Service quality management solutions To support your business objectives Implement a unified approach to service quality management. Highlights Deliver high-quality software applications that meet functional and performance requirements Leverage build-to-manage capabilities to streamline application maintenance and support Avert service quality problems postdeployment through comprehensive instrumentation, monitoring and service level management Speed service problem diagnosis, root cause analysis and resolution Leverage an end-to-end service quality management solution through a broad portfolio of software, hardware and consulting services Chronic service quality issues can wreak havoc in organizations, impeding the ability to compete, wasting valuable IT resources, disrupting business services and preventing innovation to build business growth. Worse, organizations pay a heavy price in defect repairs for reactive quality management, or for quality management in a siloed environment. Without an end-to-end view of services across the infrastructure, resolving service quality issues becomes prohibitive in costs, time consumption and potential damage to the business. Preventing or averting service quality issues is key to cost containment, and when quality issues do arise, it is imperative to diagnose and respond as quickly as possible to lessen their impact on business services. For this reason, it s essential to have the right processes and supporting tool infrastructure to manage service quality. Covering all dimensions of quality management The IBM service quality management solution covers all dimensions of quality throughout the service lifestyle: Prevent quality problems by helping software delivery teams deliver high-quality software that simplifies downstream maintenance. Avert, diagnose and respond to quality problems by helping operations teams proactively monitor, respond to and resolve service incidents.
IBM service quality management solutions offer a broad portfolio of software, hardware, support and financing to help automate quality management best practices across the service delivery lifecycle. It is one of several modular entry points into IBM Service Management a comprehensive, fully integrated approach to closing the gap between business and IT innovation. IBM Service Management helps organizations both create and manage value, with products and services that address the complete service management lifecycle, from business management to IT development and IT operations. Here we highlight some of the most common ways and the IBM offerings customers use to manage service quality. Build in quality from the start of the software lifecycle Injecting quality at the end of the software delivery lifecycle causes architectural flaws, missed requirements and a backlog of defects. IBM solutions help software delivery teams make quality management a shared responsibility and everyday practice. Best practices in requirements, design, coding, build management and test management all work together to help ensure that business-critical applications meet end-user requirements from day one. Adopting the proper tools and procedures can help identify and resolve quality problems earlier in the service lifecycle before the services are released to preproduction. For application testing, IBM solutions enable testers, developers and performance engineers to conduct rigorous functional and performance tests to ensure that applications fully satisfy business requirements. Functional testing is critical to ensure that applications behave as intended. IBM Rational Functional Tester, an automated functional and regression testing tool, provides testers with efficient, data-driven testing capabilities, a choice of scripting language and a robust editing tool for test authoring and customization. For manual test authoring and execution, testers can use IBM Rational Manual Tester to improve the speed, breadth and reliability of functional testing. Rational Manual Tester brings automation and rigor to tedious manual test processes, enables content sharing across distributed test sites and improves testing efficiency. Performance testing tools enable developers, testers and performance engineers to proactively avoid performance problems by validating application scalability and isolating and resolving performance bottlenecks before deployment. IBM Rational Performance Tester creates, executes and analyzes tests to validate the performance and reliability of complex business applications under user load. Build-to-manage capabilities help bridge gaps between development and operations IBM quality management products include build-to-manage capabilities that help IT organizations collaborate more effectively across organizational silos. Software development teams can optimize the performance of
IBM build-to-manage capabilities Design solutions for optimal performance Instrument applications for production monitoring Create test cases that more accurately reflect production activities Identify performance problems before they surface deploy BUILD TEST MANAGE Solve production problems with detailed, accurate performance trace data Simulate production loads and pinpoint bottlenecks complex, multithreaded applications using Rational Performance Tester. Once an application is deployed into production, operations staff can monitor performance and availability utilizing the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Monitoring family. In the event of an error or service breach, IBM build-tomanage capabilities enable operations staff to collect and share detailed performance trace data at the application level. Armed with this information, developers and testers can speed problem diagnosis, resolution and redeployment. The end result is improved team collaboration and reduced business downtime. Avert, diagnose and resolve problems to retain maximum service quality delivery Preproduction, operations staff needs the ability to prepare for service delivery by: Provisioning and managing the configuration of the service topology. Instrumenting the individual configuration items, as well as end-to-end transactions. Discovering and modeling service dependencies and establishing baseline service levels. In production, operations staff needs to proactively manage ongoing service quality by: Delivering targeted service contextual views across operational and business audiences. Identifying and prioritizing based on the service impact and root cause of problems. Tracking real-time and historical service levels and key performance indicators (KPIs). Automating closed-loop, organizational process workflows through tool integration.
