Run book automation integrates and orchestrates processes across silos, enabling comprehensive business service management and increasing IT's value to the business. It brings together various elements of IT service management into a coordinated system. The combination of run book automation, ITIL best practices, and business service management improves service quality, increases efficiency, and supports a secure environment by focusing on end-user services rather than individual components.

1. RunBookAutomationSetstheStageforBusinessServiceManagement
Run book automation integrates and
orchestrates processes across silos,
enabling you to move forward with
comprehensive business service
management and increasing IT’s
value to the business.
Run Book
Automation
Sets the Stage for
Business
Service
Management
By John F. Scott
1

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3. RunBookAutomationSetstheStageforBusinessServiceManagement
3
I
f yours is like most IT organizations, you face challenges that, when not properly addressed
with standardized processes, can result in cost and budget overruns, catastrophic down-
time, and increased business risk. You are continually being pressured to manage costs,
yet still achieve a high-quality level of service in an increasingly complex environment.
And, when you introduce new hardware or software, it absolutely cannot disrupt the existing
production environment. As IT organizations strive to become more integrated with the
business, the demands become even greater.
To help address these concerns, many IT organizations are turning to best practice frame-
works, such as the IT Infrastructure Library®
(ITIL®
). ITIL Version 3 provides guidance on
meeting IT service management objectives and embraces business service management
(BSM), a prescriptive model for managing IT from the perspective of the business. By following
ITIL practices, IT organizations can map out how to become more responsive to business
needs and how to be a driver of business value.
ITIL V3
The new ITIL framework is divided into service lifecycle stages. It consists of five core books, described
below, which are supported by guidance that includes a variety of best practice processes.
1. Service Strategy Ensures that every stage of the service lifecycle stays focused on the
business case
Affects what happens in the other phases
Relates to all the companion process elements that follow
2. Service Design Involves development of specifications for innovative new services
or enhanced services
3. Service Transition Subjects new or enhanced services to production-quality assurance
and controlled release into production
Includes testing, change management, and release management
4. Service Operation Focuses on delivery and control process activities to achieve a highly
desirable, steady state of service management on a day-to-day basis
5. Continual Service
Improvement
Continues in the ITIL tradition of continual improvement
Table 1. ITIL v3 Service Lifecycle Stages

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The new version of ITIL presents a lifecycle approach of IT and IT services. However, most
IT organizations today still operate as individual silos with fragmented processes. For example,
network engineering and operations personnel use network-related tools to manage their
specific devices (leveraging their own unique processes and methodologies), while server
teams, storage teams, security teams, and application groups all perform similarly. In turn,
IT services frequently come across as a portfolio of independent parts with no one ensuring
that all the pieces work as a unified whole. This, in turn, leaves end users with a fragmented
and frustrating experience.
Run book automation enables you to adopt a comprehensive BSM
approach, integrating and orchestrating processes across silos.
Yet, while ITIL provides the framework, you still need to perform an extensive amount of
implementation and ongoing manual activities. Based on industry research, between 60
and 80 percent of all unplanned service outages are the result of human error and process
shortcomings. One way to reduce human error and, thus, unplanned service outages, is to
automate routine, labor-intensive tasks.
Run book automation enables you to adopt a comprehensive BSM approach, integrating and
orchestrating processes across silos. This is in line with the ITIL philosophy of the lifecycle
approach, with a focus on end-user services that you provide to the business rather than the
individual components you leverage to provide the services.
Orchestrating the Various IT Service Management Elements
Run book automation, also referred to as IT process automation, brings together the various
functional, procedural, technological, and labor-based elements of IT service management
into a finely tuned machine that operates as a single entity. In essence, it is a key element
of service automation, orchestrating the wide array of functional IT disciplines to work together
efficiently and effectively.
This seems like a simple notion, but, in practice, it couldn’t be more complicated. The prolifer-
ation of technology across all layers — including networking; security; servers and OS platforms;
storage systems; and Web, middleware, messaging, and business-level applications —
adds a degree of technical complexity that IT has never faced before. Moreover, each of
these technical components is subject to the numerous process functions associated with
IT service management.

5. RunBookAutomationSetstheStageforBusinessServiceManagement
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Automation replicates the processes or activities that are otherwise performed manually in
order to drive speed, quality, and efficiency across operations. People are not entirely removed
from the overall business function, however. In many cases, automation is implemented for
specific portions of routine, repeatable “sub-functions.” A perfect example exists in today’s
automotive assembly line, which leverages a high degree of machine-based automation,
while still depending on human labor to handle the more complex, unregulated functions.
But how do you best implement broad-reaching automation, yet maintain the flexibility and
responsiveness required to deliver services in the way that the business desires, all without
exposing critical infrastructure to poor management controls? The answer lies in automation
of tightly integrated IT operations. Run book automation replaces manual execution of highly
repetitive functions and tasks inside IT operations. It frees up time and resources so that people
can provide higher-level analytics and work on more strategic, innovative projects that can be
used to grow revenue and meet business requirements. It also promises a higher degree of
continuity and holistic service delivery that is a trademark principle of service automation.
Connecting Technology, Process, and Organization
Run book automation solutions enable you to streamline IT operations by automating routine,
labor-intensive, error-prone tasks; by leveraging systems, applications, and tools across silos —
from trouble ticketing to fault management to performance monitoring to virtualization
management to the configuration management database (CMDB); and more. Managing
across silos is a key focus of ITIL Version 3. As such, a comprehensive run book automation
solution should provide out-of-the-box, ITIL-based process workflow to help you automate
these manual, repetitive processes.
By uniting management systems and technologies with best-practice ITIL processes, run
book automation delivers a unified service delivery capability.
Run book automation not only overcomes the barriers of technology, process, and organization
(people), but also unifies the parts to work together efficiently and provide dependable service
delivery. Once the links are established among technology, process, and organization, you
can then begin to view the services you deliver to the business as just that — services —

