why do we_model_in_the_uk_monitor_in_japan_and_manage_in_the_usa

A White Paper

Why do we model in the UK, monitor in Japan & manage in the USA?

This document reflects upon the current and future practice of capacity management and considers why it might be different in different countries. The author has experience in the UK, USA and Japan and will concentrate on these, with particular emphasis on Japan as it is possibly the least known of the three. This is in fact a biased view and possibly any differences might simply be a reflection of each country’s ‘perceived persona’.

Why do we model in the UK, monitor in Japan & manage in the USA?1

The UK is frugal, used to recession, cautious and analytical and so tries to make the most out of each bit of equipment it has invested in. The USA is more of an entrepreneur, seeking to invest, expand and exploit technology to increase profit. Japan is an historically honorable society and places greater emphasis on respecting the employees of a company and the duty owed to its customers.

Or perhaps such stereotypes play a smaller part than the impact of the particular business sector involved. It used to be that financial institutions would triplex everything to avoid any potential disruption to IT services and that has certainly changed in the last few years. In times of boom, retail might go in the same direction, but in recession, it is much more a matter of survival.

Or maybe the driving force is the attitude of the company to its IT, whether it views it as an overhead or a vital part of the business. Some companies will invest heavily in the IT infrastructure to ensure good services whereas others will treat IT as a commodity for each new project to acquire as it needs it. These would split into those that aspire to some form of IT Service Management (ITSM) and possibly ITIL and those that are project driven, aspiring to some form of Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) management.

I will try to identify what is done within IT Service Management and specifically capacity management in different places and how effective, or otherwise, it is.

This paper was inspired by three events, firstly, there was a great panel session at CMG 2009 where Dr. Tim Norton asked “Is there a model in your future?”

Secondly, an excellent paper “Why is Capacity Management seen so differently in the USA, UK and Japan?” was accepted by UKCMG 2010 from Mitsuo Takeda of IIM, Japan. I would like to thank both Tim and Mitsuo for their kind permission for the blatant plagiarism within this paper.

Thirdly, attendances at CMG, UKCMG and itSMF have been dropping and it seemed pertinent to consider why.

There are lots of reviews of capacity management. They typically refer to performance measurement and capacity planning and related activities within development, testing and service level management. In brief, the activities can be applied at four levels and are often identified as monitor, analyse, model and dashboard.

However, there are various factors that are often neglected in a statement of the objectives for capacity management. The performance aspect should be greatest during the development and implementation of a new system, whereas only monitoring might be relevant for a long-term stable application.

The approaches are very different across domains (different hardware platforms and software frameworks), partly because of costs and architecture but also because of attitudes. The approaches also vary in different countries, due to a number of aspects of culture, tradition, economy and other factors.

Each site has its own focus on different parts of capacity management and a company culture (often reflecting the share value) somewhere between ‘triplex everything’ and ‘do more with less, just in time’. The latter being the dominant force in times of economic downturn. The company culture often is reflected by management’s attitudes to budgets and possibly either going too far towards process implementation or too far towards management by project.


Doing more with less is the prevalent theme these days.

The ‘more’ to be done usually means more applications in more services on more servers for more users of more critical business requirements. This means trying to automate as much analysis and reporting as possible to be applied to increasing numbers of machines, both real and virtual.

MoreCritical business requirements for IT service and webUsers - Business customers, end-users and clientsServices - Business customers’ view of applicationsArchitectures - abstraction, virtualization, consolidationTiers & pools, Web GUI, message handler, app server…Applications, developments in-house, off-shore, packages…Servers, machines, nodes, CPUs, RAM, networks, storage

LessOverhead – IT infrastructure and servicesFinance – budgets cutSites – consolidated data-centresStaff – cutbacksSpare capacity – headroom, duplex, DR, non-stopPhysical servers – virtualised and consolidatedExpertise – less experience and less training‘Inefficiency’ but at what risk?

Hardware is cheap but other resources are limited, so why or when should you do planning, or testing, or monitoring?

