Optimizing IT Business Processes – Why APM and BTM Complement ITIL3

Optimizing IT Business Processes Why APM and BTM Complement ITIL3

The dependence of businesses on information technology (IT) is growing. By the close of 2010, Gartner reported that IT spending had grown over that year and was predicting that spending would go up 3.5% worldwide in 2011. While this is slower growth than in the past (growth was at 8% in 2008), worldwide IT spending has continued to grow at a respectable rate.

While IT expenditure will always be necessary, it is important that businesses are able to optimize IT business processes in a way that controls costs effectively. Business needs to be able to do more with less.

Turning to ITIL3 best practice guidelines can be a good start toward accomplishing this goal. And turning to technology tools that make it possible to implement those guidelines is a logical step toward identifying how best to put ITIL3 in to practice.

To accomplish ITIL3's primary goal of integrating IT into the business so it is used as the strategic, secret weapon of the business, IT teams need to shift their perspective from troubleshooting mode to problem preventing mode. In order to do this, an IT team needs to see beyond technology as a series of point-to-point interactions. IT must be viewed as an end-to-end service that serves the business.

In the past, IT has typically followed the practice of dealing with problems as they emerge. This model of reacting to IT failures is costly. Support costs rise, poor customer service occurs, IT and other employees are less productive. Customer attrition and order fallout are common side effects. The waste eats at a company stealthily.

APM and BTM for Implementing ITIL3 Best Practices

Application performance management (APM) and its sub-discipline business transaction management (BTM) are two technologies that complement implementing ITIL3 perfectly. Business transaction management helps IT teams decode business processes so the underlying technology issues are visible. This enables IT to visualize how these issues are impacting the business. It becomes possible to use APM to build responses to underlying issues so that problem response is automated at the earliest stages, long before they cascade into business disruptive (and possibly business destructive) events.

The whole purpose of implementing ITIL3 best practices is to shift from reactive IT management to business centered IT management. APM and BTM help IT teams identify the components in the IT structure that are failing to serve the business.

Business transaction management enables IT to monitor the diverse business processes that drive the business. These processes comprised of various applications, the transactions they invoke and the middleware that interconnects the transactions are a prime source of transaction failures. BTM imparts deep-dive visibility at every level, from the code executing the transaction to the reason behind the transaction from a business perspective. This enables a complex event processing engine to discriminate between business impacting failures versus non-impacting failures. While the latter is important, the ability to prioritize IT resources empowers the best decisions for building a business.

Complex event processing (CEP) is an additional factor that enables BTM and APM to transform IT functions from process centered to business centered. A complex event processor can harvest data from a complex array of sources. This data can then be correlated to "events" and the resulting transaction behaviors, which are then defined as normal or abnormal. The process of identifying normal vs. abnormal involves ongoing, self-adjustments established by the needs of the business. BTM allows a business to establish the parameters of the performance it needs to experience.

Because ITIL3 is about ensuring business centered IT infrastructure change management, and application performance management and business transaction management solutions make the process of changing structures in a business friendly way possible, these tools complement the goals of ITIL3 perfectly.

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