Instrument across the service infrastructure To avert problems, it is important to standardize and deploy instrumentation, or monitoring, beyond what is designed into applications and infrastructure components. This should occur in the preproduction or controlled release phase of applications and supporting infrastructure. IBM offers a wide range of monitoring solutions that enable comprehensive instrumentation for applications, middleware, networks (data, voice and video), security and more as well as transaction monitoring capabilities and monitoring of KPIs, to help fully instrument configuration items, end-to-end services, processes, business activity and operational metrics in real time. Having instrumentation in place for all configuration items as well as endto-end transactions ensures greater visibility into individual component status, overall transactional health and end-user perspective. Ease deployment of configuration items Consistent and controlled deployment of individual configuration is critical to assuring quality service delivery. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager helps organizations with provisioning, configuration and maintenance across applications, servers and virtual servers, operating systems, middleware, storage and network devices. By centralizing end-to-end configuration management, organizations can help assure compliance with corporate standards and significantly improve ongoing service quality. Get holistic visibility into service health and performance Once a service is deployed in a controlled environment, you can discover and model the service to gain a real-time picture of the service configuration. Tivoli business service management solutions offer end-to-end discovery and automated modeling across application, system, network, storage and security dependencies. Leverage IBM or thirdparty monitoring to feed real-time events into the service model for automated service level tracking. Automatically diagnose and prioritize response Tivoli business service management software delivers real-time service impact analysis, root cause analysis and tracking of service levels and KPIs to effectively identify, prioritize and resolve service problems and assure higher service quality. This service intelligence can be customized and delivered to operational and business audiences via a single interface for more effective decision making and service planning. Because Tivoli business service management solutions provide complete visibility into business services and processes, you can use them to: Understand cross-domain dependencies as they exist in real time. Strategically align business and operational requirements. Dynamically track operational, business and customer service level agreements (SLAs) and KPIs. Leverage and integrate existing tools for improved ROI. Automatically assess the impact of availability, performance, security and business events on service health. Implement service quality improvements that help mitigate business risk.
In addition, Tivoli business service management solutions offer a wide range of other advanced capabilities including custom correlation, event enrichment with business context, flexible escalation and notification, as well as automated response to more quickly resolve service problems. Leverage workflow automation For companies looking to close the loop on service quality, IBM Service Management software provides a variety of process managers that enable workflow automation across a range of operational processes. Leveraging the IBM workflow automation engine, organizations can rapidly integrate their IBM and third-party products to fit their own process workflows. Process managers are available for release and availability management and much more, ensuring consistent automation of best practices across the IT organization. Leverage reliable, high-availability platforms from IBM Quality service delivery depends on a solid, high-performing platform. For this reason, many organizations are turning to IBM platforms including the IBM Linux platform to consistently deliver advanced performance, high availability and scalability. All IBM systems are designed around the core principles of collaboration, openness and virtualization essential ingredients to support your service management infrastructure. IBM Global Financing provides a versatile resource for supporting the evolution of the entire IT infrastructure, with flexible leases and loans, competitive terms and a localized, consultative approach. Use IBM services to expedite service management initiatives IBM Service Management solutions are supported by an experienced, worldwide staff of professional services consultants to help you create a solid foundation for a fast, successful implementation with best practices like IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ). IBM Software Services for Tivoli and IBM Software Services for Rational can help with projects from short-term assistance with a single challenge to large-scale, customized consulting projects, or to transfer deep technical skills to your IT staff. Additional support, such as workshops, training and premium support, is also available to help you maximize your IBM Service Management solution. IBM Global Technology Services help clients assess, plan, design and implement industry-accepted service management best practices like those described in ITIL, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT). Using workshops, analytics and process reference models in a flexible and modular way, IBM provides unique, in-depth insight into how your IT resources, processes and investments match your overall business needs and what steps you need to take. Specific services available from IBM Global Technology Services include: IBM Lifecycle Management and Governance Services help assess, define and implement an integrated set of systems management tools and processes for a business-oriented view of how well IT services are performing.
