How To Integrate Legacy Management With Distributed Systems

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2 OVERVIEW Adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices has grown dramatically in the last decade. These best practices provide a framework to integrate business processes and supporting technology, and drive alignment between IT and the business. While ITIL adoption has been focused primarily on distributed technology, many organizations are capitalizing on opportunities to integrate mature legacy environments to newly stabilized distributed systems. As the distributed enterprise becomes more stable and integrated, there is a tremendous opportunity to drive process integration throughout more of the enterprise. The mainframe environment has typically employed best practices for decades. As distributed systems and processes mature, integration to already capable and mature (and typically automated) processes and tools on the mainframe can accelerate adoption, provide quick wins for ITIL/ITSM implementation initiatives, and help drive cultural change. This is particularly applicable to the Change and Release Management processes within the ITIL framework. This trend has created a de facto standard in the IT industry, to which commercial software providers (such as CA, Servicenow, IBM, BMC, Serena and HP) have mapped their infrastructure and service management suites. As a result of the widespread adoption of ITIL best practices, the modern enterprise is more integrated in terms of process, technology, and practice then ever before. ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 2

3 LEGACY INTEGRATION CHALLENGE When enterprises were mainframe-centric, mainframe based change management systems often integrated seamlessly with legacy release management systems. Change requests or work requests were correlated to change control and release management records in the SDLC. As the enterprise shifted to a more distributed focus (and thus more distributed technology) this level of integration was lost. Now that adoption of ITIL best practices has normalized the distributed tools and processes, an opportunity exists to re-establish this integration within the ITIL framework. One outcome of the commercial alignment of tools to ITIL is the emergence of a de facto standard for service desk and ticketing systems. The baseline functionality of these tools maps well to well established mainframe legacy release management (SDLC) tools. Most change management tools will be an extension of the Service Desk, and have the industry standard capabilities such as ticketing, categorization, notification and approval workflow, and a life cycle that manages the ticket from open to close. The legacy release management tools have similar control points, but employ packages or some form change ID to record the application change that is being developed, tested, approved and deployed through the SDLC. Wider adoption of standards has also created the ability to federate data from tactical databases to a central Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This allows processes to be seamlessly integrated, functional operations to be correlated, artifact relationships to be managed, and history and audit information to be centrally stored. ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 3

4 LEGACY INTEGRATION BEST PRACTICES Legacy integration has been adopted by many organizations in the past to enable change and release management across the enterprise. But because current standards and frameworks had not yet emerged, custom integration was often site specific and unsustainable. The successful integration approach for legacy change and release management is defined as a three-tiered model: Normalization, Correlation, and Automation. change control records and release package IDs on the legacy release management system. While the processes may still be separate and even dependent upon some manual re-purposing of information, the normalization of terminology allows end-to-end visibility of service transition activities. Level 2: Correlation: At level 2 integration, legacy change and release Level 1: Normalization: In normalization, a common subset of the data function points are correlated between distributed change management platforms and the legacy release management platforms. While this is the most basic of integration, it is the most essential. Change management and release management lifecycles share logical common correlation points that enable integration at the process level (see Table 1). Change records, ticket numbers from the change management system are correlated to management functionality is correlated not just at the record data and naming convention but at the respective change and release life cycles. Change ticket status is mapped to correlating stages in the release management life cycle (see Table 1). In this manner, the release management life cycle becomes an extension of the change management life cycle, and development, release and deployment activity can be traced back to its origin in either the service operation or service strategy process areas (see figure 1.1). Each life cycle ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 4

5 maintains separate approval workflows, but status updates are correlated across respective ticketing systems. Status/stage naming conventions are aligned across the respective the life cycles, and notification triggers are created upon change in change/release status. These notifications employ the same routing mechanism as the ticket support queues, and drive process integration across the respective life cycles. Level 3: Automation: Normalization of data points and correlation of workflows are externalized across the respective life cycles and systems. Approvals can be executed exclusively in either the distributed change management system or the legacy release management system, driving bi-directional updates across the respective systems. In more advanced models, a hierarchical approval workflow can span life cycles, systems and stakeholders. Once defined and integrated across systems, conditional variables such as approval status, execution target date / execution window, and status/stage values automate creation of change tickets and/or release packages, promotion of release packages through the SDLC, and update/closure of change tickets upon successful release promotion and deployment (see figure 3.1). process lays the required foundation for effective automation. In the automated model, approval ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 5