At CMG 2009 in Dallas Dr. Tim Norton posed the question “Is there a model in your future?” The answer, not surprisingly given the event, was ‘yes’, but with the rider that capacity managers needed to make sure users knew the questions to ask and were able to express what they wanted for the business before defining a capacity management process.

In these days of limited resources and tightened budgets, every IT Service Management (ITSM) activity has to be tuned to meet real demands and provide valuable services. Capacity Management is usually viewed as a combination of various techniques addressing performance and capacity. The teams typically involved come from various areas such as development, testing, domain architects, systems programmers and others (possibly including capacity management specifically), depending on the nomenclature used in the organization.

There are some ITSM activities, such as the service desk and event management, that are typically viewed as necessary. Many other ITSM activities are viewed as desirable but not always implemented such as demand management and service level management. There are also some

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ITSM activities that are perceived by many as peripheral or an unnecessary overhead, such as capacity planning, modelling, software performance engineering, performance measurement and performance testing. Given this situation, it would seem to be the right time to ask which capacity management activities should be done, and when, if at all.

Capacity Planning and performance measurement and testing is certainly getting more challenging with multi-tiered applications, virtualization of many types and cloud computing. Over the last few years, many will say that the cost of adding more hardware is significantly less than the cost associated with measurements, testing and modelling so why bother. As virtualization is becoming more prominent, this attitude seems to be increasing. It is even viewed as possible to use a virtualization pool to avoid the whole planning process. Advocates of this approach would point out that it is often very hard to get good business transaction measurements and forecasts. When the business becomes as dynamic as the virtual infrastructure, they feel that the only salvation is rapid reaction instead of methodical planning

Yet many capacity planners have watched management buy round after round of “cheap” hardware and spend ever more on deluxe solutions for routine applications. The total cost of ownership is nowadays determined as much by software licences and system support (including accommodation and power) as the hardware itself. Furthermore, the performance after such upgrades may well stay the same, that is to say poor, and overall costs skyrocket. Some form of planning is clearly needed but how do you strike the right balance? Companies really can’t afford to use the same methodology for a single $5K mini-server as they do for a $5M super-server or mainframe, but what about small servers across the enterprise? Where is the crossover? Is it always the same for every company? Is it always the same within a single company? Does everything merit the same level of Service Management? What happened to demand management?

There are five ‘So-called Objectives’ of IT Service Management.

These are ‘so-called objectives’ because they identify an ideal. Reality is very different.I’ll discuss the objectives in terms of the goals to be attained, the costs in different countries and their proportions of the GDP in each, the attitudes to investment in IT in different countries, and the country culture with respect to the balance between chasing new prospects and supporting existing users.

All ITSM objectives are important, but the key objective is often forgotten. The ultimate objective is to increase revenue and profit and this is its true contribution to the business sphere.

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Why do we model in the UK, monitor in Japan & manage in the USA? 4

Everybody concerned with business has to address the twin problems of increasing productivity while reducing costs. This is the ultimate goal of ITSM and it is affected by five main factors:

• increase productivity • reduce costs • do new things • win competitions • provide IT services.

The ultimate goal is common to all countries, but the emphasis on the different factors involved varies.

The big question is how to increase Revenue and Profit and there are two main strategies:

• Do something new creating new products or services, or expanding into new markets.• Differentiate yourself from competitors, in order to hold a dominant position and beat

their attempts to control the market.

By being effective in these two areas the company will increase productivity and reduce costs.

The important point is that IT service provision can help and support these areas.

Different countries do it in different ways and spend their money contrastingly.

The USA spent a significantly higher amount of money on IT than other countries and the ratio between this spending and its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is also high at about 3.4%The UK spent less but in pro rata terms is about level with the USA (and Australia).

Japan, however, shows a different picture. Although it is second in its IT spending, the ratio between this and its GDP is very low at 2.3%, occupying the bottom position. Japan is spending less money pro rata on IT than other countries.

*The figures come from the Japan Electronics & IT Industries Association.

The results of a 2007 attitude survey on which countries are most positive towards IT investment,

show India clearly has a very positive attitude (100%) based on the success of their many outsourcing, off-shore companies.

