OPSMETRIC

Project Overview

The lack of a comprehensive change management system is costing organizations billions production and operational losses due to unnecessary downtime, and inadequacies in coping with the complexity of today’s IT operations. The ability to incorporate a disciplined regime of strategies and processes aimed at simplifying, molding, protecting and automating core IT operational requirements and resources into a “coherent whole” can help organizations to be efficient and excel in their operations.

 Despite advances in technology, most organizations continue to implement outdated enterprise Management Systems for their IT operations management, these systems are usually expensive to implement, maintain and require several silos of information integration to make their operations whole. These silos of systems that makeup an enterprise management system, generally require manual information integration efforts to access and evaluate impact of a change. For example, in the evaluation of a proposed change, a change manager relies on the technical team to provide an accurate risk and/or impact analysis of applying the change, relies on another system for evaluating the right schedule for the change execution and yet another systems to evaluate resource suitability and availability, then manual entry and generation of the steps necessary for the change execution. These patch work of Information integration presents challenges that result in change cost overrun, delays, underestimation of change impact, under estimation of risk of a change, inaccurate timing of the change, enforcement gaps and difficulty in enforcing change policies.

The Whole System

The “Whole system” necessary for successful change management and execution comprise components that are necessary for the change. These components are detailed below and include the following abilities:

• The ability to structure the task or command to be executed or implemented
• The ability to communicate efficiently within the task
• Ability to secure the environment
• Ability to manage your resource efficiently
• Ability to schedule your changes.
• Ability to effectively analyze and communicate the risk of the change.
• Ability to effectively analyze and communicate the impact of the change.
• Ability to control the actions of the executor of the change.
• Ability to dictate the speed of change execution.
• Ability to control and maintain the state of your asset from a financial or operations standpoint
• Ability to reduce the training signature of any task or process to a factor as close to zero as possible, without impacting the quality and consistency of execution of the change
• Ability to present a consistent execution interfaces in structured and unstructured work environment.
• Ability to automate any structured process.
• Ability to route a defined change to any defined location or provider for execution without undermining the integrity of the change.

Managing large operational environments requires the abilities detailed above, to be integrated in a seamless and easily accessible manner.

 Today’s on demand business requires managers to make swift judgments on situations,  react fast to maximize operational availably while minimizing cost and guaranteeing systems security, move  from distributed to targeted infrastructure, outsource repetitive task and  consolidating operations in different geographical  locations,   and to achieve all of these  with a low cost base,   it is important that all the abilities detailed  above are implemented in a “ whole system”. The “Whole system” is a one stop systems responsible for managing, synchronizing, consolidating an organizations operational resources and requirement in an enterprise management system software implementations. The “Whole Systems” provides and guarantees visibility to all the abilities defined above, bridging cultural and global barriers as well as challenges brought on by globalization including outsourcing.

The “Whole system” is an intelligent machine capable and able to process the core attributes of a change: these core attributes become sub processes that provide critical change visibility to the core change processes which in turn become the center all for all change requests.  The benefit of the “Whole system”  can only be fully achieved when organizations are able to leverage and apply critical decision making functions in change executions. For example: The change management systems should support as a minimum the following built in functionalities, see fig 1.0 below.

    Fig 1.0 (www.opsmetric.com  ONEGLOBEÔ)

The first Whole System

ONEGLOBEÔ (Globe Automatic Change Manager) is a “Whole system” that represents the next generation of enterprise management systems software that integrates and consolidates all the functionalities necessary for global organizations to run their operations efficiently while maximizing availability and minimizing cost.

ONEGLOBEÔ sets standard that allow change and operations managers to define, control, and execute changes in a manner that guarantee security and consistency of execution, while providing the tools to automate, semi-automate or structure manual operational

processes in a structured and easy to implement style based on tried best practices as defined  in  the ITIL framework.

Key features of ONEGLOBE™

The key feature of ONEGLOBE™ is the ability to automate human actions. Most automation systems focus on software process automation, while GlobACM™ is able to automate software and hardware as well as structuring and automation of human action necessary for cost reduction and consistency of execution

and assured best practice.

ONEGLOBE™ Implements an “execute by wire” model, where

Changes that are defined in the ONEGLOBE Script Manager can be  can be release  to the analyst for implementation and execution by the system based on the change definition. Tight integration between the opsdeskÔ, script and command manager, asset manage and execution console guarantees the integrity of the executions.

The benefits if the integrated executions are detailed below:

• Where security is critical, change can be applied with no knowledge of the end system to the executor
• Since these changes are predefined, it guarantees consistency of execution in all predefined systems
•  Mandates change policy enforcement since changes are done with the point and click execution console
• Accountability, all changes defined and executed through the system are 100% measurable.
• Zero enforcement gap, because the system guarantees that changes put through it are  applied 100%
• Zero visibility gaps: Guaranteed visibility since the platforms provides a global view of all changes being executed on the platform at any point in time.
• Integrated risk and impact analysis to ensures that for structured changes, the risk and impact  is analyzed and  communicated to all interested parties in the organization, and where risk and impact are high, explicit authorization is automatically solicited form high management, for the change to proceed.

