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Page 1: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

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.

Page 2: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 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 3: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 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:

www.itil-officalsite.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL

http://www.itlibrary.org/index.php?page=ITIL_FAQ

 

Page 4: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 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, email 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?

• It depends on ½ infrastructure components that are outside an organization’s control (RIM NOC, Carrier, Device itself) and beyond reach of traditional monitoring tools like MS MOM or HPOV;

• It depends on complex mix of communication links and APIs across multiple components where issues like mail-stopping hung threads, MAPI errors and CDO errors are very hard to detect;

• In reality 95% of the issues impact just a few users, so system and application level monitoring cannot isolate and IT takes a long time to identify root cause and fix.

 Add to this the fact that mobility is in a constant state of change, with mobile user growth doubling or even tripling year-over-year, and of course users constantly move and roam across carriers of various service levels.

 

Figure 1: Complexity of Inside vs. Outside the Firewall Demands Unique Mobile User Management Approach

Page 5: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 5 

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.

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 inventory, compliance and expense) 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

Page 6: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 6 

BoxTone originally designed and architected the Mobile User Management approach earlier in this decade. BoxTone collaborated with more than 160 organizations and industry experts while 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 3rd 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 patented SmartMP™ technology. Many of these modules are available today and others are in development or planned.

Figure 3: BoxTone Comprehensive Modular Approach

These modules are designed to provide automation and visibility to each of the key roles in the organization, from the mobile end user to service desk and VIP care teams to messaging, operations, engineering, security, finance and management, as shown at the left in Figure 4.

Let’s look at the BoxTone core platform and each module’s capabilities to see how they can apply to ITIL and the relevant IT roles.

Figure 4: BoxTone Role Support Across the Enterprise

Page 7: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 7 

ITIL for Service Support

• Service Desk -- Purpose-built for the service desk role as shown in Figure 5, BoxTone delivers a discrete Service Desk Module with dedicated help desk console that is the designed to find, fix and validate clearing of issues in less than 3 minutes. BoxTone delivers a complete view of all mobile users’ current stats with real-time mobile transaction flow data, instantly identifies problems through automated diagnostics, and enables the service desk professional to follow simple step-by-step instructions for faster first call resolution. Thousands of issues are addressed, including provisioning/activation problems, mailbox full, hung threads, carrier issues, CDO errors, and more. In addition, via one click detailed email forwarding, help desk information can be integrated into leading service desk systems such as BMC Remedy or HP Service Center.

 

Figure 5: Fast First Call Resolution via Dedicated Help Desk Console 

• Incident Management – BoxTone delivers Incident Management (in Figure 5 above) and Problem Management (shown in Figure 6) modules that are bundled together for simplicity. Designed for fast, efficient incident identification and resolution by the BES Admin and messaging team, 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 recommended resolution path) while minimizing the noise that plagues traditional monitoring systems. Coupled with alerts, the BES OpsDashboard (as shown in Figure 6) is the one place to go to see current end-to-end system health and initiate a resolution leveraging drill-down root cause information.

Page 8: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 8 

 

 

Figure 6: BES OpsDashboard and Proactive Smart Alerts for Complete View of System Health and Fast Incident and Problem Management

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 (see Figure 7 below), 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, back-office IT operations and BES/messaging teams can rapidly respond to incidents.

 

Figure 7: BoxTone Connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 for real‐time Incident Management from the NOC Data Center

Page 9: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 9 

• 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. 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; identify problematic system/user components such as the BlackBerry-Lotus Domino state database; etc. Two of the most frequently used problem analysis reports is the BES Exception report, as shown in Figure 8, identifying all frequent recent problems across the entire BlackBerry system with root cause and resolution instructions plus the All Users Daily report which shows Top 25 worst performing users (high average delivery time, high pending messages, etc).

 

Figure 8: Problem Management Reports Speed Identification of Chronic Hard to Find System‐level (BES Exception) and User‐Level (All Users) 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 9). 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 10: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 10 

 

Figure 9: 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. That said, BoxTone Asset Management reports for asset inventory include configuration and change history tracking information, as shown below in Figure 10, to assist in meeting the goals of this group of ITIL capabilities.

 

Figure 10: Comprehensive Asset Inventory, Configuration and History Tracking

Page 11: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 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 specific service level management reports tracking availability and performance against target metrics, as shown in Figure 11. BoxTone also includes detailed drill down consoles and reports. In the future, BoxTone will expand these capabilities to deliver a dedicated service level management module.

 

Figure 11: Analysis and Reporting for Service Level Management Goals

• 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 system wide growth trends in users, BES, mail servers, message flow and average delivery time, as shown in Figure 12. 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.

 

Figure 12: Analysis and Reporting for Growth Trends and Capacity Planning Over Time

Page 12: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 12 

• 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 9. 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 $1200-2400 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. For example, for 2000 users BoxTone can help identify ANNUAL savings of $79,000 to $229,000. In addition, data can be exported in XLS or CSV format and potentially reconciled via 3rd party wireless or telecom expense management products.

 

Figure 13: Tracking Device and CAL license by BES 

BoxTone also includes reporting for growth and tracking CAL licensing and distribution by BES, as shown in Figure 13, and department-level utilization and chargeback reports as shown in Figure 14. 

 

Figure 14: Tracking Utilization and Activity for Department Services Chargeback 

Page 13: White Paper BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM

BoxTone Mobile User Management with ITIL and ITSM 

© BoxTone, Inc 2009    Page: 13 

• Continuity Management, Availability Management – RIM and 3rd 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 3rd parties like Neverfail. As noted above and shown in Figure 11, BoxTone can track and report on availability across the system and for individual designated groups.

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 160 organizations and government agencies – including 60 in the Global 2000 – 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 190 of the world's leading enterprises and government agencies, including 65 in the Global 2000, to manage, monitor and support their BlackBerry platforms. Built on patented SmartMP™ technology and conforming to industry standard ITIL best 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 www.boxtone.com, call +1-410-910-3344, or email us at [email protected]

BoxTone and the BoxTone logo are trademarks of BoxTone. All other product or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.


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