IVI Framework Viewer

Representative POMs are described for Communication Management at each level of maturity.

1Initial

• Practice

  Welcome and encourage feedback from the business to IT whether positive or negative.

  Outcome

  Reactive environment with minimal predictability and poor corrective actions, leading to budget overruns and/or over-investment (“sledgehammer to crack a nut”).

  Metrics

  • Number of outages
  • Total downtime
  • Variance from planned BAU cost
  • Helpdesk calls
  • MTTR

2Basic

• Practice

  Identify component silo owners who are responsible for the related operations support and management.

  Outcome

  Capability to get visibility of response times, availability, capacity, utilization and cost for each infrastructure category.

  Metrics

  • IT component availability
  • IT component response times
  • IT component capacity (storage capacity, %CPU utilization, bandwidth capacity, …)
  • Cost per discrete component
  • % IT infrastructure covered
  • MTTR

• Practice

  Communicate updates (upgrades, interrruptions to availability, etc) relating to specific componenet silos to the business at large.

  Outcome

  Improved IT performance as a consequence of minimising recurring IT issues.

  Metrics

  • Number of incidents per issue-type
  • Number of incidents per category
  • MTBF

3Intermediate

• Practices

  • Identify service owners.
  • Identify key service consumers.

  Outcome

  Capability to get business-understandable view of the availability, capacity, response times, utilization and cost of each IT service, and how the performance of each infrastructure component contributes to these metrics (e.g. end-to-end service response times).

  Metrics

  • Service availability (trended)
  • Service utilization (trended)
  • Service capacity (trended)
  • Service latency (trended)
  • Service cost (trended)
  • % IT Services covered
  • Service MTTR
  • Service MTBF
  • Cost per IT Service vs Industry Benchmark
  • Adoption of IT service metrics

• Practice

  Regularly report operational metrics in the form of service performance (SLA breaches and overall availability)

  Outcomes

  • Empirical Modelling:
  • Improved service metrics and predictability within the IT environment.
  • Improved user experience (as potential to minimise infrastructure threats before user impact)
  • Monitoring:
  • Increased availability
  • Reduction in the time taken to resolve IT service issues and reduction in the number of recurring issues.
  • Improved user experience.

  Metrics

  • Empirical Modelling:
  • Service response times (trended)
  • Service availability (trended)
  • Service capacity (trended)
  • Service latency (trended)
  • Service utilization (trended)
  • Number of SLA breaches
  • Theoretical Weighted Business Impact (Estimate of hours lost due to service outages/shortages).
  • Monitoring:
  • Availability
  • MTTR
  • MTBF
  • Number of issues (by incident type)
  • IT component metrics (actual vs SLA)
  • IT service metrics (actual vs SLA)

• Practice

  Regularly review service performance between service owner and business/costomer contact and include forward capacity expectations.

  Outcomes

  • Capacity Planning:
  • Improved IT-Business alignment
  • Improved ROI
  • Optimized cost per service
  • Scenario Planning:
  • Improved IT-Business planning
  • Reduction in risk
  • Improved business continuity plans
  • Example CP: Where should we best target part of our IT budget in order to accommodate 1200 users?
  • Example SP: Are our remote access services capable of handling a predicted increase in usage brought about by and outbreak of avian flu?

  Metrics

  • Capacity Planning:
  • ROI
  • IT service cost per user
  • IT asset utilization
  • Stakeholder satisfaction
  • Adoption of IT service metrics by the business
  • IT service metrics
  • Storage requirements per service user (trended)
  • CPU requirements per service user (trended)
  • Bandwidth requirements
  • Scenario Planning:
  • Original predicted impact of incident vs Predicted impact following implementation of new contingency plans
  • Number of times a risk threshold is broken

4Advanced

• Practices

  • Identify key business process owners.
  • Appoint IT corresponding business process owners (business liasons) with responsibility to manage the overall business relationship.

  Outcomes

  • Abstracted view of IT services defined in terms of the business processes delivered, with an understanding of how each business process is performing.
  • Ability to monitor IT contribution to business process performance via metrics such as business proce

  Metrics

  • % Business processes mapped to IT services & monitored
  • Industry benchmark cost per IT-enabled business process

• Practice

  Regularly hold business process performance, with focus on basic operational metrics as well as improvement opportunities in the context of business value improvements.

  Outcomes

  • Provides insight into Actual vs Planned SLA performance (and thereby identifies areas where IT is hampering business performance)
  • Drive continuous improvement in business process performance, helping to identify where IT investments will make the most beneficial.
  • NOTE: By understanding how changes in business demand impact on IT services, IT services is better placed to divert scarce IT resources from one IT service to another.

  Metrics

  • IT SLAs breached
  • Business process SLAs breached
  • Business process hours lost (or Number of transactions lost)
  • Transactions handled per IT dollar
  • Business process availability
  • Business process response times
  • Business process utilization

• Practices

  • Make business at risk, forward looking capacity, and scenario planning; a joint activity between IT and the business.
  • Get IT to make use of its knowledge of the linkage between the supported business processes and the underlying infrastructure to accurately outline and discuss the business value to IT investment opportunities.
  • Identifies and communicaties opportunities where IT can enhance business opportunity.

  Outcomes

  • Improved basis for prioritisation of investments
  • Optimal level of investment in order to achieve target business performance levels (as opposed to excessive overinvestment or under-investment)
  • Potential to manage risk more effectively
  • Continuous improvement in IT service levels
  • Target IT investments and effort in areas where the greatest impact can be made in terms of business process capacity
  • NOTE: This insight can also be helpful in managing change from a legacy application to a new application solution (identifying bottlenecks in its adoption).

  Metrics

  • Transactions handled per IT dollar
  • IT SLAs breached
  • Business process SLAs breached
  • Business process impact (eg additional process capacity) of service investment
  • Business process impact (eg business process hours lost from SLA breaches (ie no investment)
  • Transactions handled per IT dollar
  • Number of business process transactions (or hours) lost due to IT service/component failure

5Optimized

• Practice

  Have IT engaged at organization level and consulted on all organization decisions.

  Outcomes

  • Provides a 2-way understanding of the linkage from the business to the underlying IT environment, allowing the impact of IT on the business, and the impact of business plans on IT to be understood and quantified.
  • Facilitates business-level scenario planning.

  Metrics

  • % Organization processes covered by model
  • % Business decisions which leverage model input
  • Variance from plan (ie how well does model reflect reality?)
  • IT-contribution/loss ($) for each business process
  • ROI (per IT dollar)

• Practices

  • Use IT models as a key business reference tool for discussion of organization scenario planning.
  • Because of their reliability, IT models can be used to communiate business decision rationale.

  Outcomes

  • Improved strategic planning capabilities (business expansion/contraction, contingency planning, risk management, …) supporting opimised allocation of scarce IT resources to enable alignment with business priorities.
  • Quantification of IT's contribution.
  • NOTE: Different profiles of user place differing demands on IT services. Service analytics allow the business to understand accurately the usage and associated IT costs of, say, recruiting 400 new tax graduates for a UK prossional services firm. Service analytics is improving.

  Metrics

  • Actual cost of achieving strategic goal vs Baseline percentage estimate.
  • Cost of excess/under capacity.
  • Business growth headroom capacity (% and Time-based), for each process.
  • Improved operating margin.
  • IT Cost/Value relationship for each business process.