Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Mitigation of Risk and the CMDB Heart!

This is a story about a manufacturer, a retail buyer and the consumer and how IT management touches them all. This is the first in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I’ll post describing the benefits of a single-pain-of-glass (I did mean the pain of glass!) and management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving revenue and growth.

The Set-up . . . . .

One day a CIO receives a call from a friend, another CIO, but a customer, a big customer. The conversation quickly turns to “how come we are having difficulty placing orders with you? Should we buy from someone else?”. What’s going on…..

* Each hour we process >$100,000 worth of orders
* We experienced ~60+ hours of server down time last year
* $6M in orders have been impacted by the down time

How are we going to improve the availability and quality of the customer experience and reduce costs in a very heterogeneous, complex environment?

The Solution . . . . .

We need to know what we have and what it does in order to better measure quality and service levels. This requires 5 things:

* Define what are our services, prioritize them and align to business priorities
* Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that is a intelligent model of the infrastructure
* “Live”, single-pane-of-glass bringing life to the intelligent model of the infrastructure
* Governance over the model to ensure it is accurate and in compliance with approved changes
* Automated Service Level measurements, live and historical trends

We have monitoring in place, but we do not have a way to pull it together and marry it in a meaningful way to the infrastructure and we need to create a Service View of the infrastructure. This will require a lot of integration to meet the “live” requirement so that we can take action in real time and avert service impacting events in the future and govern that the model remains accurate and ultimately automate our service level measuring and reporting.

This is where Novell’s Business Service Management came in to integrate, build the intelligent service models, automate the model building and governance and provide the service level dashboard.

The Benefits . . . . .

* Service Level reporting is manual and costly, now that has been automated – approx 2 FTEs 5 Days each
* >25% service quality improvement with “live” service monitoring and averted service impacting events
* BONUS: Discovered >25% of logins were failing leading to a customer satisfaction challenge when placing orders that was corrected

The Intelligent Service Model and the automation’s improved customer satisfaction, quality of service, averted service impacting events and controlled costs. This is not an uncommon story for customers of the Novell Business Service Management solution. The heart of the solution is the “live” integration and intelligent service model making sense and relating bits of disparate data as super objects within the model enabling operations teams to service align, manage costs, mitigate risk and deliver quality services driving the business and growth.

Monitor, Manage, Measure and Report on your Workloads Intelligently!

Check out this recent article: How to Monitor, Measure and Report on your Workloads