A Comprehensive Approach to Practicing ITIL Change Management. A White Paper Prepared for BMC Software February 2007

Transcription

1 A White Paper Prepared for BMC Software February 2007

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary...1 The Problem...1 The Solution...2 ITIL Approach to Change Management...2 Integrating Batch Processing With ITIL-Based Change Management...2 BMC Software Delivering Batch-CMDB Integration...3 EMA s Perspective...4 About BMC Software...4

3 Executive Summary Batch processing is a critical part of most enterprises. It is a foundation technology for applications including e- commerce, accounting, stock and inventory control, enterprise resource planning, customer service, and many more. Any disruption to mission-critical batch processing can cause extensive impact to the business through downtime, lost revenue, contract penalties, and more. However, change management processes, even those based on recognized best practices such as ITIL, rarely take into account the batch environment when planning for change. Systems are shut down, removed, rebuilt, and updated without any concern for the impact such changes may have on critical batch processing, and the business services that depend on it. An emerging solution for this problem is to integrate batch service definitions into a Configuration Management Database, or CMDB. In ITIL best practices, the CMDB serves as a single source of truth for recording the configuration of devices, operating systems, databases, middleware, applications, etc. This provides (among many other things) a single point of reference to determine the scope and impact of any change to any IT system throughout the enterprise. Integrating batch process definitions with the CMDB extends this single source of truth to include missioncritical batch services also. This ensures the assessment of the scope and impact of any change can now be truly universal. BMC Software is providing a solution to this requirement, by integrating their batch process automation solution, BMC CONTROL-M, with their CMDB solution, BMC Atrium. This innovative solution based on ITIL best practices directly addresses the problems of integrating change management and batch processing. BMC Software s solution discovers batch services, records them in unique records in the CMDB, associates them with other enterprise configuration elements, forecasts the impact of change on batch processing, and correlates that impact with business services, thereby predicting the full impact of any change on business users. The result is a more effective change management process based on best practice recommendations that accommodates all mission-critical business services, reducing unexpected downtime, improving availability, and reducing the cost of change. Enterprise Management Associates believes this solution will provide significant benefits to many enterprises, especially those with an existing CMDB implementation The Problem Mission-critical data processing relies in large part on the automated initiation, execution, management, integration, and recovery of batch-mode IT processing scripts, jobs, tasks, and other non-interactive IT processes that manipulate a specific data set. These processes may be application-oriented, such as accounting, payments, e-commerce, supply chain management, ERP, purchasing, ordering, fulfillment or data mining; or system-oriented, such as data backup, grid and cluster support, virtual load balancing, storage management, or data export-transform-load operations. Batch processing in a modern enterprise is a foundation technology for many critical business services, so it is imperative to maintain consistent and reliable batch processing. At the same time, change is inevitable and profitable businesses demand almost continual change, so they can provide new products and services, build competitive advantage, and continually improve customer service. Without change, a business will stagnate, and inevitably be overtaken by its competitors. However, with change comes risk, and the potential for problems. EMA estimates, for example, that faulty configuration changes are responsible for around 60% of downtime in an average enterprise. It is therefore important to establish practices and procedures for change management that account for the effect of changes on systems, applications, and especially business services. With change management, change control, and application and infrastructure mapping tools, this can be a relatively simple and standardized process. However, these tools invariably do not account for batch processing, leaving many critical business services vulnerable to unexpected outages. It takes a deep understanding of the batch processes, and their often complex interdependencies, to ensure that configuration changes do not adversely affect the batch environment. For example, if IT needs to move a system to put it into a new virtual server, or upgrade the physical server, it is relatively easy to predict and minimize the impact on

