Visibility - See your Business

Service Management

	Visibility   |   Control   |   Automation

Business and operational audiences often lack the visibility they need to effectively manage their business objectives. Achieving the best results from a complex service infrastructure requires knowing how it's performing in many different senses. Without actionable service insight and intelligence, the success of business processes and strategies cannot be quantified; emerging technical problems cannot be isolated and resolved; and determining status of regulatory compliance could be substantially more complicated.

IBM helps address these challenges by delivering targeted real-time business, compliance, and operational dashboards that leverage an organizations existing assets-their tools, information, and people-and providing the real-time visibility needed to manage against those business objectives.

Business dashboards display service performance in a business context; as technical changes occur, their business impact can quickly and easily be quantified and prioritized. Dashboards within this group pull information from both business sources and IT sources, then connect and display the information in such a way as to report not merely on how IT is performing abstractly, but on how that performance is impacting business objectives, such as profit and loss transactions and customer experience.

Compliance dashboards display indicators and metrics required to assess whether an organization is (or is not) in compliance with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or HIPAA. These regulations specify how sensitive information should be managed, monitored, and modified. In the event of an audit, such tools can deliver invaluable information on availability, performance, integrity, and business activity. Additionally, they can help ensure that appropriate reports can be generated to demonstrate conclusively that compliance has indeed been achieved via adequate controls.

Operational dashboards show the technical status of business services and supporting infrastructure. These dashboards can be used to visualize emerging technical problems, and business impact-in many cases, prior to customers even becoming aware that a problem exists. Subsequently, they can isolate service root cause, identify problem owners and guide them through resolution.