USA (60%) is more positive than the UK, with the UK typically being on the fence as to the benefit (49% in favour).

Almost everyone in Japan thinks it is not positive to invest in IT, with only 13% in favor.


A Gartner research report indicates which issues CIOs are primarily concerned about and unsurprisingly, with the current economic situation, “Reducing enterprise costs” was the second of business priorities of both Global and Japan.

But there are big differences between Global and Japan.

Japan’s number one priority is “Expanding current customer relationships”, but this was ranked 9th by the world’s CIOs.

Another big difference is highlighted by the four blue boxes, which are not even ranked in the top 10 by Japan’s CIOs. It seems that whereas the rest of the world is adopting a positive or assertive posture to the problems they face, Japan is adopting a defensive posture to protect their customers.

Why is this?

This graph shows the quality of IT service in Japan and the USA, in terms of the availability of IT services for end users. As you can see, the target and actual downtime of the system are quite different between Japan and the U.S.

The data is based on numbers across the enterprise, including mainframes, UNIX and Windows, so some of the targets for availability will seem low to those using a mainframe.

In the USA, actual downtime was about 180 hours a year for a target downtime that was set at about 95 hours. It means that IT services could not be used for half of a day of every month.

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On the other hand, in Japan, the target was achieved even though the target was very high, about 17 hours a year, whilst the actual downtime a year was about 16 hours. It is equivalent to 1 hour and 20 minutes of a month or 2 and a half minutes of a day that users couldn’t use IT services.

*Data comes from Gartner in the USA and Japan Users Association of Info Systems.

Japan enjoys a very good reputation for the quality of Japanese products ,although this might be less true considering the recent problems surrounding Toyota. This graph shows that the quality of IT service is very high in Japan. Does that mean that Japan has the best IT practices, because it maintains a very high quality even though it invests less money in IT, compared with other countries?

This graph shows the result of a survey done by Accenture in 2005. Although it was carried out 5 years ago it still indicates an interesting point.

The breakdown separates the IT spending into two parts.

• Fixed expenses, the cost of maintaining existing IT systems.(shown in green)• Strategic IT expenses to improve existing IT systems, including investment in new IT

systems. The strategic costs are split between those to make IT efficient and those to make the business effective. (split into blue and pink)

Half of IT spending goes on fixed expenses and the other half is for strategic IT expenses in global. However, in Japan, 3/4 of IT spending is for fixed expenses and 1/4 of IT spending is for strategic IT expenses.

Why did Japan achieve such a high availability of IT service? More money is spent on fixed IT expense than other countries because Japan wants to ensure the high quality of IT services currently provide.

As a result of this situation, only the rump of the IT budget can be used for strategic IT expense in Japan. The lack of `new stuff’ contributes to the poor perception of IT in Japan.

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This is the result of a survey for IT spending done by a Japanese research company (IT Research) last year. It shows the breakdown of IT spending in Japan more precisely. 74% of IT spending is fixed expense for administrative matters and maintenance processes illustrating that the ratio of their IT spend has not altered significantly since 2005. The costs of human resources make up 50% of the whole IT spend totally, 20% of the strategic IT spending is labor cost and 30% of the fixed IT expense is also labor cost.

So, the reduction of this expense would be the most effective way to reduce IT spending in Japan. This cost reduction is connected to the fact that more tasks and processes are entrusted to outsourcers.

Many companies have cut 10 – 30% of all expenses including IT spending in recent years. To achieve this cost reduction, some companies try to implement the best practice of ITIL. ITIL has a greater dimension of management processes than most Japanese companies, which tend to focus on customer satisfaction.

They want to keep the current service level and in many cases, they establish the service desk first for customer satisfaction. Also, incident management, problem management and release management, as described in service support of ITIL V2, are issues that Japanese companies have been addressing.

Processes such as capacity management and service level management, described in service delivery of ITIL V2, have not been regarded as important processes compared with the processes of service support.

The results to date indicate that far from being able to reduce costs, many companies find their costs increasing as they grapple with the management processes.

I’ll focus on the Japan row to clarify the ideas on this graphic.

