Page 494 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Organization and Governance 4-25

4.2.6.4.8 What role will application development play in the vendor’s RTI strategies?
Vendors have different visions regarding the role of application development in RTI:
• Some vendors (for example, Microsoft) believe that RTI begins when applications are being devel-
oped. Their plans state that instrumentation that will help control the behavior of environmental
resource allocation must be added during program development.
• Other vendors (for example, IBM) suggest that development happens mostly during production
operations. Such vendors will likely emphasize just-in-time instrumentation techniques—for
example, byte code instrumentation, which is found in many of today’s Java 2 Platform, Enterprise
Edition–based management products.
Companies will need to adopt both approaches. You should look for vendors that can satisfy a spec-
trum of needs. Expect to make trade-offs between development complexity and the management of
information granularity in production.

4.2.6.4.9 How will the roles of testing departments in IT organizations change after RTI is adopted?
Testing for the RTI environment will become more complex because the IT system is now expected to
be self-configuring and optimizing. Expect to assemble a more sophisticated quality assurance team
than you’ve relied on in the past. The team will have to understand how the system reacts and repriori-
tizes infrastructure capacity due to demand fluctuations. By contrast, single-application stress and load
testing is likely to become less important. Your new team will test policies rather than applications and
observe whether the system behaves in a compliant manner. The team also will need to be familiar with
the preplanned orchestration of many interrelated infrastructure components. Your vendor should offer
you guidance on best practices in testing.

4.2.6.4.10 How will enterprise management technology evolve to support the needs of the RTI?
Configuration data, understanding relationships, and dependencies between and among components
on different levels of the stack are critical to the success of RTI. To realize the promise of the RTI,
systems management science will have to evolve beyond currently available management capabilities.
Problems that vendors must address include the following:

• Root-cause analysis technology is inadequate and must become smarter, faster, and more adaptable.
• Hard-coded, rule-based systems suffer limitations (such as with maintenance) in complex, het-
erogeneous scenarios.
• No unified management schema is available to enable an end-to-end evaluation of the managed
object infrastructure.
• Real-time modeling and simulation capabilities are nonexistent. Capacity planning tools are
available, but most are designed to work offline rather than in real time.
Because potential limitations in areas such as bandwidth will affect decision latency, some correc-
tive actions may have to be preauthorized. RTI will likely have to become more of a federated system of
automation “cells.” Expect to make decisions regarding whether control will be local or centralized. Ask
RTI vendors how they will overcome these technical challenges.

4.2.7 Future Trends

IT management must strive to seamlessly integrate IT planning into the business planning process by
providing practical answers to key business planning questions.
Achieving end-to-end service management benefits requires significant IT process reengineering,
including changing workplace cultures and behavior, which is often a difficult task. The principal chal-
lenge is moving toward a customer-centric service orientation, where standard products are delivered