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Despite advances in technology, most organizations continue to implement outdated enterprise Management Systems for their IT operations management, these systems are usually expensive to implement, maintain and require several silos of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:
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:
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: