This dimension deals with the operational management of services.  This is more than simple monitoring and alerting of availability of the underlying systems as is traditionally associated with enterprise systems management.  The most advanced organizations will leverage operational management capabilities for a competitive advantage, feeding operational metrics back into the system in a “closed-loop” effort to continually improve them.  It begins, however, with traditional capabilities of collecting metrics, providing reports, and establishing appropriate monitoring and alerting.

Level 0: Ad Hoc

At this level, there are no specific techniques used for the operational management of services.  Management is focused on the underlying infrastructure including physical servers, application servers, etc.

Level 1: Common Goals

At this level, the operational management architecture is documented, and a roadmap put in place.  At this early stage, it is likely that existing technologies that provide some value in a services environment, such as HTTP monitoring, will be leveraged.  This management will largely be focused on the operational staff.

Level 2: Foundation

At this level, the organization should have be piloting reports for service consumers and services providers.  The centralized team should be receiving these reports, as well as actively monitoring the services environment in real-time via service-specific technologies. 

Level 3: Method and Governance

The distribution of the information obtained from the operational management systems is now distributed to a wider audience.  The centralized group takes on a governing role where they assist service managers and service consumer managers in the analysis of the results and how that information should be leveraged in future plans.   A formal approach to capacity management should be established, including clear identification of the roles and responsibilities involved with bringing new consumers into production.

Level 4: Service-Oriented Enterprise

At this level, the information obtained from the operational management systems is now fully leveraged by the IT staff.  Troubleshooting is done efficiently. The IT staff looks for trends in service utilization, allowing them to determine future areas for improvement.  The information is also shared with the business, with a pilot effort to leverage business intelligence technology by analyzing the content of service messages that occur in the environments.  Events are now leveraged within the IT infrastructure to automatically adjust the configuration of the environment in an adaptive fashion.

Level 5: Optimized

Operational management is no longer an IT domain, but rather a business domain.  The same technologies that provide system metrics and events now provide business metrics and events, feeding into the business process management and business intelligence systems.  Predictive analysis can be formed with the results fed back into the underlying technology solutions for advanced capabilities and business advantage.