As part of these services, the business of IT dashboard provides the visibility to increase application and infrastructure flexibility to support dynamic business objectives. IBM Service Management Implementation services help improve control over configuration, change and resource management processes. IBM Testing Centers of Excellence let you work with IBM consultants to improve, plan for and validate the performance and scalability of applications, systems, storage solutions and networks both IBM and non-ibm to support key initiatives, including service oriented architecture (SOA). For example: the IBM Manage Service Quality solution A leading insurance provider, frustrated by performance problems that threatened critical business services, was transitioning to an SOA that distributed business logic and data across multiple Web servers, J2EE application servers, integration middleware and mainframe systems. Applications often performed admirably in a lab environment, but delivered substandard performance once released into production. It was expensive and sometimes impossible to reproduce the exact production environment in the test lab, much less narrow down the root cause. They needed to streamline communication between the software delivery and operations teams to reduce time to resolution. Today, as part of their best practices, the software delivery team uses Rational Performance Tester to optimize application performance before release. They also establish baseline performance expectations based on a set of simulated transactions exercised in the lab. Once released, operations staff uses Tivoli Composite Application Manager to monitor transactions, understand application performance and perform trend analysis. When performance problems are detected, the software automatically collects a detailed performance trace, down to the application level identifying the application code at the root cause of the problem. Software development and test teams use the information to re-create the problem and fine-tune application code. Now, problems are identified more quickly and service interruptions are fewer and shorter. By collaborating across development and operations teams, the insurance provider avoided the hours of time typically required to verify, reproduce, analyze and resolve performance issues, helping to meet service level commitments more efficiently and with greater reliability. IBM is uniquely qualified to deliver service management As the only vendor offering a service management approach that applies industry best practices that encompass the entire service management lifecycle, IBM is uniquely qualified to offer a modular, comprehensive service management model. From a single vendor, businesses can find the service management entry point that best meets their needs: Predict: by improving insight into the health of services and projects and preventing service level violations. Align: by integrating best-practice processes to improve productivity. Innovate: by managing services across newgeneration architectures. Deliver: by optimizing change management to improve service delivery. Manage: by reducing the time required to resolve service quality problems.
IBM is helping IT organizations around the globe to create and manage value throughout the service management lifecycle. Organizations create value by focusing on the highest priorities of the business, and by driving innovation through consistent delivery of quality software. Organizations manage value by improving the efficiency and responsiveness of service delivery and support, and by meeting service level commitments with greater reliability. For more information For more information about how your organization can use IBM Service Management to enhance service quality or to find the service management entry point that is right for your organization, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/itsolutions/servicemanagement About IBM solutions for enabling IT governance and risk management IBM enables IT organizations to support governance and risk management by aligning IT policies, processes and projects with business goals. Organizations can leverage IBM services, software and hardware to plan, execute and manage initiatives for IT service management, business resilience and security across the enterprise. Organizations of every size can benefit from flexible, modular IBM offerings that span business management, IT development and IT operations and draw on extensive customer experience, best practices and open standards based technology. IBM helps clients implement the right IT solutions to achieve rapid business results and become a strategic partner in business growth. For more information about IBM Governance and Risk Management, visit ibm.com/itsolutions/governance
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