Why did employers in Japan come to think that IT doesn’t matter? They used to be very positive towards investing money on IT in the old days. Ezra Vogel wrote his book, Japan as Number One in 1979 and Japan was praised for its economical prosperity in those days.

The financial companies and manufacturing industry in Japan were very positive to investing in IT at that time, and achieved huge improvements in productivity without increasing costs, especially labor costs. It must be one of the big reasons why Japan gained the position of Number One.

The structure of companies in Japan was different from other countries at that time, especially in personnel affairs and their systems were quite different.

Almost all companies had a system of lifetime employment and an employee changed his role every three to five years to be promoted. Employees learned the business processes of each division

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where they were engaged and understood many key processes and how the company generated revenue and profit.

At the beginning of the 1990s the Bubble Economy in Japan collapsed and employers had to tighten their purse. At the same time Client-Server systems appeared as an alternative solution to the mainframe, which was thought to be very expensive. Many people were under the impression that Client-Server systems or Open systems could be built with less money when compared with the Mainframe. So, downsizing from Mainframe to Open systems became a way to reduce IT costs in Japan.

In the mid 1990s the internet and the desktop PC began to be more popular and in the latter half of the 1990s all enterprises had to cope with the Y2K problem. So, employers could not help but reluctantly invest money in IT.

Some large enterprises established subsidiaries, separating out their IT departments as a way of reducing the labor cost of IT staff. Subsidiaries can have different wage systems and hire new people at smaller salaries than the parent company.

Many enterprises, including these IT subsidiaries, outsourced IT management processes to IT vendors. This movement generated a serious problem, the IT department was now alienated from the Line of Business(LOB) and this meant less communication between IT and LOB, and a lack of understanding of what LOB did.

In the last 10 years everything has changed. The internet has overwhelmed everything and everyone is connected everywhere.

There have been repeated economic downturns which have resulted in the need for more cost reduction and Companies have seen downsizing as a way to do this.

In Japan, most companies began to downsize, and turned to outsourcing as a way of achieving this. In many cases, almost everything was outsourced.

This had several results, the many individual applications were entrusted to outsourcing, meaning that there was little control over these applications and LOB became increasingly divorced from IT, leading to the lack of clarity of business processes. IT found itself having to interface between the various applications and the company could now find itself with many outsourced IT vendors, over whom they had little control.

The lack of communication between LOB and IT created a feeling of frustration on the LOB side, in many cases it was felt that IT didn’t understand LOB.

Mistrust and suspicion led to LOB creating their own stand-alone systems, separate from the rest of the organization.

Well, what is the future? There are new words becoming popular such as the era of New Normal, eco system and so on. New Normal was the phrase coined by Mohamed El-Erian, boss of Pimco and a fund manager, to describe the situation post economic crisis, whether it be back to the old standard or to something new.

New words are continually being created, words like Virtualization, Green IT and Cloud Computing are recent key words about which, apparently, we should all be concerned.

Employers in Japan have not been swayed by those buzz words, even though they have a strong fear of being left behind the new wave.

What should be done to regain their trust? They have become more careful to challenge new things than ever before but they are also keen to get studies about new technologies.

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There is no one who won’t invest money if they recognize the return is more than the investment.Japan recognized the benefit of system integration by using virtualization technology and they made investment for that.

In this situation, what can be done within IT Service Management? Can Capacity Management provide an answer to regain their trust?

The reason that a large proportion of IT spending is occupied by fixed expense comes from the fact that everybody demands high quality, for all IT services, in Japan.

In addition, each IT service is managed individually as a separate project, and it is not unified in many companies. There is neither a capacity planner nor a performance analyst in the project team where the applications were developed and in many cases, they manage and maintain not only the applications but also the system where the applications are running. When a problem occurs, investigation is made by each project to solve the problem.

However, recently it is becoming very difficult to identify the reason that the problem occurs because there are few systems running standalone, and many systems are linked to each other. Optimization made by each project is just for the system they have managed and it cannot be a total optimization for whole systems.