4 online users. Using application mapping, even complex applications, and their associated business services, can be mapped onto specific servers or devices. Similarly, using performance monitoring tools, it is also quite simple to measure the peaks and troughs in online usage, so the move can be scheduled to occur outside the peak online usage. These change management processes help to minimize the possible disruption to the majority of online users. However, mission-critical batch processing may occur on the same system. This will not be revealed through traditional application and business service mapping, which tends to concentrate mainly on the online, realtime aspect of application processing. Nor are the complex interrelationships of batch processing revealed in performance monitor output. So while the scheduled downtime may cause a minimal impact on online users, it still has the potential for significant disruption by delaying or interrupting scheduled batch processes that form the basis for critical business services. Of course, the major part of this problem is the complex dependencies that batch processing entails. While one system may not host mission-critical batch processing, it may still be part of a critical path, due to a complex flow of dependencies. For example, in a manufacturing company, a specific system located on the loading dock might be dedicated to providing an input station for stock and inventory management. It may run just a couple of batch jobs overnight to update the ERP system with the new materials received in the loading dock that day. Bringing that system down for a change request will not have any obvious effect on critical online business systems. However, the batch process that updates stock and inventory may be part of a critical batch process inventory received updates accounts payable, accounts payable updates general ledger, general ledger updates accounts receivable, and accounts receivable updates billing, which in turn issues all invoices. So all of a sudden, bringing down a barely significant system on the loading dock actually stops the company from issuing any invoices a major impact on the business. Effective change management processes must therefore provide visibility into batch processing, and the critical business services that rely on it. Otherwise, even a wellmanaged change cycle can cause significant problems to important business services. The Solution ITIL Approach to Change Management ITIL, which stands for IT Infrastructure Library, is a set of best practices for IT organizations, originally created under the auspices of the British government. While it covers other areas, its focus is on ensuring that IT is able to deliver consistent business service. Three key areas of ITIL apply to address the problem of effectively managing change: Service Desk Configuration Management Change Management Central to these ITIL best practices is the implementation of a Configuration Management Database (or CMDB) either a central or federated database that is used to record the status of all relevant configuration items (CIs) throughout the enterprise. This gives IT the ability to correlate the relationships between incidents, problems, service requests, changes and business services, which in turn ensures that changes are properly approved, managed, and executed. However, in a traditional implementation, a CMDB will not contain any information about batch processing. So even with an ITIL-based approach to change management, without taking into account the impact on batch, serious service impact can occur. In addition, any changes to batch processing itself cannot be managed with standard change management processes, as ITIL change management relies on CMDB data for planning, impact analysis, approval, etc. This is why it is important to integrate batch processing with an ITIL approach to change management. Integrating Batch Processing With ITIL- Based Change Management Using batch process information, alongside other configuration information, as input to the change approval process, stakeholders can take into account the effect of change on the entire enterprise, not just the online applications. This is a much more complete approach to change, and much more likely to avoid adverse change

