For service levels to be meaningful they must be documented. The documenting of service levels provides a reference point for all parties involved. Service levels should not only be documented, the documentation should be distributed, agreed to and maintained.

Review of service levels should occur on a regular basis. If an area is not meeting a particular service level the following should be defined:

• What caused the service level miss?
• How can the service level miss be prevented from occurring again?
• Is the service level valid (i.e., is it an attainable service level)?

Although the first two points are obvious, the third item may not be. For a service level to be effective it must be attainable. If the service level cannot be met under ordinary circumstances, changes to that service level may be required. An unachievable service level, however, should not be confused with a regularly missed service level which is the result of poor performance.

Providing the enterprise with organizational charts is critical to ensure users know who is responsible for each area of the systems environment. The organizational chart should list each individual within the organization and define what they do and who they report to.

Job descriptions are used internally by the systems management organization to define what each individual is responsible for. The job description at a minimum should define overall responsibilities, objectives and performance measures.

It is important for the organization and its components to have a clearly defined charter. The charter must contain the vision of the organization, the mission and strategies. The vision defines what each area is striving to achieve, the mission defines the objective of the organization, and the strategy indicates how the organization will achieve its mission and ultimate vision.

The vision, mission, and strategies must be understood by those inside and outside the organization. Each individual within the organization should understand their role in contributing to vision and mission. Each department should have a clear and concise mission which should support the overall organizational mission.

In an environment where new technology is introduced on a daily basis, proper training and education are critical to successfully managing the enterprise.

Training must be provided in a manner which supports an individual's ability to do their job. As new technology is unveiled, training must be provided as proximate to the implementation date as possible. If training is provided too soon, newly acquired skills may not be utilized on a day-to-day basis and may be forgotten before the new technology is implemented.

Training and education need not be formal; brown-bag discussions and one to one training are oftentimes more beneficial than formal training sessions.

Mentoring plays an important role in developing an effective systems management infrastructure by providing a mechanism for individuals to learn from the experiences of others. With mentoring, individuals with certain skill sets are used as "role models" to promote those skills. Within changing environments, mentoring is key since it provides a mechanism for individuals to quickly learn the skills of another.

Career pathing provides longer-term benefits by supporting an individuals need for personal fulfillment. A career path provides an employee with the road map necessary to achieve success. A career path need not lead only to a management position, many individuals may seek a more technical path. The goal is to provide individuals with real expectations regarding personal growth within the organization and a method for realizing that growth.

Location relates to the placement of systems within the enterprise. When mainframe systems were the only concern, location considerations were based upon finding space within the data center. In today's environment, while space is still an issue, midrange systems and servers may reside outside the data center.

Contrary to the mainframe environment where dedicated communications channels ensure adequate response even across large distances, today's smaller systems must contend with inadequate networks to support ever-increasing bandwidth demands. Often, placing a server in the data center may not be feasible since response time may be adversely affected.

Uninterrupted power and proper cooling is paramount to minimizing system downtime. As systems are no longer restricted to the data center floor. The result is the need for procedures to define acceptable system locations and methods for providing adequate facilities to support them.

Security in today's environment is also complicated by the fact that systems are distributed. Security in this instance does not involve data security, but rather system security. Mission critical systems must be protected with regard to access regardless of being midrange or mainframe.

Facilities must address the need for growth within the data center. As systems come on line, space must be available to support these systems. Concerns regarding proximity and other facility components (e.g., power, security) must be addressed and planned for.

The cornerstone of today's processing environment revolves around an adequate network infrastructure. Facilities must be created in such a manner to support both internal network considerations as well as external network issues.

Providing a central point of control for today's complicated environment has many benefits including:

• Centralized operations
• Minimal points of contact
• Consolidated systems management.

A command center for the mainframe environment was easily constructed since network and system issues were minimal. In today's environment, complicated systems are managed with an ever-growing number of tools. Although the need for a command center remains, creating such a facility is a large undertaking.

Operating standards are essential to a successful Operations environment and are based on the ability to reproduce consistent actions in every area of the environment.

Documented procedures provide the framework for successful Operations. Procedures are documented and when changed, are updated. The procedures are consistent in their presentation and are distributed for understanding throughout the organization.

Information Technology organizations can support an operating environment in a cost effective manner only by limiting complexity and reducing the number of nonstandard actions needed to provide service. With business drivers requiring multiple technology platforms, operational acceptance criteria must be defined for all components of this extended enterprise. This means that technology decisions must include supportability considerations and that standards be defined and enforced as part of the process of accepting systems into the production environment. Use of standardized middleware and system management tools should also be part of the acceptance criteria.

In meeting the challenges of distributed systems management, users face a multitude of requirements that fall into two major categories: Event Management and Configuration Management. Configuration Management disciplines will increasingly take center stage in systems management as a means of controlling environmental quality, enforcing policies and reducing complexity.

Without a focus on Configuration Management, Event Management will be fighting a losing battle for availability, efficiency and service quality if the sources of events and user calls are not a key part of the management process. This requires configuration management tools and processes and can be resolved with a framework-based configuration management solution using pre-tested components to enable source problem reduction.

As in the host system environment where modules are checked in and out of a source library and changes to production proceed from testing through a change management system to ensure system integrity, the client/server development and production environment needs similar tools and procedures for version control.

In the host-based environment, software distribution is a centralized process controlled by change management procedures and staging tools. However, in the far more complex world of client/server computing, there are three key reasons why software distribution will continue to grow as a strategic management issue:

1. The number of desktops deployed across enterprises continues to grow
2. Major vendors are entering the market with enterprise offerings
3. The advancing storage and processing capabilities of desktop workstations

These factors enable and/or "force" more organizations to load productivity applications on workstations, therefore requiring updates, maintenance and general configuration management. Software distribution tools which simplify the process of updating software components and ensure enterprise compliance with approved configurations are necessary to avoid service outage and resultant problem resolution resource impacts.

As systems become more complex, they risk becoming unmanageable. This can happen by either increasing the user population or increasing the number of managed elements. Environments that are manageable when running a small number of users risk becoming unmanageable as the user population grows or as the number of components grows. In an environment where the number of users must, to support business, increase significantly, the only way to maintain a controllable number of elements is to control the number of separate software components in use. To support this goal, system software installation and maintenance tools and procedures are necessary.

As with software components, the complexity of the supporting hardware environment determines its manageability. Standardization of the hardware environment is necessary to maintain high levels of system availability. To assist this effort, an up-to-date asset inventory is essential. With a systems management framework where automated component discovery is supported, the processes of upgrading system hardware will evolve into standard support procedures.

Research into the next wave of deployable technology must be driven by strategic business requirements with a constant focus on supportability, with the understanding that services that are too complex to be adequately supported will not provide the high level of quality and low cost of service that the global business market will reward. The support infrastructure and tools must be part of the application research testing process for cost effective technology options to be defined.