They often depend on vendors or consulting firms to solve the problem because there is no performance analyst in the project team, and it requires unexpected expenditure. In some cases, additional resource procurement such as a CPU upgrade or more processors is implemented to solve the problem without investigation in detail, because they think it would be more economical than taking time and effort for problem analysis. However, this kind of approach doesn’t solve the real problem as it adds to the complexity. It might fix the problem in the short term but it generates more costs trying to manage and maintain the complexity.

It can be said they are truly in the situation that they “cannot see the wood for the trees”. A lot of global companies suffer all of this, though maybe not to the same degree.

Japan achieved a high quality of IT service availability with relatively less IT spend than other countries due to an excessive emphasis on quality. Although Japan does not invest in IT positively, there is excessive procurement redundancy for many new systems. In addition, sizing of the system often depends on vendors so that excessive resources are proposed to avoid performance problems (as well as the fact that they will always try to gain more revenue).

There is the point that a lot of human resources are required to maintain high quality, such as a large number of service desk staff borne out in the survey showing that a half of IT spending is on personnel.

Another invisible fact in the survey is that LOBs spent money to have their own system internally for their department and this expenditure is not appropriated within IT expense but in local administrative expenditure. There is no IT governance for the company as a whole and so there are many redundant investments made. If such invisible IT expenditure is included, Japan may in fact be spending a lot more money on IT than is shown and could be in excess of other countries. This scenario is also true globally, but more so in Japan.

In the UK & USA, deals are struck for corporate licences whereas, in Japan it is all done at LOB level with multiple contracts between the same two companies.

In addition, the fact that the LOB has their own system without asking the IT department indicates they aren’t satisfied with the IT services provided by the IT department.

This situation has not changed for the past decade and many employers think of IT as a money loser because they do not recognize IT benefits.

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The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan did a survey three years ago regarding the assessment of how much value IT investment had generated.

There are very harsh statements, pointed out by several employers, in the report and these indicate some very important points on why they were unwilling to invest more money on IT.

“As the company invests …“Approval of the budget …“Suffering from a lack of …

Nicholas Carr said, “IT doesn’t matter” in his paper on Harvard Business Review published in May, 2003. In full, he said ‘As IT availability increases and cost decreases IT becomes ubiquitous - a commodity. From a strategic standpoint, IT becomes invisible; it no longer matters’.

I don’t know how many employers in Japan read the paper, but the fact is that many employers in Japan seem to have the same thoughts as Nicholas Carr.

There are actually a lot of employers who still think a computer is just a big abacus.

What should be done? Three key things:

• Regain trust• Measure• Report

Employers’ misgivings about IT investment are in these first two areas and to answer that, we must explain how the IT service contributes to the business itself.

It is important to divide IT services into direct and indirect, as related to business results. So we should divide IT into two groups:

• IT services that have a direct influence outside the company such as on customers, clients and partner companies.

• IT services that influence only internal users within the company.

Then prepare an explanation for management of the degree of contribution that each IT service makes in order to reach the right decisions.

This brings benefit in that we can prioritize the service level of each IT service based on the importance to the business, so that then we can control the service level according to the business priority.

In this way, meaningful reports can be produced and presented to help in business decision making.

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It is in this way that capacity management can be proactive and make a major contribution to the business. Capacity management done reactively and passively is inherently done badly and also makes it seem an overhead to be minimised.

What considerations should be involved in effective reporting and what kind of reports should be provided?

It is important to explain the relationship between business performance and its IT service provided to the business by using an indicator that shows the result of the business. Business Performance Indicator is abbreviated to BPI. It is effectively a business level Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and given other names such as Metric of Interest or Service Quality Level.

• Take an inventory of the applications making up the IT service and classify those applications by business function.

• Prioritize the applications as classified by their business function.• Usage of each application classified by business function should be measured to establish

a baseline and the degree of usage can be identified compared with the priority.

It is effective to use application logs that are stored to close events on records if it is available. For instance, a Web application has an http log which includes the number of accesses and response time to each URL. This information can be used to analyze the usage of each business function.

