Integration with Business Service Management

Dashboards

Reporting

Diagnostic utilities

It could be extremely useful for the Service Desk and other support groups if the technology incorporated the capability to create and use diagnostic script s and other diagnostic utilities (such as, for example, case-based reasoning tools) to assist with earlier diagnosis of incidents. Ideally, these should be ‘context sensitive’ and presentation of the scripts automated so far as possible.

There is no use in storing data unless it can be easily retrieved and used to meet the organization’s purposes. The technology should therefore incorporate good reporting capabilities, as well as allow standard interfaces which can be used to input data to industry-standard reporting packages, dashboard s, etc. Ideally, instant, on-screen as well as printed reporting can be provided through the use of context-sensitive ‘top ten’ reports.

Dashboard-type technology is useful to allow ‘see at a glance’ visibility of overall IT service performance and availability levels. Such displays can be included in management-level reports to user s and customer s – but can also give real-time information for inclusion in IT web pages to give dynamic reporting, and can be used for support and investigation purposes. Capabilities to support customized views of information to meet specific levels of interest can be particularly useful.

However, they sometimes represent a technical rather than service view of the infrastructure and in such cases they may be of less interest to customers and users.

There is a trend within the IT industry to try to bring together business-related IT with the processes and disciplines of IT Service Management – some call this Business Service Management. To facilitate this, business application s and tools need to be interfaced with ITSM support tools to give the required functionality. This can be illustrated by this example:

An Eastern European telecoms company was able to interface its telephone cell-net monitoring and billing system to its Event Management, Incident Management and Configuration Management processes. In this way it was able to detect any unusual usage/billing patterns and interpret these such that it could identify, with a high degree of certainly, that a telephone had been stolen and was being used to make illicit calls.

It was able to raise event s for such patterns and automate actions to suspend usage of the mobile phone devices and, in parallel, identify the exact location of the illicit user (using GPRS technology) and raise incidents so that the police had the capability of finding the suspected thief and recovering the device.

More advanced tools integration capabilities are needed to allow greater exploitation of this sort of business and IT integration.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23