Business Service Management

Businesses today demand reliable, efficient service delivery from IT that supports the core business needs at a reasonable cost. However, IT leadership has been unable to truly align IT service delivery with business objectives.

This misalignment is caused by a number of factors, including:

• business priorities and expectations are misunderstood by IT
• lack of effective communication between IT and the business
• IT operations is organized in technology silos, making it difficult to measure results in business terms
• IT is constantly in reactive mode, making it difficult to be strategic.

Compuware Vantage Service Manager provides a proven business service management (BSM) solution to address these factors. It delivers a business-aligned view of service delivery by mapping the critical business services to the supporting IT infrastructure. Vantage Service Manager enables IT to effectively engage with line-of-business counterparts to communicate service delivery in business terms and optimize IT operations in accordance with business needs.

Map critical business services to the supporting IT infrastructure

Establishing the foundation for business and IT alignment begins with the Service Model. Vantage supports a top-down, business-driven approach to map business services to the IT components they rely on. The Model allows users to define service quality as well as business rules that determine impact. For example, if a given service is still available but performing poorly, Vantage highlights a potential issue before it causes an impact on the business and customers.

Increase communication with the business through real-time service views

Vantage Service Manager processes and distills data from disparate sources to present real-time views of service quality and performance. This real-time insight provides business managers, IT management and IT operations with an objective, single source of information that enables fast decision-making.

Increase client satisfaction through improved Service Level Management

Many enterprises and IT service organizations have adopted service level agreements (SLAs) to establish a shared expectation of IT service delivery and support. Failure to meet SLAs results in, at the very least, customer dissatisfaction and, in most cases, financial penalties.

By monitoring IT according to established service levels, organizations can reduce the risk of failure to comply with SLAs. Real-time service views can tell when an SLA has not been met and when it is at risk so IT can take immediate corrective action to avoid any possible customer satisfaction issue or financial penalty.

Achieve value quickly with out-of-the-box, customizable dashboards

Vantage Service Manager provides pre-configured dashboards to help your organization quickly realize value from the BSM implementation. These out-of-the-box views provide key information relevant to IT and business executives, business unit managers, IT management and IT operations personnel. Vantage's dashboard designer enables users to easily build and tailor dashboards from the library of datablocks to meet the requirements of the targeted users as well as the corporate look and feel.

Executive Summary

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Integrate from multiple data sources for comprehensive view of service quality

Most organizations have several monitoring tools already in place. With Vantage Service Manager , there is no need to replace these existing tools. Vantage Service Manager makes it easy to integrate data from other IT infrastructure management products, service desk software, configuration management databases and other applications across multiple platforms, including:

• infrastructure management applications such as IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol and HP OpenView
• end-user experience data
• applications such as Oracle and WebLogic
• service desk software such as Remedy and Peregrine
• asset and configuration management systems, including any homegrown or commercial CMDB
• enterprise messaging, Web services, HTTP, SNMP and other industry standard protocols.

Seamless service management with integrated end-user experience and application analytics

Compuware Vantage is more than just a BSM solution. Vantage enables business-driven service delivery by combining BSM, end-user experience measurement and application analytics into a single, integrated solution. This unique combination enables IT organizations to measure and report on business-relevant information, drill down from the business level to the granular level as well as identify the root causes of issues and repair them quickly.

Key advantages of the Vantage product suite include:

• business/IT alignment
• management visibility and control
• comprehensive service views, including third-party applications
• business-relevant metrics via end-user experience
• seamless execution across technology silos.

Prioritize resources and problem resolution effectively by understanding business impact

BSM establishes the common language that IT and the business use to communicate, allowing IT to prioritize its efforts according to business impact. The Vantage Service Model links applications and infrastructure elements to outcomes that are expressed in tangible business terms of time, cost and resources, allowing IT to quickly identify the services impacted by IT component problems and prioritize them accordingly.

Improve IT operations through Six Sigma techniques

Vantage Service Manager can be used to drive continuous process improvement based on the business-driven Six Sigma quality management approach. Vantage includes automated techniques to measure the current Quality of Service and determine the best candidates for improvement based on formal statistical analysis. Furthermore, Vantage Service Manager helps control improved services with techniques supporting each of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) phases for continuous service improvement. The DMAIC phases are highlighted in the following figure.

Six Sigma Approach

Vantage Service Manager provides continuous improvement through support of the Six Sigma DMAIC process.

Quality of Service

Vantage Service Manager includes automated techniques to measure the current Quality of Service and determine the best candidates for improvement based on formal statistical analysis.

Adopt IT service management processes with ITIL support

Many organizations have adopted IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes for IT service management. Vantage Service Manager provides comprehensive support for ITIL Service Delivery and integration to Service Support processes. With Vantage Service Manager, organizations can:

• capture, measure and track user perception of service
• define, monitor and publish adherence to SLAs
• automatically alert administrators to service breaches and manage the configuration that provides a service.

As a result, IT organizations have the information they need to continuously improve service - responding faster to intermittent problems and eliminating fundamental architectural or configuration flaws that inhibit service.