iWise Policy Management (part of the iWise Knowledge Base)

It is extremely difficult to describe a painting in words rather than pictures. iWise software is a "see" rather than a "what." But we will do our best to describe it in both words and images. Below is a summary of iWise Policy Management.

iWise Policy Management consists of various features, each used to define and maintain components of the infrastructure management methodology, and forms the foundation of iWise. The centralization of policy definitions or business rules in one location greatly simplifies service management, and makes changes in policy instantly available to all users. iWise applications use Policy Management for:

• Attribute validation
• Obtaining process rules
• Checking authorization

Besides defining validations and related data, Policy Management is used to begin the definition of the support and approval hierarchies, and is later expanded using iWise CMDB. The following table describes the types of objects defined in Policy Management:

Objects Defined in Policy Management

Monitors

An important component of Policy Management is the iWise Monitor Agent. These agents provide automated escalation or tasks based on business rules and user-defined thresholds. These tasks include notification, approver list generation, automatic incident entry, invoice reconciliation, and probable cause analysis and prediction. Although each automated task reduces the costs of administration, its major benefit is in the reduction of omissions and errors in the service management arena. Without automation, watching over a service management system is extremely labor-intensive. Follow-up calls, ensuring appropriate approvers are added and notified about pending changes or purchase orders, and maintaining a configuration are examples of tasks that can be automated using iWise. Depending on the task, certain functions are performed once, such as purchase order approver entry, while others are ongoing, such as notification and escalation of incidents or pending requests.

Once the procedures for invoking monitors are identified, iWise coordinators can perform ongoing administration. Initial procedure definition includes identifying and defining installation-unique scripts for invoking monitors. Ongoing administration includes identifying frequency of execution, notification rule definition, and similar tasks. This information is defined using iWise Policy Management dialogs and does not require technical knowledge.

The iWise Knowledge Base contains an object for each iWise monitor agent, including suggested execution frequencies and other pertinent information. Once monitors are defined in Policy Management, they can be updated at any time to reflect ongoing modifications to support structures and processing.