SAP Solution Manager has become a part of every SAP landscape. The implementation scenarios are mostly driven by IT services’ needs. In addition, companies are still struggling to understand Solution Manager’s functionality and potential. Because most implementation scenarios are to address internal IT service management issues, implementation funding is always provided as a final line item at budget preparation time. This philosophy means in short that it only is funded if there is money left over. Another problem with many implementation plans is that many components are implemented without an overall strategy in mind. This missing strategy causes Solution Manager to be disconnected from functions within IT as well as within the business.

With most implementation scenarios, the potential contribution to business value is not even considered. The primary implementation purpose is to solve internal IT issues, such as better data on capacity management, better data on performance management, and a more effective way to manage service and change requests. If a Solution Manager implementation would consider the business value that an effective running environment could provide, more funding would be available and the priority for a sound implementation approach would increase.

I’ll show you how Solution Manager provides excellent business value and can help you implement measurement processes to quantify IT’s contribution in terms of generating business value. I’ll introduce a new research area called business-driven IT management (BDIM), which is focused on developing ways to quantify the effects of IT investment and decision making on business value. Following that, I’ll explore BDIM’s relationship with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). In the context of autonomous computing and cloud computing, BDIM develops into an essential discipline to measure resource allocation to business value. Finally, I’ll explore the fit of Solution Manager functionality with the concepts of BDIM.

Introduction to BDIM

Early IT management was concerned with managing failures in infrastructure, both of hardware and software components. The support effort was centered on reacting to failures and trying to resolve them. The next phase in the evolution saw the development of tools to assist in rudimentary monitoring of the various components. This phase included tools specific to network monitoring and operating system monitoring. Even with these tools, the overall management was based on a reactive approach. The next phase was the introduction of the ITIL framework. The framework looked at IT management and services holistically, and defined through its stages the steps necessary for delivering services and service levels to the business.

Figure 1

The IT monitoring evolution

ITIL is focused on delivering services and measuring service levels. BDIM adds an additional focus area, aiming to find dependencies between IT solutions and business performance. In other words, what effect will new resource allocations, such as CPU, database, and network resources, have on transaction throughput of a business process — and what impact can that have on overall revenue?  

Figure 2 helps describe the underlining purpose of BDIM. At the base layer, it involves collecting metrics for IT operations and technical components. The next layer up is the business process layer, in which you measure the performance of the individual transactions. Already between these two layers relationships can be established to see what effect a change on the IT service layers has on the business process layer. Progressing upward from the business process layer is the actual business layer with its performance metrics. The trick is to correlate the metrics of each layer and establish relationships, so that the value generated by IT can be traced back to the business process and further up the chain to the actual business result.

Figure 2

A business value generation flow

A good step-by-step approach for mapping the metrics is:

1. Identify the business metrics of interest.
2. Select technical performance metrics in the context of IT management and the business scenario of interest.
3. Model or map these metrics to find the correlations.
4. Validate the model by changing the underlying conditions that influence the metrics.
5. For the business scenario of interest, measure the gains to the business goals.

Besides helping to analyze and understand the correlations among technical IT metrics, business process metrics, and business functions, BDIM enables a closer collaboration between IT management and business. To start measuring any IT-related metrics to determine business value effect, a strong partnership needs to be established that requires trust and cooperation on both sides.

Use Cases for BDIM

Before discussing the relationship of Solution Manager and BDIM, it is beneficial to look at some potential use cases and research areas of BDIM.

BDIM over ITIL

The ITIL framework’s main focus is to deliver services to the business by meeting agreed-upon service-level objectives. The application area for BDIM is to measure this business value and to correlate this value generation back to the service itself. Different ITIL processes, such as capacity planning, change management, security management, and release management, correlate IT availability metrics to monetary losses if the service levels are not met. As an example, you could take change management and the prioritization of change requests regarding deployment to production. This prioritization of deployment is based on the business value loss or gain to the business. Other areas are security intrusion protection, risks associated to business disruption, and loss of business value.

BDIM is receiving increased attention over ITIL by IT management and solution vendors as a result of the search for developing technologies that can model the relationships over multiple ITIL processes. In the future, measuring the business value for individual processes is a reasonable holistic model for all complex processes.

BDIM and Autonomous Computing

Another area of interest where BDIM is gaining importance is autonomous computing, which uses biological systems as inspiration for technology. The idea is to develop an artificial monitoring and regulating environment in a computer landscape that takes autonomous corrective actions when configured performance thresholds are exceeded or indicates a potential failure or bottleneck.

The overall life cycle of monitoring such an environment contains components to develop an action plan based on the policies provided and then execute the plan. Following the execution of activities, the system monitors itself, analyzes the results, and adjusts the plan for further action. Central to this life cycle is a knowledgebase that contains lessons learned and problem resolutions over time.

This autonomous decision process (i.e., to take corrective actions) is based on defined policies. These policies are positioned so business value generation is maximized (or business losses are minimized). Preceding such a definition is an analytical analysis of performance metrics correlated to business metrics through analytical models. It is, therefore, critical for such a system to develop the right technical-to-business metrics if the objective is to maximize business value or to minimize business losses.

BDIM and Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has achieved great adoption in a short time. This is due not only to the potential cost savings for IT organizations, but more importantly in being able to use computing resources on demand. The elasticity of expanding and reducing computing resources in near real time provides a business model that can address changes in computing demand from the business.

The other computing characteristic of cloud computing is chargeback or use calculation. These metrics provide valuable input to link the use, capacity, and performance with generated business value. For example, as a seasonal increase in business activities is recognized, a demand for more computing resources is initiated. By providing these resources and measuring the incremental capacity and performance, you can compare it to the additional business value output to derive an overall business value effect.

The key here is that through the elasticity of cloud computing, measurements of direct business effect are obtained more easily than with traditional infrastructures. This is because requisition of additional computing resource for temporary additional workloads is often lengthy and may require the purchase, installation, and configuration of additional hardware and software. In addition, these new add-ons often provoke outages. With cloud computing, the adjustment of resources can be measured, which in return triggers an effect on business process and business value.

BDIM and Solution Manager

Now that I’ve covered the purpose and objective of BDIM, I want to turn my attention to its relationship with Solution Manager. As shown through the examples previously described, Solution Manager provides a platform to adopt a BDIM vision for the IT organization and start implementing BDIM concepts in it.

SAP Solution Perceptions and Maturity Levels

The problem, however, is that Solution Manager struggles with several perceptions that need to be overcome. The maturity of a Solution Manager implementation can be directly related to the perception that is prominent in the IT organization. The first level of maturity and the related perception of Solution Manager is for the SAP Basis team to get license keys, do some technical monitoring, and in general maintain the SAP landscape. Access is restricted to the Basis team and any understanding of business value generation may be missed or neglected.

The second level of maturity and related perception is that Solution Manager can be used for IT service management (ITSM) and change management processes. This level recognizes that better service levels need to be provided to the business through incident and change management. However, the motivation is to provide better service levels as well as to get a better handle on the change management process internally. In many incidents, a hybrid solution is implemented by using Change Request Management (ChaRM) alongside another ITSM system. Hybrid solutions might solve perceived functional issues but add significant complexity through interfaces.

The third maturity level recognizes to a degree that better monitoring of business processes is necessary. Normally, this awareness starts with the need to get a better handle on interface monitoring. Interfaces provide the weakest link in the business process chain, and most often its failure causes a significant problem to the business.

Each maturity level has its purpose and is necessary, but often each implementation is driven by different motivations and may not be carried out with a holistic view of driving business value. Because the overall business focus is missing, most components are implemented in silos and do not follow a common goal that measures IT’s contribution to producing business value.

To change these perceptions, Solution Manager needs to be used to measure business performance and results. A fundamental new focus needs to emerge that asks in all implementation activities the question: What effect does this have on the business and how can we measure it? Developing an implementation roadmap with this focus changes the priorities of many current activities and increases the urgency to implement different components based on these new priorities.

Practical Steps to Change Course

In an ideal world, Solution Manager would immediately have the capabilities to provide the necessary linked metrics between business and technical layers. However, that is not the case. Even if this functionality were available, it is doubtful that a current implementation would produce better results. The main obstacle is the absence of the vision needed to make measuring of business value the top priority.

Here are some pragmatic steps to start on the new path of driving business value from Solution Manager:

Step 1. Redefine a new vision and implementation roadmap that is exclusively business focused. Consistently evaluate every action on the question, “Where is the business value and how can we measure it?” To pursue quantifiable metrics is better than to simply offer qualitative statements of intangibles.

Step 2. Develop a partnership with the business. This is critical because the business is the best critic and can observe the effects. Discuss on a regular basis these metrics and discuss in a spirit of partnership how the metrics can be improved either through enhanced accuracy or changes in process.

Step 3. Develop a team of one to three people that focuses primarily on maintaining, tuning, and enhancing the metrics between technology and business process. This team should be part of a center of excellence and well connected with SAP Basis, the business warehouse folks, and the integration team.

Step 4. Before any improvements can be made, capture baseline metrics. However, when developing the metrics framework keep a holistic view in mind. Table 1 shows metric examples from different areas and illustrates the connection between the different layers.

Table 1

Metrics connecting business and IT

By structuring the metrics framework as described in Table 1, certain metric relationships become obvious. For example, if the availability metric drops, the generated business value also drops. If certain change requests are not implemented or show failures, this causes a reduction in business value. Another relationship that might be illustrated is transaction performance to sales orders processed and sales order value produced.

After this exercise, more complex relationships may be developed and used. However, that can only happen with sufficient historical data and by recognizing trends. These relationships should be discussed with the business partner and monitored in a proof-of-concept mode to determine their validity.

It is also important not to get overwhelmed by defining too large a scope. The approach should be to keep it as simple and effective as possible. It is better to have a workable, effective model for the critical processes then spend too much time measuring everything and thereby causing an overload of metric data and, as a result, lose control.

Tim Reimer

Tim Reimer is an expert in architecting integration solutions between SAP and third-party applications. These integration solutions require a monitoring platform for which SAP Solution Manager is a perfect fit. Tim has consulted to companies in Canada, the US, and Europe and was recently responsible for SAP Solution Manager in an SAP global roll-out in Europe. His current focus is in assisting companies developing a holistic monitoring and metrics strategy with the objective to measure business value.

You may contact the author at Tim.Reimer@infoprag.com.

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