BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

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1 White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM Summary Today, many organizations are shifting their IT focus from day-to-day technical operation of back-office infrastructure to delivering high quality services that their users or customers require. For most, this means a shift from technology management to service management known as IT Service Management (ITSM) typically using the most widely accepted approach or process framework called ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library ). For the mobile workforce that relies on BlackBerry smartphones to stay connected and reliably perform their business function anywhere, any time, the strategy of Mobile User Management has emerged as the most effective application of ITSM leveraging ITIL. This document outlines the capabilities of ITSM and ITIL as applied to Mobile User Management by BoxTone for smartphones such as those included in the BlackBerry platform.

2 An Overview of ITSM and ITIL IT Service Management (ITSM) is sweeping the industry as a more effective, customer-focused approach to ensure that users get the IT services they require in the right priority, in a timely fashion and at the right price. ITSM is a customer or user-focused discipline for managing IT systems. ITSM focuses on the quality of processes for supporting and managing technology for end users, rather than on innovating or implementing the technology itself. The most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world is ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library ). ITIL defines the organizational structure and skill requirements of an IT organization with a set of standard operational management procedures and practices to enable the organization to manage an IT operation and associated infrastructure. The most widely implemented ITIL framework is V2. This document focuses on ITL V2 as an organizational starting point. Within ITIL, IT Service Management is divided into two practices: Service Support ensuring that end users have access to IT systems required for their business function Service Desk the single point of contact between end users and IT with responsibilities to handle user incidents and requests, integrating people, processes and systems (also called help desk, field support, etc.). Incident Management the process of restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible while minimizing the adverse effects on the business (which may or may not address underlying root cause but does get the user up and running again quickly). Problem Management the process of finding the root cause of multiple smaller-impact or individual large-impact incidents and resolving permanently with a goal of shortening and eliminating future incidents and problems. Asset Management the standard policies and processes for systematically tracking, evaluating and managing software/hardware licensing compliance, inventory and usage. Configuration Management the process of tracking all configuration information for individual assets and entire systems, such as version and model numbers, baselined performance/throughput and relationships to other assets. Change Management the processes for efficient and reliable handling of change in IT systems in order to minimize impact of change-related incidents and improve overall operations. Page: 2

3 Release Management the process for automated distribution or releases of software and hardware with the goal of protecting the live environment through formal procedures, checks and certifications. Service Delivery proactive services to support overall customer requirements for the business Service Level Management brings together all other areas into one set of high-level metrics for tracking and reporting through continual identification, monitoring and review of the levels of IT services specified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring that the agreed IT services are delivered when and where they are supposed to be. Capacity Management optimizing quality of service to cost of provisioning IT services, including such disciplines as application sizing, workload management, modeling, capacity planning and performance management. Continuity Management --ensures the availability and rapid recovery of IT services in the event of a disaster, including such disciplines as risk analysis, contingency planning and risk management. Availability Management enables IT to sustain the IT service in order to support the business at a justifiable cost, including such disciplines as availability requirements, availability planning and availability monitoring. Financial Management --ensures that the IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price (which does not necessarily mean cheapest) and calculating the cost of providing IT services so that an organization can understand the costs of its IT services. More information on ITIL is available at the following: Page: 3

4 Inside Mobile User Management Mobile User Management is a set of best practices and technology applied to ensuring the high quality of service that mobile users demand. In most instances, organizations turn to the Mobile User Management approach to more effectively support their mobile workforce a distinct group of executives, knowledge workers and field personnel who require reliable voice, data, and application connectivity both to the Internet and back to the enterprise via smartphone technology such as the BlackBerry platform. Recognizing that mobility is different from traditional IT systems, Mobile User Management has become the only way to effectively and proactively manage, monitor and support the mobile workforce. Why is mobility different? First, because one-half of the infrastructure required to deliver mobile IT services is outside the firewall and beyond the reach of traditional management and monitoring tools and internal best practices, as shown in Figure 1. Second, field research shows that 95 percent of issues affect only a subset of users and cannot be found by looking at the infrastructure alone. Third, mobility is in a constant state of change, with mobile-userssupported sometimes doubling or even tripling year-over-year. Add in the fact that users constantly move and roam across carriers of various service levels while requesting direct mobile access to many more applications beyond and PIM. Figure 1: Complexity of Inside vs. Outside the Firewall Demands Unique Mobile User Management Approach Proactive IT service management means proactive Mobile User Management, which has led many organizations to leverage their ITSM initiatives through ITIL into their Mobile User Management initiatives. This means the tremendous benefits of ITIL can extend to mobility, rather than segregating mobility into a one-off group of specialty skills, higher cost and unpredictable complexity. Beyond the economies of scale and efficiency, an ITIL-based organization benefits from one standard set of vocabulary and best practices across the entire IT organization for delivering all end-user services and technologies. Page: 4

5 Mobility, Mobile User Management and ITIL As organizations look to formalize their Mobile User Management practices, they can directly leverage the two sets of ITIL V2 practices for Service Support and Service Delivery. The inherent flexibility in ITIL means that organizations can start in the areas they identify as most important to their business, and over time they can adopt all 12 areas. Ultimately, a comprehensive approach to Mobile User Management means that an organization should identify processes and technologies to start addressing the most important areas today while developing a long term ITIL adoption strategy. As shown in Figure 2 below, many organizations choose to proactively start with Asset Management (including Provisioning Tracking) while they are still in the early part of the VIP growth phase. Other more established organizations moving towards the mission-critical platform phase tend to start with Incident Management, Service Desk Management and Problem Management and then round out their approach with the remaining modules. Industry research shows that once an organization accelerates past the mission-critical platform phase, it recognizes that formalized best practices and technologies to proactively manage, monitor and support their mobile users become mandatory. Figure 2: Mobile Maturity Curve Mapped to Adoption Rates BoxTone originally designed and architected the Mobile User Management approach earlier in this decade. BoxTone collaborated with more than 100 organizations and industry experts while Page: 5

6 leveraging 9+ years of advanced technology development in the areas of high-volume production systems management and monitoring. Recognizing the strong adoption rate of ITSM and ITIL in its customer base, BoxTone defined a product and services roadmap to align Mobile User Management with ITIL, where relevant and applicable. Leveraging the BoxTone SmartMP core technology, BoxTone has architected a plug-and-play platform with key modules that deliver functionality for these essential IT services. BoxTone itself is focused on delivery of these key modules that leverage BoxTone s unique core intellectual property (IP) for management, monitoring and support while leveraging RIM and other 3 rd parties for other ITIL relevant capabilities where their core IP applies. As you can see from Figure 3, BoxTone s comprehensive modular approach includes the delivery of seven key Mobile User Management modules, each leveraging the core BoxTone SmartMP technology. Many of these modules are available today and others are in development and will be available soon. Figure 3: BoxTone Comprehensive Modular Approach Let s look at the BoxTone core platform and each module s capabilities to see how they can apply to ITIL. Page: 6

7 ITIL for Service Support Service Desk -- Purpose-built for the service desk role as shown in Figure 4, BoxTone delivers a discrete Service Desk Module with dedicated help desk console that is the one place to go for service desk personnel to deliver quality service and drive fast first call resolution. BoxTone delivers a complete view of all mobile users current states with real-time mobile transaction flow data, instantly identifies problems through automated diagnostics, and enables the service desk professional to follow recommendations to quickly resolve frontline issues (with >80% of incidents addressed or escalated in three minutes or less). Fast issue identification and resolution spans provisioning/activation problems, to mailbox full, to hung threads, to carrier issues. In fact, BoxTone identifies and provides recommendations for thousands of potential issues. In addition, via BoxTone Connectors and/or consulting services, help desk information can be integrated into leading service desk systems such as BMC Remedy or HP Service Center. Figure 4: Fast First Call Resolution via Dedicated Help Desk Console Incident Management BoxTone delivers Incident Management (shown here) and Problem Management (shown next page) modules that are bundled together for simplicity. Designed for fast, efficient incident identification and resolution by the BES Admin, BoxTone combines proactive baselined alerting with the BoxTone BES OpsDashboard and drilldown consoles. By baselining end-to-end performance each minute of the day, 24x7x365, and by correlating with a known database of patterns and rules, BoxTone can more readily identify and alert for anomalies (and provide a Page: 7

8 recommended resolution path) while minimizing the noise that plagues traditional monitoring systems. Coupled with alerts, the BES OpsDashboard (as shown in Figure 5) is the one place to go to see current end-to-end system health and initiate a resolution leveraging drill-down information. In addition, via BoxTone Connectors, critical incident event information can be integrated natively into leading data center products such as HP OpenView, Microsoft MOM/SCOM, CA/Unicenter and other SNMP-based systems. When such systems are used with the BoxTone Service Desk Module, an organization can ensure that front line help desk, backoffice IT operations and BES/messaging teams can rapidly respond to incidents. Figure 5: BES OpsDashboard and Proactive Smart Alerts for Complete View of System Health and Fast Incident and Problem Management Problem Management As noted above, BoxTone delivers a dedicated Problem Management module. For the BES admin and the engineering team, BoxTone delivers root cause details and rich performance information via specifically-designed problem analysis reporting along with the BoxTone BES OpsDashboard and drilldown consoles, as shown in Figure 6. This enables organizations to: identify hard to find problems such as BES-mail server intermittent performance problems due to frequent hung threads that cause frequent restarts; isolate problematic and high use accounts correlated with other infrastructure and performance metrics, etc. One of the most frequently used problem analysis reports is the BES Exception report, identifying all frequent recent problems across the entire BlackBerry system with correlated metric data to isolate root cause. Page: 8

9 Figure 6: BoxTone Health Checks and Problem Management Reports Speed Identification of Chronic Hard to Find Problems and Resolutions Asset Management For the BES admin, messaging teams, service desk teams, asset tracking teams and the finance department, BoxTone provides the Asset, Expense and Compliance Management module, which includes analytics and reports designed to help businesses better understand current and historical trend information about asset status and usage (see Figure 7). Three clusters of analyzed information are provided, including: 1) the Asset Inventory Cluster (asset user inventory, application inventory, device configuration and device lifecycle history reports); 2) the Asset Security and Compliance Cluster (verified IT policy inventory and verified activation/deactivation/wiped reports) and; 3) the Utilization Cluster (high-use, low-use and no-use user reports). In addition, all data can be exported in various formats, including XLS and CSV so that it can be imported into other asset management or configuration management databases (CMDBs) for standardized use across the enterprise. Page: 9

10 Figure 7: Comprehensive Asset, Expense and Compliance Analysis and Reporting Configuration Management, Change Management, Release Management RIM continues to advance the BlackBerry platform to deliver mobile device management capabilities for configuration management, change management and release management as core capabilities. BoxTone leverages these capabilities that exist today and is working with RIM on substantial advancements for the BlackBerry V5 platform in the future. Page: 10

11 ITIL for Service Delivery Service Level Management The goal of service level management is to continually ensure that an organization is meeting specified Service Level Agreements (SLAs). For most organizations, this is one of the last ITIL processes deployed once all the other dependent ITIL processes and systems are in place and the IT operation matures. Today, BoxTone includes base system health and performance reports and data that can be leveraged to aid in service level management, as shown in Figure 7. In the future, BoxTone will deliver a dedicated service level management module to help organizations track their performance to defined service level targets. Figure 8: Analytics and Reporting Assist with Service Level Management and Capacity Management Capacity Management The goal of capacity management is to optimize quality of service with the cost of provisioning IT services. Today, through dashboards, drilldown and reports, BoxTone includes key metrics such as BES server performance and utilization metrics to aid load impact and capacity planning, as shown in Figure 7. Over time and with customer demand, BoxTone intends to deliver a sophisticated capacity management module to help organizations model performance trends and recommend specific capacity adjustments/requirements. Financial Management The current BoxTone Asset, Expense and Compliance management module is designed to aid in overall IT Financial Management. This module includes analyses and reports that identify monthly usage metrics for each user combined with high-use, low-use and no-use users, as shown in part in Figure 6. With this data, an organization can quickly identify low-use and no-use devices and data plans that can be reallocated or turned off, saving annually $ in cost per user. BoxTone has learned that most mid to large deployments have 3-10 percent of their users in this category, which can drive potentially substantial cost savings. In addition, Page: 11

12 data can be exported in XLS or CSV format and potentially reconciled via 3 rd party wireless or telecom expense management products. Finally, BoxTone core reports help identify chronic users with chronic problems that an organization might choose to compartmentalize to manage impact of cost on support and IT operations. Continuity Management, Availability Management RIM and 3 rd parties continue to advance in this area with high availability technologies today and more in the future. BoxTone can aid in gathering key metrics and reporting on overall BlackBerry system availability. For the remainder of functionality in this area, BoxTone partners with RIM and 3 rd parties like Neverfail. Conclusion As we have explored in this document, IT Service Management through ITIL is a tremendous step forward for the enterprise in terms of optimizing process, efficiency and costs. For organizations that operate with the ITIL framework or who plan to implement ITIL, BoxTone is a natural partner and solution. BoxTone for BlackBerry enables an organization to leverage and extend their ITIL initiatives and processes into Mobile User Management. Through a modular platform approach, available today and expanding in the future, BoxTone is helping numerous organizations capitalize on the strong benefits of ITIL for mobility enabling improvements and efficiencies in responsiveness to users, process, measurability, service quality and costs. It is a technology and approach trusted by more than 100 organizations and government agencies including 40+ in the Fortune 1000 to balance quality of service with costs, accommodate rapid user and application growth and guarantee the high quality of service that mobile users demand. About BoxTone BoxTone software is trusted by more than 110 of the world's leading enterprises and government agencies, including 40 in the Fortune 1000, to manage, monitor and support their BlackBerry platforms. Built on patented SmartMP technology and conforming to industry standard ITIL practices, BoxTone s comprehensive modular platform and role-specific consoles enable IT and services organizations to collaboratively reduce support costs, accommodate rapid device growth, and guarantee the high quality of service that mobile users demand. Learn more from the expert in mobile user management at call , or us at [email protected]. wcc Page: 12