Instead of a team that focuses exclusively on the mainframe, another that handles LANs, and another that addresses UNIX, many organizations are moving toward groups responsible for such core tasks as capacity planning across all platforms. Centralized management can overcome the problems of managing element by element, where everyone touches just part of the elephant, as well as keep a lid on costs and improve effectiveness. Although service management is often seen as an issue for the operations staff, it should also involve application development and support groups. In most cases, acquiring tools to assist with service management is the easiest step. Tools with a detailed understanding of databases and the most critical enterprise application packages are also critical.
Few tools generate data in exactly the language spoken by end users.
But that can be overcome with a little education of end users. Because meeting SLAs requires the cooperation of different IT groups, some companies are even taking the step of forging agreements between IT groups. One major brokerage firm set up OLAs that zeroed in on solving problems reported by end users. Before the OLAs were put in place, the brokerage's operations centers handled fewer than 35 percent of the problems. The rest were escalated to groups within IT whose chief mission was to maintain current systems and devise new IT solutions for specific business units.