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Cisco and Varian Medical Systems also have customers in the highly secure defense and security industries; however, their service-management efforts had a slightly different focus from Elbit Systems of America’s. The goal of Cisco’s service management program is to transform IT into a services business to enable Cisco’s corporate strategy. Varian Medical Systems wanted to create a more efficient, timely response to service customers.
Elbit Systems of America
The five distinct business units of Elbit Systems of America — a wholly owned subsidiary of Elbit Systems, based in Israel — provide complex, high-performance technology to the defense, security, aviation, and medical instrumentation industries. Just to give you an idea, Elbit Systems of America’s products and services include dismountable computer platforms for military vehicles, laser systems for military helicopters, and maintenance and logistics support of military electronic equipment.
Harry Butler, IT project manager for Elbit Systems of America, is responsible for making sure that all company employees get the IT services and support they need to get their jobs done. This mission may sound simple, but with thousands of employees involved, many of whom work at the high-security sites of client sites, it gets very complicated.
In 2001, Butler knew his team needed to take a new approach to service management to deliver consistently high-quality services to internal customers. IT needed a more holistic, proactive approach to managing services. As Butler put it, “It dawned on us that we could put out fires for the rest of our lives or actually go try to figure out what was causing the problems and why customers were upset.” The company hired an outside consulting firm to assess the company’s approach and make recommendations. The company established a service desk to deal with incident and problem management; then it implemented plans for a service catalog and a configuration management database (CMDB). Virtualization was a key part of the strategy. The IT team at Elbit Systems of America found out a lot along the way.
Implementing a service desk
The first order of business was deploying a service desk solution with a good incident-management system. IT initially targeted its internal customers — consultants and solution providers who need consistent access to secure information and IT services. What problems did the service desk need to handle? Generally, if an Elbit Systems of America employee can’t access the
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applications he needs, he contacts the service desk with an urgent request. Suppose that a vice president of contracts needs to complete a proposal while he is onsite with a major client but can’t access Elbit Systems of America’s computers over the company’s virtual private network (VPN). He must receive immediate assistance from the service desk if he wants to close the deal. At the same time, the service desk receives less-urgent calls. Before the service desk solution was implemented at Elbit Systems of America, however, IT gave all calls the same level of priority.
An important step in implementing the service desk was negotiating and agreeing on service levels with end users. Butler recognized that the old way — treating all calls as top priority — wasn’t working. The company needed to balance available resources against the priorities of the business. The only way to do this effectively was for the business to articulate its needs and for IT to identify the cost tradeoffs. According to Butler, this negotiation process is ongoing, but IT has gotten good at it.
Streamlining business processes
After getting the service desk up to speed, Butler and his service management team had more time to devote to streamlining their approach to handling service requests. The intention was to automate some manual aspects of approving requests, such as authorizing file-share access.
With the help of senior executives, Butler’s team reviewed the process for one of the most common service desk requests: permission to access secure facilities, files, or applications. This process involved many manual steps, ranging from users filling out paper forms to locating the person authorized to grant access rights. Sometimes a paper form was misplaced on its journey, and the company lost several days just trying to get employees access to facilities or applications. Other common requests, such as ordering a computer, also benefited from in-depth analysis.
Butler and his team found that too many paper forms needed to be routed through various steps for approval. All these common service requests were streamlined, and the new process was documented in a service catalog (see the following section).
Creating a service catalog
Sometimes the simplest ideas have the biggest impact. The IT services team had a 700-page catalog of IT services that included a lot of information, but the format wasn’t very accessible and actionable. Elbit Systems of America
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took the very pragmatic approach of streamlining business processes for delivering IT services, implementing these processes, and documenting them by using service-catalog software.
How would you like to shorten a two-day process to two hours? That happened to employee requests for access after the service catalog implementation. Now employees can use the service catalog before a trip to request security clearance. If someone in Texas plans to travel to New Hampshire the following week, for example, she can use the service catalog to request physical security clearance so that when she arrives in New Hampshire, she can be ready to work. Previously, she had to e-mail someone requesting security clearance. If that person was on vacation and didn’t get the notification e-mail, the consultant might not get clearance in time. He or she might waste several days this way that could have been used productively working. Now, if the person who is supposed to provide the service is gone, the system designates an alternate.
