The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
McLean, VA, US

YEAR:
2007

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Business and Related Services

NOMINATING COMPANY:
Morgan Stanley

ORGANIZATION:
Managed Objects

PROJECT NAME:
Aligning IT with the Business

Short Summary
Managed Objects is the leader in providing Business Service Management (BSM) software solutions. Our solutions let companies more effectively monitor and manage the IT services they deliver to the business – services like order processing, e-commerce, online trading or email. Our unique service views integrate data from existing management tools so complex IT infrastructures can be more easily managed, not as a set of components, but rather as the set of services that IT delivers to the business. Through centralized service views, companies can tackle the issues that most impact the business first - whether they involve finding and resolving availability or performance problems, improving response time, managing the impact of change, or reporting service level metrics to the business.

Companies that use Managed Objects realize measurable improvements in IT service quality, cost savings and increased IT responsiveness.


Introductory Overview
Managed Objects’ Business Service Management (BSM) solution is a powerful tool for simplifying the complexities of managing an IT infrastructure. Managed Objects BSM solution lets IT organizations more effectively monitor, manage and model their enterprise infrastructures by providing a unique service perspective to existing management tools that enables significant improvements in service quality, cost savings and IT responsiveness.

Why a service perspective? Quite simply, because most of today’s traditional IT management systems were developed with a component centric framework in mind, and as such, they monitor and report on the health of individual IT configuration items (CIs). Without a higher level service view of the IT infrastructure, most analysts agree that substantial improvements in IT service quality are unattainable.

Managed Objects BSM was developed to meet the growing need to operationally manage complex IT infrastructures, not as a set of components, but rather as the set of services that IT delivers to the business – services like order processing, e-commerce, online trading or email.

Managed Objects consolidates IT management (event and trouble ticket), asset and configuration data sources into a single command and control console. By leveraging Managed Objects’ unique object-based intelligence and pervasive integration capabilities, enterprise-wide IT management information is correlated into dashboard views that graphically show the state of health for each critical IT service.

With its intuitive and interactive interface, Managed Objects lets the user know in real-time when there’s trouble with a mission-critical e-commerce system – or any other key business application. More importantly, because Managed Objects provides complete command-and-control capability, drilling down to find and fix individual IT components is a point-and-click operation.

The problem with traditional IT management systems is that they only provide component-level visibility and cannot visualize the logical services that the physical IT components work together to comprise. Without this important visibility, there’s a critical “service management gap” between IT operations and the way they manage their IT infrastructure.

Take, for example, the relatively standard service of email. When there’s an email outage, how does IT isolate the failure and fix the problem? More importantly, how does IT prioritize which problem to fix first when multiple components fail? The answer all too often is to fix the first thing that breaks, and then more onto the next. This can mean spending valuable time fixing email while a critical online trading system outage stops traders and brokers dead in their tracks.

In a complex IT environment, finding and fixing operational problems before they affect end-user productivity is the leading priority of today’s IT organizations. To this end, IT organizations are constantly looking for new ways to shorten the time span between problem discovery and problem remediation. Likewise, IT organizations need new ways to prevent outages before they actually occur. Leading analysts today collectively agree that up to 60% of IT outages are the result of changes to the IT enterprise, whether planned or unplanned. Better control over infrastructure changes is a key focus of new configuration management and modeling initiatives.

Enter, Managed Objects real-time BSM solutions which provide the perfect service management and modeling environments so companies can examine the impact of changes to their IT infrastructures, before they’re actually implemented in production.


Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
Managed Objects’ BSM enables organizations to evolve away from a process of managing IT as a series of infrastructure components to a more efficient process of managing IT as a set of services aligned with, and delivered to, the business. In doing this, the benefits to both IT and the business are both measurable and substantive.

- Improves availability of revenue-generating services: When companies understand how technology impacts business, they can focus their resources where it counts: on revenue generating services. Managed Objects enables IT to prioritize availability or performance issues and apply necessary resources to those issues most critical to running the business.

- Significantly reduces the risk of outages due to changes in the IT infrastructure: Through Managed Objects configuration modeling capabilities companies can determine the impact of potential infrastructure changes before they are actually implemented. Additionally, Managed Objects’ powerful modeling analytics allows users to more quickly understand when unplanned changes have occurred within the enterprise. Further, because Managed Objects can isolate unplanned changes and determine their impact, the risks associated with unplanned change are substantially mitigated.

