ISSN 1816-6075 (Print), 1818-0523 (Online)

Journal of System and Management Sciences

Vol. 1 (2011) No. 1, pp. 18-30

A service management enterprise architecture

Jianwen Chen1, Iain Mcintosh1, George Africa1, Arthur Sitaramayya1
1

IBM Australia, St. Leonards, NSW 2065, Australia

jchen@au1.ibm.com, iainmci@au1.ibm.com, georgeaf@au1.ibm.com, arthursi@au1.ibm.com

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for

service management. The aim of the proposed architecture is to provide an
automated, centralized, real-time service management system solution at the
enterprise level. This architecture covers essential service management
functions and integration between these functions. The proposed architecture
can be adopted as service management reference architecture to implement
service management in the real business world.
Keywords: Enterprise Architecture,
Management, Toolset Management

Service

Management,

System

1. Introduction
IT Service Management represents an evolution from managing IT as a
technology to managing IT as a business. Service management is a key enabler
to provide an end-to-end view from business driven perspective. Today, there
are some service management products provided by service vendors include:
IBM Service Management, Remedy Service Management, USD Service
Management, Novell ZENworks, Oracle Enterprise Manager, CA Unicenter, HP
OpenView, and Microsoft Systems Management Server (Alberto, 2010;
Deborah, 2010; Garrison, 2010; Maheswaran, 2010; Patrick, 2010; Rob, 2010;
Troy, 2010). There are different limitations and disadvantages for these service
management products and systems. Most important, what is lacking for service
management is an architecture to bring service management, system
management, toolset management, and integration services together at the
enterprise level.

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We propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for service management. The

advantages of this service management architecture include: 1) It provides a
service oriented architectural approach for service delivery; 2) It complies with
ITIL V3 process framework; 3) It integrates with service management, system
management and toolset management; 4) It provides an architecture for
automated, centralised, real-time service management of the following service
management functions: request fulfillment management, incident management,
problem management, change management, asset management, service
level/availability management, service catalogue management, configuration
management, release management, event management, security management,
and performance management; 5) It proposes a service management portal
solution to provide a real time and proactive service management dashboard
with an integrated view from the business, IT management and IT operation
perspective; 6) It provides a report management solution across all service
management functions/disciplines with a single reporting layer.

2. A Service Management Enterprise Architecture

2.1.

An Architecture Overview

The overview of proposed four-layer architecture is presented in Figure 1 below:

Fig. 1: Service management architecture overview.

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Layer 1: The system management layer of client environment consists of

various service management ITIL functions and collects data from operational
domains using system management tool agents or agent less methods. The
essential service management functions in this layer are:
Configuration management
Release and deployment management
Event management
Security compliance management
Performance and capacity management
Layer 2: System management and data integration layer: The collection
systems within the client environment integrate to the service management
functions by utilising an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as transport and the
underlying integration interfaces.
Layer 3: The IT service management layer provides the management for the
data collected from the client environment. The essential ITIL service
management functions in this layer are:
Request fulfillment management
Incident management
Problem management
Change management
Asset management
Service level/availability management
Service catalogue management
Layer 4: Service management portal and the presentation layer: Service
management staff can access the service management layer via a single service
management portal and a presentation layer common to all service management
tools.

2.2.

Integration Services in Service Management Architecture

The proposed service management functions and service integrations in service

management architecture are presented in Figure 2 below:

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Fig. 2: Service integration.

In our service management enterprise architecture, we adopt IBM service

management system (ISM) to provide essential IT service management
functions of proposed automatic, centralised and real-time service management
system:
ISM has automatic bridges between request, incident, problem and change
(RIPC) records.
ISM has integrated RIPC, request fulfillment, SLA/availability, asset, service
catalogue management functions in one system.
ISM is a centralized service management system with no additional client
service management system required.
ISM integrates service management functions with system management
functions: event management, configuration management, release management,
security management, and performance/capacity management.
The inputs from event management, configuration management, security
compliance management, performance & capacity management are
automatically sent to ISM service management.
The outputs from ISM service management are automatically sent to release
management.
In our service management enterprise architecture, we propose a real time and
automatic event management with a central point for event collecting,
aggregation and correlation, event enrichment and auto ticketing functions; a

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centralized and automated configuration management; an integration service

between event management and configuration management for event
enrichment; a centralized, process driven, automated asset management ; an
automated release management; an automated, real-time, historical and
proactive performance management; an automated and centralized security
management for security compliance; report management that can provide the
completed report across all service management functions, single presentation
layer for reporting; a service management dashboard for real time, proactive
service management with an integrated view from business perspective, IT
management and IT operation.
Event Management
In most existing service management system, there are following major issues
for event management:
No central point for event collecting, aggregation and correlation
No real time event management
No automated event ticket system
No event history repository
We propose an event management architecture that can address the issues
above and have more features and benefits. Our event management architecture
is presented below:

Fig. 3: Event management architecture.

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We propose a real time, automated event management system solution with

following features and advantages:
Event capture tools are all directed into IBM Omnibus to provide rules
based centralized event collection, correlation and aggregation.
An auto ticking event management and event enrichment with business
context through Impact which integrates configuration management
data with service management.
An event management solution with a historical repository provided by
Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW).
A single reporting/presentation layer for event management provided by
GSMRT.
Event monitoring across all operational domains through ITM6ITCAM-Omegamon monitoring family and other integrated alerting
toolsets.
Asset and Configuration Management
There are the following major issues in most existing service management
system for asset and configuration management:
No centralized and automatic asset and configuration management.
No data integration and reconciliation between configuration
management and asset management.
No integration between reporting for asset and configuration
management.
We propose an asset and configuration management architecture that can
address the issues above by automating the discovery, collection and
aggregation and integration of configuration data to assist client in achieving
and maintaining a baseline of assets and related configurations. It is presented in
Figure 4 below:

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Fig. 4: Asset and configuration management architecture.

Our asset and configuration management architecture proposes a solution

with following features and advantages:
It provides a centralized and automated configuration management.
TADDM is adopted for configuration item (CI) collection, application
relationships and population into a configuration database. Another set
of tools TAD4D and TAD4Z are adopted for scanning and discovery of
hardware and software data across operational domains.
It provides a centralized, process driven, automated asset management.
TAMIT is adopted for asset management and integration with the ISM
system. It utilizes and integrates the data from the configuration
management database and the ISM database.
It provides data integration and reconciliation between configuration
and asset management. Configuration management is integrated with
asset management through TAMIT and ITIC. TAMIT manages the
relationship between asset and CIs and ITIC performs database
integration mapping from configuration database to asset database.
It provides asset and configuration management integration reporting
through IBM GSMRT reporting system.

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Release Management
In most existing service management system, there is no automatic release
management across operational layers, manual intervention is normally required.
Our proposed release management architecture includes automated provisioning
of system OS, hardware, software, storage, applications and middleware across
platforms and operational layers, for both physical and virtual environments. It
is presented in Figure 5 below:

Fig. 5: Release management architecture.

Our proposed release management architecture has following features and

advantages:
It provides automated release management integrated with the ISM
system.
It provides the automated provisioning of system OS, hardware,
software, storage, application and middleware across platforms and
layers, and for both physical and virtual environment. It is achieved
through a set of provisioning tools integrated with ISM system to
provide workflow based approvals and notifications as shown in figure
above.
It provides full reporting for release management through GSMRT.
Performance and Capacity Management
In most existing service management system, there are following major issues
for performance and capacity management:

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No real-time performance and capacity management

No proactive performance and capacity management
No centralized historical repository for performance and capacity
management data
Our proposed performance and capacity management architecture addresses
the issues above and provides more features and advantages as presented in
Figure 6 below:

Fig. 6: Performance and capacity architecture.

Our proposed performance and capacity management architecture meets the

following objectives:
It provides the coverage for performance and capacity data collection
across the layers.
It provides a system that is automated, both real-time/historical and
proactive.
It provides a centralized repository for real-time and historical
performance analysis.
It provides reporting that is both real-time and historical.
It provides an enterprise service management portal for performance
and capacity analysis and reporting.

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The cornerstone products for performance and capacity management are IBM
ITM6-ITCAM-Omegamon family products for midrange and mainframe. The
Tivoli Data Warehouse is used as the central data repository, TPA for analysis
and proactive management, and GSMRT as the reporting solution. Tivoli
Integrated Portal is adopted to provide service management portal view for
client and support staff.
Security Management
In most existing service management system, there are following major issues
for security management:
There is no central repository for security data.
There is no automated provisioning of security patch management.
There is no automated integration with service management system.
There is no single layer reporting for security compliance.
Our proposed security management architecture addresses the issues above
and provides more features and advantages:

Fig. 7: Security management architecture.

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We propose security management architecture to provide an automated and

centralized security management architecture with following features and
advantages:
An automated, consistent and repeatable toolset and process for
undertaking security compliance checks on devices.
A data warehouse as the central repository for security data.
An automated provisioning of security patch management through TPM.
A single layer compliance reporting through GSMRT.
The automated alert integration with ISM service management through
OMNIBUS and Impact.
Reporting and Dashboard
In most existing service management system, there is no single layer
reporting across all service management functions and disciplines to produce
real-time/historical reporting. There are following major issues in most existing
service management system:
No real time and proactive service view for SLA management.
No business perspective view of service management.
No integration view and single presentation layer from business, IT
management and IT operation for service management.
Our proposed security management architecture can address issues above and
offer more features and advantages:

Fig. 8: Reporting and dashboard management architecture.

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Our service management reporting architecture provides a single, integrated

reporting solution that enables reporting across all service management
functions/disciplines and produces real-time/historical reports:
IBM GSMRT is adopted to provide the completed report from ISM system,
event management, security compliance management, configuration
management, performance and capacity management.
GSMRT is adopted to provide a single presentation layer for all reports
across service management functions.
Tivoli Data Warehouse can supply historical data to be extracted by GSMRT
for historical reporting.
Our service management dashboard architecture provides a real time,
proactive service management with an integrated view from the business
perspective, IT management and IT operations. The service management portal
integrates the following products to produce the dashboard views:
PriSM and TBSM are adopted for service management dashboard to provide
real time and proactive service management especially SLA management.
TBSM provides a business perspective of service management. PriSM
integrates with TBSM, TDW, Impact to provide an integrated and graphical
view from business user, IT Management, and IT operations perspectives.

3. Conclusion
In this paper, we propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for service
management. This architecture provides an automated, centralized, real-time
service management system at the enterprise level. The proposed service
management system 1) provides the following service management functions:
request fulfillment management, incident management, problem management,
change management, asset management, service level/availability management,
service catalogue management, business continuity management; 2) integrates
service management, system management and toolset management
automatically. The integrated system management include: configuration
management, release and deployment management, event management, security
compliance management, and performance/capacity management; 3) proposes a
service management dashboard and reporting solution to provide a real time and
proactive service management and report management all service management
functions and disciplines; 4) complies with ITIL V3 process framework; 5)
provides a service oriented architectural approach for service delivery.

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The proposed architecture can be adopted as a service management reference

architecture to guide the development of a technology roadmap for the
implementation of service management in real business world.

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