Component Description

Task Manager: Allow operations and change managers to define and structure changes in a consistent and secured manner, guaranteeing consistency of execution, security and integrity, thus improving visibility, and enforcement of organizational change policy and accountability.

Operations Asset management: This is a core component of the change management system. The system need to be aware of the state of its systems to efficiently process scheduled changes, and also in real or semi real time provides an update on the state of the operational asset to the organization.

Script and command manager: Provides management and control interface for the command/scripts/function/utilities that are the backbone of today’s complex operations environments. The script manager allows organizations to simplify their solutions and develop and implement best practices. Control comes for being able to efficiently manage what is executes in you critical production environment, how it is executed and who executed it.

Risk Manager: Provides the change managers with a non technical and consistent overview of risk associated with the change.

Change Impact manager: Provides the change manager visual, non technical overview of the impact of a change, thus enabling adequate fail saves and save guards to be out in place.

Guaranteed operational systems security: Globe ACM enhances organizations security by preventing production systems direct logon and access to all critical production systems as a minimum.

Scheduler: Globe ACM provides a scheduler interface so operations managers are able to schedule pre-evaluated tasks in advance and in a secure and consistent manner either for manual execution or with human interaction (human-machine mode).

Guaranteed consistency of execution: by providing a clear and consistent interface for the execution of task, scripts, commands, functions while also guaranteeing security of the systems.

This is very important for organizations that are in the process of out tasking or outsourcing to other countries where the skill of the operators cannot be guaranteed or resource turnover is very high. Further more, it also helps organizations implement zero training requirements, since it hides the complexities associated with the execution of a task.

Research and analysis have shown that most systems and business unavailability today is caused by change, this same research also shows that the main driver for change in any organization is to attain guaranteed business continuity first, security and then cost control. The example below shows how ONEGLOBEÔ brings all these functionalities together.

The Interface

ONEGLOBEÔ provides a flexible interface for task definition, a task

Fig 2.0 Change execution window is defined as a series of command and scripts or actions necessary to complete or effect a change, a task to effect a change on a system for example could include the steps below:

Change definition

Request to define a task

Scripts/command/actions/functions (structured or unstructured process) definition.

Task Impact evaluation

Task Risk evaluation

Task definition

Affected asset definition

Resource definition

Schedule definition

Task release for execution

Execution step (actual tasks)

 sending a communication to the markets

 Place  the system in maintenance

 Stopping the system

 Running a script/or command to delete files

 Executing a function for quality check on action in step 14

 Restart the system

 End maintenance

 Communicate systems availability to markets

 Close the change

 Handover to systems owner

The 20 actions above constitute a task, and for organizations to realize cost saving, consistency of execution, security any change manage needs to incorporate and provide the ability to automate and  schedule the tasks above.

ONEGLOBEÔ provides the ability for organizations to automate the human processes that is the norm with executing tasks like the example above, the platforms flexibility means that it controls the human-machine interaction aspect of executing any change action on systems, it is able to control the actions of resource, guaranteeing the steps for execution of   a task, allowing parallelism and synchronizing steps where necessary and as specified in the change definition, it also isolate the short comings of the resource from the execution of a change and be able to replicate the human action necessary to complete a change consistently and successfully.

Regardless of the complexity of the task, once defined, it is presented in a structured GUI front-end interface to the executors of the task fig 2.0 below: This ability to transform structured and unstructured command/scripts or instructions for execution is the key behind ONEGLOBEÔ.

ONEGLOBEÔ was designed and built around the Nestle globe project and encompasses all the operation best practices employed for the successful implementation of the project.

ONEGLOBEÔ facilitates global operational re-engineering for organization from global infrastructure allocation to consolidation. From global distributed support operations to regional; and from regional to outsource support, facilitating outsource resource management,  by incorporating SLA and quality assurance in its execution model, as well as measurement and control.

ONEGLOBEÔ provides the framework for global operations reengineering by guaranteeing the following

Key benefits:

• Integrated Operations management, measuring  and reporting
• Better control of environment and systems
• Consistency in execution and implementation of changes
• Substantial  reduction in operational costs to the magnitude > 20% derived from the ability to accurately  evaluate risk and impact of change
• Mould of geographically dispersed implementation and execution teams by providing a virtual view of the enterprise, resource and assets.
• Plug the shortcomings in manual operation by providing a structured view of all defined tasks.
• Better control of environment and systems by synchronizing and controlling that execution sequence of changes.

• Guaranteed Security of critical production systems by isolating and preventing logon access to all critical assets. Changes are submitted to the change systems, and execution is done by the change management system.
• Consistency in executions and implementation of changes, since all defined changes appear in same way for execution.
• Guaranteed control of production environment, all changes on the system are executed view the change manager, these changes are logged and recorded for auditing.
• Resource management  enables the change manager to better manage and plan  allocation and utilization
• Globe Monitor and Alert ensures that alerts with existing changes are routed accordingly for resolution and those without defined changes are routed to predefined teams for change definition.
• Visibility of change
• Visibility of change impact
• Visibility of change Risk
• Ability to  selectively outsource/out task process in your organization