• This BPI must be an indicator that shows the result of a business function such as the amount of revenue or profits, improvement rate of productivity or reduction rate of cost.

• The BPI should have a time stamp to be able to compare the usage of application by business function in same time scale. The contribution to the business can be seen by correlating the BPI and the usage of the application.

• Unit costs of an application by usage, such as by each access or by each transaction, can be calculated by dividing the degree of application usage into the total cost of the application including the expenditure for development, maintenance and operation.

This brings the benefit of explaining how the application contributes to its business by comparing the total and unit cost with the results of the BPI.

This approach is achieved in Metron by using a ‘metrics matrix’ to develop the business drivers and BPI information needed, related SLA targets and constraints for each, which are then mapped into resource/component metrics to be measured and reported.

Few employers say “No” to an investment if it has a high enough return on investment in a short enough timescale.

IT infrastructure may be thought of as being similar to a production line in the manufacturing industry. The product of IT infrastructure is IT service. The production line must have a capability to produce competitive products with expected quality. Investment in the IT infrastructure must be made to adopt the demands by improving and expanding its capabilities associated with business plan and strategy.

If the IT service currently provided is not being used at the expected usage level, we should consider whether the IT service can be disposed of because there is little value from the IT service. By doing this, we can reduce the fixed expenses for maintenance of the IT service and we can also apply the resource and staff spent on the IT service to other IT services.

It is important to improve the productivity and skill of IT staff engaged in providing the IT services. We have to redistribute human resource to the right place, where they can display their ability based on the productivity. All of which can be maximized by outsourcing or in-sourcing.

The capacity planner should be trained or hired in the company. We should not outsource this management process because it is best done by people who know the business and culture of the company and have an ability to communicate with users at LOB. They can explain the validity of an

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IT investment to employers as decision makers by using the information of how much the IT service contributes to its business. Of course, that does not preclude using consultants to act.

Let’s start with the interactive reports and analyses.

• Reporting considerations.- What information is really useful? - What data is needed and are the metrics available? - How to present/use the reports?

• Analysis by service, workload, server, resource• Summaries and exception reports (all to defined standards)• Comparison of actual and target

- setting targets - workload volume, resource consumption, trends- service level achievement, costs, BPI

• Ideally (or maybe not) complete coverage:- all platforms, resources, workloads, services, costs

• Resource accounting- be able to say who is using what and how efficiently

• Identification of areas needing attention- focussing attention to where it is needed, bottlenecks, leaks, loops - Trends, alerts, exception management

• Providing reassurance that all targets are being met- Not just tons of data and loads of graphs.

The monitoring and analysis reports shown here are typical of the sorts of report that a performance and capacity team will look at for a large number of services and servers. Ideally many of the reports will be automated to reflect unusual correlations or excessively busy users (and ideally unusual patterns such as ramps reflecting memory leaks or program loops).

There is an inclination to use excessive bar charts and other basic standard Excel-like plots in reports, which is understandable given the need to automate. However, it is worth considering past experience to try to highlight information as appropriate. Tufte has coined the word ‘sparkline’ to reflect the use of simplified graphics within text to highlight key patterns and some apply this to web-based performance reporting. Some exploit ‘hotspot’ to describe performance charts using medical-style color 2D surface-contours. Some use traffic lights or thumbnails to highlight server nodes with issues.

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So let’s view some typical automated reports.

The first examples of reports are typical of those used within the capacity management team (CMT). There is usually also a requirement to publish the performance reports for servers automatically to an intranet for others to exploit (though not many sites seem to keep a check on the use made of the data outside the CMT).

Typically some form of explorer based interface will enable the choice of relevant servers or services for different users to pursue their own issues.

In most sites of significant size, this whole process is automated and the reports standardized as much as practical to make it easy to comprehend reports, no matter what detailed architecture lies beneath.

Ron Kaminski has published many excellent articles on this subject, ranging from the use of standard colours for predefined workloads and automatic identification of process pathologies to using sparklines (see Edward Tufte) to highlight anomalies.

