bart Boydens for their visionary input and for providing the opportunity to realize this great piece of work.
Contact me for more information about Provisioning IT.
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