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rather than focusing on the individual components. When you start looking at the services
as a whole, you gain a better understanding of the end-user perspective. For example, the
end user really only cares that the service is available and working as expected, and that’s
what IT needs to measure. If the sales order application isn’t functioning, it doesn’t matter
if all the individual components appear to be working properly. To the end user, IT has failed.
ITIL provides a framework for adopting a service lifecycle approach and proper business
perspective. IT then needs to establish service levels in accordance with business priorities
to most effectively allocate resources (both people and technical resources) to the areas
that matter most.
The powerful combination of BSM, ITIL, and run book automation will
help IT organizations continue to increase their value to the business
by increasing IT efficiency, improving service quality, and supporting
a secure and compliant environment.
Run book automation solutions provide monitoring and measuring capabilities so that you
know how the automation is affecting the overall process. This also enables you to adopt
a continual service improvement program, another cornerstone of ITIL.
Putting it all together
BSM enables you to do more of what supports your business — and less of what doesn’t.
Run book automation is a key component of a comprehensive BSM approach, enabling
rapid integration and comprehensive orchestration of process-based actions across IT silos.
In practical terms, it provides measurable value by streamlining IT operations management
(through the integration of a vast array of systems and network management technologies
across operational disciplines) and automating a repeatable operational process to eliminate
time-consuming, manual activities for operators. The powerful combination of BSM, ITIL,
and run book automation will help IT organizations continue to increase their value to the
business by increasing IT efficiency, improving service quality, and supporting a secure and
compliant environment. n

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Orchestrating Change and Configuration Management
With IT becoming integral to the success of most businesses, the need for a safe, secure, and reliable
infrastructure is increasingly important. Many interruptions to business services can be traced to con-
figuration updates, patches, and other related changes made to the IT infrastructure. Beyond operational
governance, regulatory requirements mandate that IT organizations implement new types of processes,
controls, and reporting to assure compliance. Using run book automation to orchestrate change manage-
ment for configuration updates across the IT infrastructure can provide numerous benefits, including
reduced downtime, real-time visibility of changes, improved customer satisfaction, and lower cost
of operations.
Large multi-national corporations and service providers have deployed worldwide networks to support
business operations. Configuration updates on these networks take place on a constant basis and
require significant manual processes to ensure that changes from different parts of the organization
do not adversely affect other dependent network assets; and these manual efforts are not always
successful. Within such companies, run book automation has been effectively deployed to provide IT
process automation across a number of management tools, including configuration management,
event management, and the service desk.
For example, a run book process might be triggered by the event manager, which receives notification
from the configuration management system that has just completed an audit and detected a non-
compliant configuration item. The run book process runs an immediate check against the list of all other
events associated with the change event and suppresses correlated event “noise.” in this scenario,
the run book process would then query the change management system to determine if the changes
were “planned” or “unplanned,” and would also query the asset/CMDB to determine the pre-defined
business priority of the services being supported by the affected device or system.
Using a rules engine, if the event is determined to be “unplanned,” a ticket is opened in the service desk
system, populated with all asset, change, and configuration item (CI) information, and escalated to
the appropriate group (e.g., network, server, IT operations) with the corresponding priority level. If the
ticket is not responded to within a defined timeframe, the ticket is automatically escalated to the next
level. The run book automation process then monitors the service desk system in real-time for updates
to that ticket. Once informed whether the change has been approved or rejected, the run book automation
process will automatically close the ticket or send a job request to the configuration management system
to restore the CI to its original status.

8. Enables you to be more responsive to business needs>>
Improves service quality by focusing on end-user services as a whole rather>>
than the individual technological components
Provides a unified service delivery capability>>
Increases IT efficiency>>
Supports a secure and compliant environment>>
of the Combination of Run Book Automation, ITIL, and BSM
5 BENEFITS
8
About John F. Scott
John F. Scott is senior program executive at BMC Software. He came to BMC
through the acquisition of RealOps, where he provided vision and direction
for the company and managed the road map and development of the com-
pany’s product portfolio. Scott previously served as vice president of product
development with NTT/Verio, vice president of marketing for SevenSpace,
and vice president of strategy and business planning for Digex. Prior to joining Digex, Scott
was a telecom industry senior consultant with Andersen Consulting’s Washington, D.C., office.
Scott earned Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees from Georgetown University’s
Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business in finance and international business.
As the above example illustrates, automating the interaction of change management processes, con-
figuration and patching updates, monitoring tools, and other related support systems can greatly increase
the success of planned changes. It can also mitigate unnecessary event triage, resulting in reduced
costs and better service for customers. Conversely, unplanned change activity can be detected, routed,
and escalated far more efficiently so that operators can respond in a timely fashion, providing the
opportunity to quickly reverse rogue configuration updates.