- Improves IT’s accountability to the business: Managed Objects empowers business and IT management with a real-time representation of how the business is doing, rather than lists of events and alarms. This keeps executives in the know – which not only helps keep them satisfied, but can also help them make better business decisions.

- Makes companies more adaptable to change: Managed Objects’ agnostic approach enables companies to leverage all that they’ve invested in technology. At the same time, it ensures that companies will have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting new tools and technology standards. Having an open and extensible platform also means that new services, partners and suppliers can be easily integrated into BSM capabilities.


Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
All over the world, Managed Objects’ customers have implemented BSM to ensure they deliver the highest level of service possible to their end-users. Within these organizations, Managed Objects monitors and manages such “real-world” services as: on-time overnight package delivery in the UPS AirHub 2000; or electricity delivery and restoration by the Independent Electricity System Operator in Canada. Managed Objects helps companies with mission-critical IT operations -- even in times of crisis. Here are just a few examples:

- In 2004, Hurricane Charley ripped through Florida and the Carolina’s causing power outages for approximately 502,000 Progress Energy customers. Before the storm ever hit, the Progress Energy team used Managed Objects to create service views enabling operators to see customer-impacting outages before customers reported them and to prioritize what should be fixed first. Within one week, Progress had restored power to 98% of their customers and was easily able to meet their overall restoration goal of 10 days.

- A large health insurance organization uses Managed Objects BSM solution to make sure their health insurance claims are processed accurately and quickly. Managed Objects enables them to understand exactly what’s happening in their infrastructure, what is impacted, and also helps them to leverage their existing infrastructure to mitigate any impact to claims processing. This ensures not only that its customers are getting the benefits their entitled, but also helps the company avoid financial penalties assessed by the government for inefficient claims processing.

- General Electric used Managed Objects to create a Quality Management Information Portal complete with information on the customer’s experience not just data center uptime/downtime. This kind of information gives GE the ability to effectively manage the service levels and customer satisfaction for services like an order processing kiosk system deployed at 1700 sites of a large home improvement customer.


The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
When Morgan Stanley began looking for a solution to help them reduce their IT enterprise complexity and reduce their risk of outages when IT changes were implemented, Managed Objects started by introducing the new paradigm of service management into Morgan Stanley’s IT organization. Through the service views provided by Managed Object’s BSM solution, Morgan Stanley could find and analyze IT issues before they became major issues with end-users. In addition, Morgan Stanley could leverage built-in features like root cause or impact analysis to quickly understand whether IT issues would have a serious or profound impacts on production environments – this was critical with a company like Morgan Stanley who must ensure 100% availability of critical online trading and other financial applications.

For Morgan Stanley, ease of use and ease of implementation were key components to providing an overall solution to more effectively manage their IT environment. With Managed Objects, Morgan Stanley was able to keep their existing investments, install and configure Managed Objects and start getting measurable efficiencies from the Managed Objects solution in a very short period of time.

Today, after one year of implementation, Morgan Stanley uses Managed Objects to effectively manage over 2 million objects in their IT enterprise.


Originality
What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
Managed Objects BSM solution is unique in its ability to deliver a consolidated service view of a complex infrastructure. According to Gartner Research, “With CMDB360, Managed Objects may challenge the primacy of the traditional “Big Four” IT operations management software suite vendors in the configuration management database solution market segment.” Source: CMDB360 Will Federate Data Sources, June 20, 2006.

How does Managed Objects compete with the large IT operations software vendors? Managed Objects’ agnostic approach to integrating virtually any source of data enables companies to leverage their existing technology, while ensuring that any changes – like new tools or services – can be easily accommodated. Unlike our competition, likely the big management software vendors who often force companies to “lock-in” to one vendor throughout their their infrastructure, Managed Objects enables organizations to leverage best of breed solutions for each area within the infrastructure. This means that organizations have the flexibility to change tools or create home-grown applications within in their infrastructure with minimal disruption to their environment.


How is it original?
Managed Objects' BSM solution leverages a unique object model to define and visualize the IT infrastructure. By normalizing and correlating event and business metric data, companies get a real-time representation of their complete enterprise infrastructure.

