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Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April - Index

Circle 38 on Reader Service Card
– each specialist is focused on managing their part of the IT
infrastructure. These operational silos in combination with their
distinctive IT management tools create silos of data. [Figure ]
figure 2: courtesy of managed objects
To be valuable, this information must be manually consolidated
and correlated in order to achieve end-to-end management and
understand the impact on performance. It’s a labor-intensive process
consumes countless hours of precious IT resources and slows IT
problem resolution.
76 I March-April 2008 Issue
Translation to Impact
Business Service Management is a fundamental shift in the way
technology is managed. Instead of managing technology as individual
components BSM dynamically links these components to the services
delivered to the business. With strong integration capabilities, BSM
translates event data – that is data about the status of an individual
component – into impact. In other words, BSM is a platform of information
that illustrates the impact of IT with respect to the business.
In complex environments it’s not uncommon for enterprises to have
thousands, even hundreds of thousands of components in their
infrastructure – each of which is capable of incurring downtime and
generating an event alert. The ability to translate event data into impact
is inherently valuable and requires the integration of data from existing
IT management tools onto a single pane of glass. In other words, vendor
agnostic BSM solutions enable users to leverage their existing investment
in application, network and system management tools – extending their
value – and simultaneously understand the impact to business.
As with many large organizations, the IESO’s IT environment was as
complex as it was critical. The IESO has a heterogeneous IT shop
that counts a combination of Compaq and Sun machines and also
three different monitoring tools including HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli
and Microsoft MOM. As such, it wasn’t unusual for IT operations
to have four or five different screens in front of them, all showing
slightly different views of the enterprise. n this way, the IESO’s IT
operators often found themselves inundated with alarms, that were