Some solutions on the market today can route complex transactions through the mainframe sysplex and display information in a format that system managers can easily understand, in near real time, showing the flow of transactions and the places where delays have occurred. Because of this, you can reduce the need for prolonged bridge calls involving multiple specialists, as well as counterproductive finger-pointing.

When mainframe management can be automated at this level, it can significantly improve business continuity.

Improving Business Relevance
To deliver even more strategic value from the mainframe, you need to improve its relevance to the business. This requires both a new style of management and a new way of thinking that transcends the mainframe silo.

Business service management (BSM) is a strategic approach to IT management that lets you increase the value that the mainframe and IT infrastructure deliver to the business. BSM lets you manage IT from the perspective of the business and continually align the two. It lets you evaluate IT incidents in terms of the real-world effects they have, helping re-establish the business value of IT to both application owners and consumers of IT services.

BSM includes best-practice IT processes (based on ITIL), automated technology management and a common view of how IT supports business priorities that transcend IT management silos. BSM doesn't require "rip and replace." Instead, it builds on the automated management processes and practices you already have. It is a methodical process to help IT perform more like a business.

Major research firms estimate that companies implementing BSM can potentially save 25 percent of their overall IT budget—funds that can be applied to IT innovation instead of IT operations, creating real strategic value.

The "hub" of BSM is the configuration management database (CMDB), a master system of record and central repository for IT assets and configuration items, including their relationships and dependencies. The CMDB works in conjunction with service models that link IT events with business goals, enabling you to manage IT based on its effect on the business.

By capturing mainframe resources and events in the CMDB, you can begin to manage the mainframe using BSM principles. You can manage service delivery based on business parameters (such as transaction completion time) versus component-level SLAs, which mean nothing to application owners or service consumers.

BSM brings business relevance to all aspects of the IT infrastructure, including often-overlooked batch processing. With BSM, you can clearly see the effect that delay or failure of a single batch job has on both the entire batch stream and the business service the batch stream supports.