5 impact. Integrating all of this information into a single source of truth the CMDB helps to ensure change approvers have access to all the information they need to make timely, accurate, and non-disruptive decisions regarding potentially damaging change requests. Recording batch service CIs in the CMDB also ensures that any changes affecting batch services can be managed within the systems, standards, and best practices that are in place for other enterprise systems including initiation by a service desk request, issuing the change ticket, planning, impact analysis, authorization, verification and notification. For example, in a server consolidation project, IT may plan to co-locate several applications onto a single server. A CMDB will help to determine and resolve conflicting system configuration requirements, but it will yield spurious and potentially harmful results if it does not contain configuration information for batch services. Recording critical batch service CIs in the CMDB, however, will give change approvers a single source of truth to discover, for example, that two overnight batch processes, which previously ran in parallel on separate systems, will need to run in series if they are located on a single server, seriously delaying processing and disrupting daytime business service. In another example, an upgrade that needs to shut down an application or the entire server might be scheduled for an overnight change window in the middle of the week. Change approvers can use batch service CIs stored in a CMDB to check what mission-critical batch processing requires access to that server or application, and what impact it will have to shut the server down. This may lead to a decision to delay the upgrade to a different change window for example, from a weekday night to a weekend to avoid delaying critical overnight batch processing. Alternatively, it may lead to submission of a change request to relocate the critical batch service to a different system a request that the change team can analyze, plan, approve, and execute with a standard ITIL-based change management procedure. BMC Software Delivering Batch-CMDB Integration One solution provider is set to deliver this solution, by pioneering this new approach of integrating batch processing with change management through integration with the CMDB. BMC Software is providing a packaged solution that integrates their batch process automation solution, BMC CONTROL-M, with their comprehensive CMDB, BMC Atrium. Information from BMC CONTROL-M is populated into the CMDB with an add-on to BMC Atrium called the Batch Service Extension. This extension allows all relevant batch service attributes, such as service name, priority, service owner, and service description, to be stored in the CMDB. This information is automatically discovered by scanning the BMC CONTROL-M environment, mapping the batch business services, and correlating batch entities with machines and applications, using a standard API that normalizes service data to ensure consistency. This solution also integrates with BMC Software s leading service desk, BMC Remedy, providing a complete ITIL-based change management process. BMC Atrium therefore can provide a single source of truth not just for configuration information, but also for the mission-critical batch processes maintained by BMC CONTROL-M. Stakeholders can more accurately predict the impact of change, and thereby more easily diagnose, resolve, and avoid potential problems. The next step is to provide the ability to launch the BMC CONTROL-M forecasting capability from within a change management interface, what BMC Software refers to as Launch in Context. This will allow a change approver to simulate a requested change to the environment (e.g. shutting down a server) and, from within their change management application, launch a forecast of the resulting batch process that uses that environment. With this facility, the change approver will be able to see the impact the change will have with exceptional clarity. In addition, BMC CONTROL-M Batch Impact Manager will correlate this forecast with the business services that depend on batch processing, delivering a much higher Business Service view of the impact of change on batch processing. This new approach allows batch processes including relevant inter-process dependencies, infrastructure dependencies, and connections to business services to be defined and recorded in the CMDB, providing a single source of truth, not just for critical online application configuration, but also for batch processing. This single source of truth enables all stakeholders to determine the true impact of change on all critical business services, using one authoritative source to forecast the potential

6 impact of change on both online and batch processing. This allows a complete risk assessment, and provides the necessary tools to properly plan, manage, and execute change with minimal disruption. EMA s Perspective Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a strong supporter and advocate of an ITIL approach to enterprise management, including change management, configuration management, CMDB, and service desk. EMA is a strong supporter and advocate of batch process automation, promoting wide use of batch process automation solutions to deliver efficient, effective, and reliable business services. With this innovative integration of CMDB and batch process automation, BMC Software is implementing a combination of these recommended best practices, combining them into a cohesive, integrated solution, and delivering a unique value to enterprises. Integrating batch processing with the CMDB provides a single source of truth to manage change, with the confidence that change management planning is accounting for all critical processing, not just online applications. Stakeholders are better informed, and can make better decisions, to ensure change does not have unplanned and adverse effects on critical business services. It is worth noting that a CMDB is not necessarily a simple implementation project, and enterprises should carefully plan any such project, and set about to achieve realistic goals in a realistic timeframe. However, a CMDB is a critical part of a complete ITIL implementation, and provides definite value in an ITIL-based configuration and change management process. Any enterprise that has systemic problems with managing change should investigate a CMDB deployment such as BMC Atrium. And where batch process disruption occurs as a result of change, enterprises should also look at integrating their CMDB with their batch processing. BMC Software is leading the way in providing such a solution to achieve this goal, providing unique and innovative value. EMA therefore recommends enterprises investigate an integrated solution that includes BMC Atrium, BMC CONTROL-M, and BMC Remedy. This integrated ITIL-based approach to change management integrates batch processing, CMDB, and service desk disciplines, to help ensure business service availability, even in the most complex environments. About BMC Software BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC] is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases, and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2005 revenues of more than $1.46 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit

7 About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Enterprise Management Associates is an advisory and research firm providing market insight to solution providers and technology guidance to Fortune 1000 companies. The EMA team is composed of industry respected analysts who deliver strategic awareness about computing and communications infrastructure. Coupling this team of experts with an ever-expanding knowledge repository gives EMA clients an unparalleled advantage against their competition. The firm has published hundreds of articles and books on technology management topics and is frequently requested to share their observations at management forums worldwide. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Corporate Headquarters: 2585 Central Avenue, Suite 100 Boulder, CO Phone: Fax: