By Larry Lange

Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s science fact. Consider “Minority Report,” Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie, in which networking technology gives the main characters an instant, 360-degree view of everything that’s happening in their environment. For cutting-edge CIOs, the notion of a 360-degree view of the business is fast becoming reality. Thanks to the combination of several technologies, CIOs are poised to gain unprecedented access and control over the full spectrum of their IT environments. Increasingly, they’re able to view their people, process and technology—and to quickly relate these resources to the needs of their business.

This 360-degree vision is also helping CIOs provide true innovation and marked business growth across the enterprise. “When I first heard about the potential benefits, I thought, ‘This sure sounds like science fiction to me,’ ” says Jim Haar, CIO at solution provider BEA Systems. “But after looking closer, I’m impressed.”

There are myriad reasons why the 360-degree vision is so necessary in today’s business world. For starters, there’s the changing role of the CIO. Fully half of all CIOs have duties outside of core technology, such as helping to craft corporate strategy, according to recent research. That’s up from 20 percent just three years ago.

Adds Frank Modruson, CIO of consulting firm Accenture: “The 360-degree view is all about understanding the needs of the business and then positioning IT to meet those needs. The CIO today needs to be thinking about the IT strategy for the company and the business strategy at the same time — making sure those two are aligned—as well as anticipating the ever changing competitive landscape.”

Along with this change has been an elevation of many CIOs to the top circle of corporate management. “IT today is part of the bottom line; it’s a business unit within the enterprise,” says Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester. “The CIO is now really the ‘CEO of IT.’ ”

At the heart of this shift is the notion that IT has become the core of business services— and that the end user has become a bona fide customer. “IT has moved to completely different modalities of communication when touching the customer via theWeb,” says Bob Cagnazzi, CEO of communications solutions provider BlueWater Communications Group. Pointing to call centers, Internet-enabled mobile devices and other developments, Cagnazzi says the customer experience is now intimately tied to what the CIOhas designed and executed.

‘IT Consumerization’
Also, CIOs are under pressure to keep up with today’s increasingly tech-savvy consumers. “We’re looking at what the industry calls the consumerization of IT,” says Paul Alexander, Director of IT for Pinellas County, Fla. This started with the PC and evolved to wireless innovations like the BlackBerry and iPhone that are empowering the end user/customer, he says, “and that’s significantly increased the expectations the business side has for the CIO.”

Finally, many IT organizations are still devoting a large percentage of their time and resources to simply supporting existing IT capabilities, leaving little for innovation. In fact, Forrester’s Garbani says that fully 80 percent of a typical CIO’s budget goes to maintaining basic IT functionalities. So only 20 percent can go to new initiatives that support business growth.

360-Degree Vision
All this means that today’s CIOs need the ability to view and manage all assets, people and processes that affect their IT environment. CIOs must also align these components with the goals of the business. And they must do all this with increasingly tight budgets and staff.

A 360-degree view can help, in part by aligning IT performance management with the business’s revenue streams. Consider online shopping. When measuring online transactions, it’s critical for a retailer to know how many prospective customers are leaving its shopping site prematurely— and why they’re leaving, says Nick Sharma, Senior VP of Global Infrastructure Services at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. “A full view would give me the data involved with that,” Sharma says, “so I could mine the data associated with that transaction and discover its true business value.”

A 360-degree view can also help CIOs tame technological complexity, which, for many, is nearly out of control. In large part, this is due to the need for legacy systems to now interact with newer technologies, such as the Web and mobile devices. Further, because IT has traditionally been run by subject-matter experts, IT is often fragmented: One group of IT people is responsible for the network, another for systems, and yet another for applications and databases. Further, each group can deploy its own software tools and processes.

“The 360-degree view needs to be a view of facts — not just the supporting facts, but the detailed facts behind them,” says Modruson of Accenture. “If I’m looking at a business process, I want to know: What’s the outcome of the process? What are the metrics I measure the process by? What are the supporting technologies? And how can I improve it?”

Further, IT fragmentation can be exacerbated by corporate acquisitions and mergers. For example, when two banks merge, the CIO of the merged entity must manage two data infrastructures and two customer-records databases. In these situations, small issues can cause big problems, says Adam Frary, a Director of Product Marketing at CA. “Say one institution stores five-digit ZIP codes, and the other supports the five-plus-four,” Frary says. “Failure to manage these things can increase time-to-market for IT services and impact business results. From an IT perspective, there’s an urgent need to uncover and reconcile these differences.”

Ultimately, possessing the 360-degree view puts the CIO on equal footing with other business leaders, an increasingly important condition at many companies. “We in IT have to be able to relate every activity, every dollar and every person to a positive business outcome, just the way the guy who runs our pipeline needs to relate the value that will come from each barrel of oil,” says Mark Thompson, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Enbridge Inc., a Calgary, Alberta, operator of the world’s longest crude oil and liquids pipeline system.

So as IT complexity and fragmentation continue to expand, CIOs need a comprehensive approach to unify and simplify the management of IT. That’s even more critical when it comes to the efficiency and effectiveness of IT leadership’s three pillars: governance, management and security.

Governance includes everything associated with IT planning: making investment decisions in a portfolio management context; balancing financials, resources and schedules to drive an optimal alignment to business objectives; prioritizing projects; executing projects and programs; and managing vendor contracts and license agreements. Compliance is an important component, too. “IT needs to be on top of putting the processes and controls in place to ensure the company is compliant with the latest regulations,” says Sharma of Satyam.

Management, the second pillar, has grown in scope. IT management once meant overseeing IT components— the desktops, middleware, Web servers and databases— to make sure they worked together as seamlessly as possible. While that basic kind of IT management continues to be critical and fundamental, leading-edge organizations are now focused on business service management (BSM). BSM ensures not only that the underlying infrastructure runs well and seamlessly, but also that it can be managed in the context of the business. That’s important, because IT shops have evolved from being mere back-office support functions to serving as true service providers.

Security, the third pillar, includes identity and access management, as well as enhancing service continuity through proactive threat management. “We take security so seriously, we have adopted what the industry calls ‘CIA’ for Confidentially, Integrity and Availability,” says Alexander of Pinellas County. “I mean, imagine incorrectly releasing a criminal because the information on the system was inaccurate. We’re not about to let that happen.”

Today, CIOs need to manage their infrastructures from a business-service perspective. “The question becomes, ‘Which parts of the IT environment are supporting any given business service being provided—and in what context?’” says Don LeClair, Senior VP and Distinguished Engineer at CA.

By “context,” LeClair refers to the various components involved with the service itself, as well as to the ability to make decisions about the service with a hard eye on its business objectives. That, in turn, is all about prioritizing, LeClair says. “IT needs to know whether something it’s offering is a high-priority service giving the business the most bang for the buck, or just a low priority service,” he says. “That can lead to further prioritization concerning the software, the hardware, the processes and the people involved with it.”

Haar of BEA offers a real-world example of the value of prioritization. “If a particular application fails, and it doesn’t have a tremendous impact on the core service, I can dial back the amount of money I’m spending on supporting it,” he says. “Then I wouldn’t have to keep paying maintenance for that particular piece of the infrastructure. Over time, we’re talking serious savings.”

Among the real-world components that can help make the 360-degree vision a reality, perhaps the most important is the configuration management database (CMDB), which, despite the name, is much more than a mere database. In fact, the CMDB is actually an application that identifies configuration items (or CIs) that make up the IT components associated with a service, such as the assets, the processes and the people involved with that service. More important, the CMDB “understands” the relationships among all of these components. CIOs can use this intelligence to prioritize their assets, processes and people as they relate to their business’s objectives.

IT as a Service
“A lot of the thought behind CMDB comes directly from ITIL®,” says Marvin Waschke, Senior Technology Strategist at CA, referring to the IT Infrastructure Library, a framework of IT best practices. “It’s saying, ‘What IT does is supply services, and those services are supported by subservices.’ As you drill down that hierarchy, eventually those subservices are the real-world components of IT, the actual hardware and applications offering up real services, like the sales guy accessing a presentation on his laptop.”

In the real world, CMDB technology is now helping a growing number of CIOs. As Haar of BEA explains, “The CMDB is a centralized repository of information that gives me all the infrastructure assets I have available—as well as how they’re configured and managed, and how they all play together—so I can figure out, for example, how a configuration change propagates across the service lifecycle.”

In fact, Haar and his staff at BEA are working with an in-house tool, called the device database, to identify their IT infrastructure assets, capture basic information about them and store high-level configuration data. “But it’s more of a place where people record stuff after the fact, as opposed to being an automated tool,” Haar says. “That’s why we’re looking at the CMDB right now.”

Also, CMDB data around a particular service can be graphically visualized using specially designed tools. These tools provide visual insights into whatever IT is working on, explains Helge Scheil, Senior VP and GM at CA. “It could be a business process view, a business service view, a network diagram or an application diagram— whatever your perspective of the world is,” he adds.

The highest value comes when multiple solutions are integrated with the CMDB. Then, the CIO can view and manage the entire lifecycle of a particular service. “Say you’ve got a project and portfolio management solution at the front end, but you’re also running a service level management solution — which defines the service level agreements (SLAs)—and a problem management solution,” explains Scheil. “All of these solutions are working together to support an overall ‘service.’ And this interaction is enabled by the CMDB, which aggregates all the relevant information from these solutions to answer questions like: ‘What is the total cost of ownership of the service? How many quality issues have we encountered with the service across all components? What SLAs have been signed? How well is the service secured, considering all of its elements?’”

This extensive model is best presented by what is being called the Unified Service Model. That’s because the Unified Service Model, as developed by CA, is where the real empowerment of the 360-degree vision lies for the CIO and IT management.

To fully understand this vision, it may help to think of a building blueprint. When builders, electricians and other contractors construct a house, they rely on a blueprint to keep themselves working in concert. In the same way, the Unified Service Model can help the CIO to keep the different silos of IT on the same page when a service is being provided to a customer. But the Unified Service Model goes beyond just being a static blueprint. In fact, it should be thought of as a “living blueprint.” That’s because it helps maintain the service every time it’s in play, then dynamically updates the blueprint accordingly. (See sidebar, “What Is the Unified Service Model?” p. 16)

Another advantage of the 360-degree vision: It helps CIOs look before they leap on new initiatives being discussed for the enterprise. “With the Unified Service Model, you’ll be able to run ‘What if’ simulation scenarios on new services,” says Waschke of CA. “You’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea, I can translate it into a design, so now let me project what it’s going to cost, what it’s going to return and what the ultimate business value will be. I can even project the risks and compensate for them now.’ ”

This can also help the CIO take the lead on business strategy. A CIO might go back to the business unit and say, “We’ve looked at this, and right now our online shopping application has some server capacity issues, so we don’t think you should roll out this new service until we can upgrade the servers.” Today the 360-degree view is being deployed in stages and offering marked value for the business. Some companies are starting to realize the promise of the Unified Service Model by implementing CMDB technology integrated with other management solutions. “The CA CMDB, as an extension of CA Unicenter® Service Desk, is a critical component of our long-term 360-degree vision here,” says Alexander of Pinellas County.

The CMDB helps Alexander’s staff keep reliable records, and it details their components and services in a central repository. “It helps us to more rapidly solve problems when they come in, because we know where things are,” Alexander says. “And we certainly have better control of our infrastructure and how it is configured at any given moment. So it also allows us to forecast and plan, because we can keep track of our inventory and its status.”

Test Runs
At outsourcer Satyam, Sharma says his company has begun to implement a 360-degree vision strategy. “We’re trying out some test runs, and we’re planning on taking it out to our clients,” he says. “Especially with clients using the Web more and more for transactions, it plays very well there.” Yet despite the good buzz around the 360-degree vision, some CIOs remain cautious. “With a geographically distributed company like ours, the 360-degree vision of IT will be a challenge,” says Thompson of Enbridge. “Knowing that a single router exists somewhere, and finding out it’s experiencing a problem, seems fairly optimistic to me, let alone having the relevant information flow all the way across the organization.”

The answer is to take a pragmatic approach: Don’t try to do too much, too fast. Experts advise CIOs to first identify a lagging business process in the organization and then to implement the CMDB and Unified Service Model to turn around that process. While gaining the 360-degree view is a long-term effort, measurable results can be achieved now.

For CIOs, the longstanding dream of having real control over every facet of their technology — and being able to align it to the business — is happening faster than once thought imaginable. “The CIO is in for a fun ride,” says Cagnazzi of BlueWater. Make it so!

Larry Lange is a freelance writer and a former senior editor at TechWeb, PlanetIT.com, EE Times and IEEE Spectrum.

ITIL ® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.