4ISM® is the module that provides reporting and performance indicators for information systems that integrate monitoring of ITIL processes
4ISM® collects, centralizes, presents and keeps a history of all pertinent indicators for piloting an IT department in a simple way. It supplies the appropriate reports and performance indicators that integrate company goals. Its filtering functionalities facilitate the creation of reports adapted to each user.
It integrates multiple sources and provides a coherent and reliable view of them (XML, databases, spreadsheets, flat files, software APIs, etc.).
Finally, 4ISM® automatically alerts the person in charge, for instance when service level deteriorates.
4ISM® provides performance indicators for IT department managers:
- IT Department
- Design and Planning
- Operations and Production
- Help desk
- IT production
- Networks
- Quality Department
- Cost Control
- etc.
4ISM® also allows defining the appropriate reports for communicating with general management and the business units.
4ISM® provides different types of Reporting
- A standardized reporting format that includes standard reports produced at predefined intervals and distributed to different users according to their profiles, either in pdf or Web format.
- Specifically designed requests and reporting: Users have access to reports that are adapted to their specialty. They have open access to information to obtain answers to specific questions, such as, “How many instances are found in the Oracle 8 database?”
- A personalized reporting format that is easily created using configuration and drag-and-drop by a user or an administrator.
- Operational reporting: This type of reporting is produced according to an adapted frequency, which can be almost as often as real-time, to provide an immediate and continuous view of data. This is the case, for instance, of application availability for use.
4ISM® for ITIL: measure the efficiency of ITIL processes
4ISM features as a standard a library of indicators related to ITIL processes. Most notably, these cover the two major components of ITIL: Service Support and Service Delivery.
Service Support processes are piloted using indicators that measure the efficiency of the following processes:
- Service Desk
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Management
- Release Management
Service Delivery processes are piloted using indicators that measure the efficiency of the following sub-processes:
- Service Level Management
- Capacity Management
- Availability Management
- IT Service Continuity Management
At the top, the 4ISM® portal with smileys indicating whether ITIL process objectives have been reached. Indicators are presented using arrows, smileys, traffic lights, etc., and details can be displayed by simply clicking on an indicator.
Concrete case: utilization by IT Department Operations
4ISM® is used to select the appropriate indicators from the ITIL library and from other indicators, in such a way as to provide the solutions and the indicators best adapted to the company. These indicators should reflect the goals of the IT department for the short, mid and long term. Filtering and quick configuration functionalities will allow updating indicators if objectives change.
Return on investment is both qualitative – re-assignment of investments to strategic projects – and quantitative – lowering of application maintenance budgets with a target reduction from 10 to 30%.
We will give as an example an operational utilization. In this case, the idea is to implement the proper indicators for ensuring good support and supplying services according to ITIL. The indicators selected and integrated into 4ISM® will be:
- Average time for resolution of operating incidents (ITIL incident management)
- Number of active elements whose availability is measured (ITIL capacity management)
- Availability of services and applications (ITIL availability management)
- Number of service interruptions (ITIL service level management)
- Customer satisfaction by service and by application (ITIL service level management)
4ISM® can also be used to address a specific issue, for example abnormally long batch processing, which might be tied to future problems. 4ISM® supplies the following elements:
- Emission of an alert and a specific report in case of excessive duration
- Statistics on minimum, average and maximum time for each batch for each application
- Statistics on when batch processing is done for each application
- Monitoring of trend indicators
Advantages
Advantages for the operator are time saved (consolidation, calculation, correlation, feedback and reporting) and the automatic detection of problems that are potentially dangerous for operation and the quality of service supplied.