'Close the Gap' to Improve Business Service Delivery

By Mary Nugent

The major hurdle preventing synergy between real-time operations and service management is the organizational gap created by companies with disparate IT operations and service management teams.

These superficial barriers inhibit building a common set of workflow processes and a well-defined integrated management tool infrastructure. Although everyone understands the need to integrate both environments, the means to achieve the goal is not.

Additional reasons for the lack of synergistic progress between real-time operations and service management include:

• Poor understanding of what data needs to flow between the event management and service management environments and products
• Limited out-of-the-box functionality
• Lack of an IT management focus to make and drive the integration decisions
• Lack of understanding and appreciation between each other's functional areas

Additional issues wrought by poor integration between event management and Service Desk tools include:

• The real-time event management product looses the ability to track how events are managed once it is sent to the Service Desk
• The Service Desk product is overloaded during an event storm
• The Service Desk product may not be able to update the real-time event management product if a trouble ticket is managed or closed
• Passing events without appropriate communication can cause duplication of effort, or worse, will result in no effort as both teams assumes the other is handling the incident.

Without a level playing field where IT operations and service management teams collaborate on process workflows between real-time operations and service management, the ability to implement and benefit from software that integrates the two technology groups is unlikely to neither be successful nor provide measurable returns.

Mary Nugent is the Vice President and General Manager of Services Management Solutions for BMC Software Inc., a leading provider of enterprise management solutions.

Mary Nugent is an accomplished software technology executive with expertise and in-depth knowledge in the emerging e-business marketplace. As Vice President of the Company's newest line of business, Service Management Solutions, Mary is spearheading BMC Software's largest company-wide business initiative, Business Service Management (BSM).