Objects themselves are IT and business elements (like servers, databases, inventory, and revenue) each having specific properties, behaviors and relationships with other objects. In this way, objects exhibit intelligence. Objects contain detailed real-time information on state, performance, relationships with other objects and IT service and business metric data. Because individual objects within the Business Service Object ModelTM are linked back to the systems from which they receive event data, they can actually send commands back to those systems. This allows operators the control to both monitor and manage the infrastructure from a single console.
An object model provides tremendous advantages over traditional event-based management systems. Managed Objects’ Business Service Object Model gathers and correlates data in real-time - many of today's event-based systems rely upon databases to get their event information. In this way, they provide only near-real-time information. Managed Objects’ object model is unique in its ability to build and maintain relationships between objects. By doing this, Managed Objects BSM understands when a component fails, how it affects other elements within the enterprise. Understanding exactly how IT is affecting the business - from one application, to an entire company, has never been easier.


Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Exceeded

Is it fully operational?   Yes

How many people benefit from it?   All

If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
At The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Information Technology (CIT), Managed Objects is the core technology used to deliver a real-time application availability and performance dashboard. Managed Objects is the core integration and correlation technology and service level management solution that provides IT management with a real-time dashboard for the critical shared applications delivered across all 27 institutes that comprise the National Institutes of Health. Managed Objects does all of this by richly integrating in real-time to multiple system management tools and data sources across the CIT infrastructure to provide end-to-end application views. This award winning dashboard continues to be a critical tool used by CIT IT management.

Other organizations have noted the following benefits:

For Fidelity Investments, the critical IT infrastructure that supports its online trading environment requires not only constant 24 by 7 monitoring, it also requires proactive network and systems management on the part of Fidelity’s Integrated Monitoring Center (IMC), to keep things running smoothly. Prior to implementing Managed Objects’ BSM technology, pinpointing and ultimately managing network or system load issues could take up to 60 minutes – an eternity in the online trading industry. Today with Managed Objects, the IMC can accurately find network or systems issues and swing traffic in as little as 5 seconds – a tremendous savings in both productivity and end-user satisfaction.

“Managed Objects helps us to prioritize what IT issues need to be fixed first” Source: Allied Irish Bank

“Managed Objects achieved more in 2 hours than typical enterprise solutions could manage in a year.” Source: CSF


How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
Managed Objects is celebrating its Tenth Anniversary in 2007 and since that time, the company’s customer-base as evolved from an early adopter profile to a more pragmatist. The company’s early customer-base was comprised of leading-edge companies for which business was dependent on technology, had to manage growth and do more with less resources, and had to manage large heterogeneous technology environments often due to growth through acquisition. These early adopters included companies within financial service, energy, government and service providers industries.

As more organizations are becoming reliant on technology-based applications, more and more companies are beginning to understand how much technology impacts the business. As a result, the business is making IT more accountable for the quality of service they’re delivering to the business. Managed Objects enables IT to manage the technology infrastructure based on the impacted to the business and to deliver the information related to those systems in terms the business can understand.

Managed Objects currently boasts more than 300 Global 2000 companies as customers spanning a variety of industries including telecommunications, healthcare, insurance, retail, university, financial, energy, government, technology, etc. These companies all have the need to manage more with less and to deliver high quality services reliant on a complex technical environment. Managed Objects believes this adoption rate will continue to increase as companies become more and more reliant on technology for critical business services and the business continues to demand high level of service from the technology infrastructure.


Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
The gap between business and IT is a well-known obstacle facing Global 2000 organizations. The increased reliance on technology is forcing the business and IT to “work together” with the business demanding a higher level of service and accountability from IT and IT struggling to communicate the value they provide to the business. In these situations, IT is forced to adapt to the business and deliver information the business will cares about. Managed Objects enables IT to monitor and manage the services they’re delivering in terms the business can understand, but first we must face the obstacle of helping IT understand why it is important to manage more than just technology components and look at the overall service. This obstacle is becoming easier to overcome as IT is adopts various service management disciplines and understands the benefits they can reap by managing based on the business needs.

Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
The biggest objection Managed Objects faces is from organizations that tenaciously stick to traditional means of managing IT infrastructures. These are organizations who aren’t interested in seeing new ways to manage their IT environments – typically because they are so heavily mired in their existing tools, they can’t see beyond the daily fire fights. These organizations usually end up with unhappy end-users who in-turn look to IT outsourcers to provide better IT service quality. When faced with this resistance, it is important to find the person(s) responsible for overall service delivery – the person(s) who will understand the benefits of managing the infrastructure based on the service. Additionally, we offer a number of tools based on the benefits Managed Objects’ customers have seen to help organizations understand the value they will gain from the solution – in terms they can actually quantify.
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