6 COMMERCIAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS Software providers such as CA, Servicenow, IBM, and Serena have offerings that span the distributed as well as the mainframe environments. While (somewhere between level 1 and level 2 as defined in the model above). The true integration and automation, is enabled through documented web services interfaces and APIs. This already imperfect situation is made more complicated by the fact that most organizations do not have the luxury of standardizing on ITSM support products from a single vendor across the enterprise. Since some of the leading providers of Service Desk technology do not have mainframe offerings, integration of legacy release management systems is more often than not relegated to custom development as depicted in Figure 4.1. these vendors have built some integration between their products, integration varies based upon market position of the mainframe platform, go-tomarket strategy of the distributed ITSM suite, and the impact of recent acquisitions on that architecture. As a rule, vendors who market a mainframe based release management tool have built some integration to their distributed change management and broader ITSM suites, but this integration is typically very basic in nature This market reality induces a tremendous amount of risk to the enterprise attempting to achieve the promised benefits of ITSM implementation. Many of these ITSM suites are sold to C-level executives under the banner of out-of-the-box (OOTB) or off-the-shelf (OTS) functionality. Even under the best of circumstance, most modern enterprises quickly find the promise of OOTB/OTS functionality falls far short of requirements. Because the OOTB/OTS expectation has shaped the ITIL ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 6

7 implementation project, the charter does not allow customization, and has allocated little to no budget for integration of systems. Given the realities of the hybrid enterprise, many organizations can find themselves actually creating silos and manual bypass of standard processes, which can greatly weigh down an implementation and adoption initiative. ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 7

8 NXBRIDGE INTEGRATION SOLUTION NXBridge from ITEGRATIONS employs the Normalization, Correlation and Automation model outlined above to achieve seamless integration between mainframe legacy release management and the distributed change management systems. While ITIL best practice release management has been in place for decades on the mainframe, the systems that facilitate those processes differ slightly in their definitions. NXBridge normalizes vendor-specific legacy release management data to a common standard (see Table 2). NXBridge correlates release and change management life cycle data to distributed change management systems, which share common function points because they are mapped to ITIL best practice definitions. NXBridge interfaces to legacy release management system control files through standard published exits and APIs, and with distributed change management through a standards based messaging layer. Once data, functions and life cycles are normalized and correlated, NXBridge enables automation by establishing life cycle status, approval status, ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 8

9 and execution target conditional triggers. This level of integration can help to reinforce the adoption of standards-based processes, which is critical to organization attempting to integrate their enterprise at the business process and technology layers. By externalizing normalized data via a standard messaging layer, NXBridge can support business processes across a wide range of systems, including ERP systems, monitoring and alerting systems, and mobile devices for productivity gains. More importantly, NXBridge provides acceleration to organizations to integrate disparate systems on disparate platforms, while reinforcing standardized processes across the enterprise. BENEFITS Change and release management is the pipe through which changes in service are delivered to the production enterprise. Whether these changes are driven by the need to fix a problem (or remove and known error in ITIL terms), or deliver innovation through new or enhanced functionality, this is essentially the channel by which IT delivers value to the business. Through seamless integration of change and release management processes across silos, development and support groups, and across the diverse application components that comprise a business application, the organization is expanding its capacity to deliver. This can be reflected in the ITIL model on a per process basis, relative to their relationship to change and release management: ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 9

10 SUMMARY A successful legacy integration approach that employs the three-tiered model of Normalization, Correlation, and Automation, can greatly enhance an organizations ability to reach ITIL integration. Legacy integration can also create quick wins for an organization by integrating mature and well established best practices that exist in the legacy environment to newly consolidated practices on the distributed change management environment. More importantly, recognizing integration opportunities early on in the ITIL project can greatly decrease risk, and the three-tiered model maps well to the milestones of standard process development. The adoption of ITL best practices has for the first time, aligned distributed technology with established norms on the mainframe platform. Long standing and mature release management best practices can now map seamlessly to newly adopted change management best practices on the industry leading platforms. By integrating distributed change management systems with legacy release management systems, an organization can achieve enterprise integration and visibility, and accelerate the time to value of the ITIL implementation project. ITIL ENABLED LEGACY INTEGRATION FOR CHANGE AND RELEASE MANAGEMENT 10