As the success of this small project permeated the organization, Butler’s team was inundated with other requests. Human resources, for example, wanted the team to automate some of the time-consuming manual processes involved with new hires and employee exits. Finance requested that its check-approval process be automated, and the department included input in the service catalog. Now the team has a rather long list of services that need to get into the service catalog.
Implementing a CMDB
The configuration management database (CMDB) is at the heart of Elbit
Systems of America’s service-management strategy.
A CMDB stores all the information about all the assets across the company. In the case of e-mail, the company would store information about software such as Microsoft Outlook, the exchange servers, Internet access, routers, hubs, switches, firewalls, spam servers, e-mail–monitoring servers, and so on. It also has information about how exchange servers are connected to the Internet and to other servers. The IT team responsible for making sure everyone has e-mail must know what’s included in the e-mail service. This makes it easier to fix a problem because, according to Butler, the reality is that you will never find one person in the organization that knows the entire hierarchy of how all servers are connected and interact with each other.
Now changes to the infrastructure are submitted 14 days in advance. They’re discussed and visualized so that the team can see what pieces are going to be involved. In the case of e-mail, for example, team members see the upstream and downstream effects of changing the exchange server and can notify the people who are going to be affected by the changes. If a change order doesn’t generate any potential problems, it’s approved and becomes standard. The
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change-management process also helps identify rogue services. This process, then, helps reduce the number of problems in the infrastructure.
Employing virtualization
As the company’s service management strategy expanded, so did the number of servers. As IT added new tools, each tool had its own server. The company ended up with a service desk server, a service catalog server, a local asset management server, and an enterprise asset manager server. Across the five business units, Elbit Systems of America had five separate servers at each
of 13 locations, totaling 65 servers around the globe. This configuration was hard to manage.
After virtualizing five separate servers onto one at each of the 13 facilities, Elbit reduced the number of physical servers by 52. The company has cut down on the amount of hardware it has to maintain, and the solution is more flexible. For example, if it needs more disk space or more RAM, it can do it on the fly rather than ordering more RAM and waiting for maintenance to install it. Now IT just buys a healthy chunk of RAM for the server and allocates it. This process also saves space, as well as electricity and cooling costs.
Establishing best practices
Elbit Systems of America’s service-management strategy has matured significantly since 2001. Butler offers the following thoughts on best practices based on the company’s experiences:
Don’t try to swallow the elephant all at once. Butler cautions you to take service management one step at a time. Start by focusing on one IT service that will have a big impact on the business. Take the time to understand the processes so that you can streamline and create a more
efficient approach. A learning curve is involved, so plan to allocate some extra time for the first few services you deploy.
Build credibility. Initially, when IT negotiated with the business, the business didn’t necessarily believe that a certain level of support would cost a certain amount of money. As the services rolled out and succeeded, the business started to understand how much it would cost to get a job done.
Build relationships. Strong relationships go hand in hand with building credibility. It’s essential that IT understand the business needs and that all stakeholders use a common language. Everyone must be open to new ideas and new approaches. As Butler puts it, “Just because we have always done it that way doesn’t mean that’s the way we always need to do it. It was important for both sides of the house to keep an open mind.”
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An important lesson from Elbit Systems of America’s experience with service management is recognizing that everything is a service, from giving employees mobile online access to ensuring the security of facilities, providing access to those buildings, and providing a check-approval process. Elbit Systems of America evaluated the manual processes involved in delivering these services and moved to take a more comprehensive and automated approach.
Cisco
Customer experience matters to Cisco, one of the world’s leading providers of hardware, software, and services for creating Internet solutions. Although the company is best known for its Internet Protocol (IP)-based network technologies, over time Cisco has dramatically expanded its business into new markets through strategic acquisitions. In adding companies such as WebEx and IronPort to the fold, Cisco has had to evolve its processes and systems to support multiple business models including traditional product, Software as a Service (SaaS), subscription, and IT as a service (ITaaS) offerings on a global scale. As one can imagine, such expansion over time has correspondingly led to a rather heterogeneous IT portfolio.
In order to evolve their operating model from support and delivery of individual technologies to a service provider model, Cisco has begun moving forward with the adoption of a comprehensive service management framework. The purpose of the framework is to facilitate the conversion of the many technical capabilities the IT organization provides into discreet customerfacing service offerings. One foundational building block in the execution of Cisco’s service management framework is the construction of a multi-layer service catalog.