The more computational intelligence, correlation, advice and guidance than can be automated and incorporated in the reporting regime, the better. The more a standard GUI will enable ready drill down and comparison, the better. The more short term anomalies and long term trends that can be readily identified, the better. The more process pathology that can be automatically used to reveal ramps (unending upward incremental trends), leaks, loops and other issues, the better. A standard interface, explorer-like access and highlighted exceptions will help users avoid becoming saturated with too much detail.

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And then some modelling reports.

The plots shown here are an indication of the sorts of results that can be achieved when a particular service has been analyzed across a multi-tier solution and models of each node derived. ‘What-if’ scenarios can be quickly evaluated and the bottlenecks revealed, ready for further drill-down analysis to determine the best options for action.

• The use of relevant graphics again can highlight issues quickly.• These are all indicative of the sort of reporting done in the UK and USA, but less so in

Japan, where the case study is based and has an emphasis on monitoring, but with a BPI perspective

We have found a variety of ways of analysing the relevant data. We now need to present the findings as useful information.

This list indicates some of the guidelines that should be observed in most cases.

• Adopt: data should be as accurate as they appear and appear as accurate as they are.• If variables are logically summable, present them in a stack; if the total sum is significant, use

a pie chart.

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The case study is based in Japan and this is a graph that shows application usage by business function. Each line indicates the trend of the application usage such as number of order entry, inquiry of inventory by type, inquiry for user information, and so on.

Blue is the highly used order entry process for December 2009.

The BPI of the IT service may be the number of orders and revenue from the products processed by this IT service.

In this case, the site is a big Telecom company and the facility management application for order entry where the business activity is related to the number of transactions of contracts.

The usage count by branch office indicates the usage of a specific business function by that branch, in this case order entry in December 2009. As you can see, it is heavily used in the Tokyo office (in blue at the bottom) and Fukuoka (pronounced ‘phookowka’ to rhyme with loo-coke-ah - in purple). But some are low and this led to an investigation as to why. They found that at the low performing branches, there were only a few members of staff who knew how to use the relevant business functions. After suitable training, the numbers of orders increased to the clear benefit of the business. This is an example of IT driving up business performance or perhaps, badly implemented IT driving it down.

Web, application and database activity can be reported on one plot so that unexpected correlations or anti-correlations can be highlighted and investigated to improve performance.

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Report on resource usage and business function usage to analyse peaks and identify relationships between applications and bottlenecks.

All of these messages are not new and have been described by many authors over the years. But who is actually doing it?

It is necessary to show employers that IT contributes to business in order to regain their trust in IT. We must show them how much contribution IT has made to increases of revenue and profit with actual results figures. Employers tend to feel that a new IT issue is yet another pie in the sky.

What should we do within IT Service Management? Implementing practical, effective capacity management is a vital step.

The first step in capacity management is confined to resource management at the component level such as CPU, memory and storage. It will maintain a constant service level with suitable resources, but it is a passive job in that we only provide capacity to achieve all IT services at the same performance.

In the second step, service level is prioritized depending on the importance of the business. Then the capacity of the IT resources is optimized according to that conclusion. However, all capacity management efforts are still only focusing on how to keep the Service Level Agreement. No one takes care of how the IT services being provided help its users or contribute to LOB results.

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Why do we model in the UK, monitor in Japan & manage in the USA?17

In the next third step, the lack in the second step should be addressed. We have to measure how much the IT services being provided contribute to the result of the LOB and it should be reported not only to the LOB but also to the employer making management decisions. In this way, capacity management can contribute to the business itself as well as the IT infrastructure.

The heretical view of ‘Knot-ITIL’ can be repeated in brief here. It focuses on the six core processes, and tries to draw attention to the key one. Do it.

Deliver IT (do it)Address Bugs as they arise.Make Changes to correct as needed.Identify Assets to be used.Exploit Finance to control it all.Do it Efficiently to do it well (including availability, capacity…).Short, sweet and easy-to-remember with A-F as highlighted in bold.

It is clear that employers in Japan and maybe elsewhere have lost faith in IT…it can be restored by capacity management.

Why do we model in the UK, monitor in Japan & manage in the USA? 18

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