Using the multilayer service catalog
Sean Worthington, vice president of IT, Business Services, leads the team responsible for the construction of the services catalog. In addition to using the catalog to provide transparency into the portfolio of services across the enterprise, another goal is to clearly identify owners of those services. “That’s a good barometer for me,” says Worthington, “because if we have applications that we can’t assign to a service, that begs the question ‘What purpose are those applications servicing?’ In this way, the catalog can be used as a guide to reduce the cost and complexity inherent in such a large enterprise IT environment. The company sees the catalog as a way to begin
to streamline service delivery by getting rid of applications and technologies that aren’t being used effectively.
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“Conversely,” says Worthington, “if it turns out there are a bunch of required services we’ve defined in our catalog where there’s no application delivering them, that is an invalid outcome.” In this way, Cisco can also use its service catalog to guide prudent investment in new capabilities. In building its catalog, Cisco has developed a taxonomy used to group IT capabilities into three categories of services: foundational, client, and business.
Foundational Services
Foundational services are consumed by internal groups, processes, or functions. This category includes such functions as database administration, hosting, storage, and network provisioning. The scope of these services is quite diverse. Worthington says, “That’s why the creation of the catalog is very important but also not a terribly easy task.”
Client Services
Client services are consumed by an individual and include the provisioning, management, and billing for services such as mobile devices, phones, PCs, and other items that get any employee up and running. The genesis of Cisco’s service management efforts can be traced back to 1999 when they implemented an internally built application called Enterprise Management (EMAN) to automate client service delivery.
Business Services
The third category of services represents discreet business functions and is often exposed to the outside world. Under Guillermo Diaz Jr., vice president IT Customer Commerce, Services and Solutions, Cisco has executed a service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy as part of an ongoing commerce initiative. (Refer to Chapter 6 for additional information on SOA.) The commerce platform includes business services for product pricing, discounting, and configuration, services that will be offered to channel partners over time. Initially, these services will be used by multiple internal groups as they build business applications. Cisco envisions that over the next few years its channel partners will begin to use the same services — standard components from Cisco — and expose them as widgets or portlets to create their own online selling experiences. In addition to the commerce platform business services, IT also offers other services to internal groups, such as video conferencing and collaboration.
Enhancing the CMDB
At it continues to mature, the service catalog can further enhance the important process of configuration and change management, another pillar of Cisco’s overarching service management framework. Worthington and Diaz believe
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that a solid CMDB is critical to the success of their overall plan to deliver services that meet customer requirements. Worthington refers to the CMDB as the “building list of materials for a service.” The idea is to take the basic CMDB concept that’s been with IT for quite a while and wrap value around it with the service catalog. Using the two together, the team can understand what each service offers and can list the components for a given service through the CMDB. Using the CMDB helps IT to understand how certain services work together to support the business.
Managing service-level agreements
These mechanisms in turn help manage the service-level agreements that go with individual services. Understanding the interdependencies between service components has been a key focus of Cisco’s approach. For example, the business-level product pricing service might require 99.99 percent availability, but it depends upon other services from the catalog. This means that all the underlying services that support this service (such as database and
network availability) also need to have the appropriate service levels in place to support the designated service level for pricing.
“As an IT client-facing person, I recognize that our clients and, ultimately, our end partners depend on IT services to always be available for their revenue generation,” Diaz says. “We need to provide the right service-level agreements to our customers.” Of course, tradeoffs can occur between meeting customer expectations and supplying the necessary resources. If you want to ensure a higher degree of availability for a particular service, you need to improve the resiliency of the underlying foundational components — which can add to the complexity of the architecture. Sometimes adding an incremental improvement to service availability requires an exponential increase in cost. How do you explain this to end users? According to Diaz, IT must be very clear about all the cost/benefit tradeoffs involved prior to establishing proper SLAs with customers. The service catalog and CMDB work in concert to clearly articulate these cost issues. Having an understanding for the interdependencies can, in some cases, enable more granular, tiered offerings for service consumers to choose from where service availability is properly balanced with associated cost.
Laying the groundwork for virtualization
Looking forward, as Cisco increasingly virtualizes its data-center environment; it must understand where a service is running and what its proper level of resiliency should be throughout the technology stack. In a virtualized world, you don’t want a priority-1 service, running in a virtual machine, to be migrated to a priority-6 physical host for example; that arrangement certainly wouldn’t meet service-level expectations. Both Diaz and Worthington agree that the service catalog will be increasingly important in the next generation of Cisco’s data center.