Integral Solution for IT Cost Controlling
netinsight is a controlling tool for the accounting of business and IT processes according to actual consumption and with comprehension of the IT infrastructure.
Thereby netinsight uses the ITIL method (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) in order to identify the impact of technical events for business-critical processes. As a comfortable instrument for maintaining business process rules, netinsight integrates the Visual Rules Business Rule Engine for verification and enrichment of high-performance IT flows.
Integration of Visual Rules into the system architecture
netinsight features a modern and fully modular 3-tier architecture. It is used for flexible mapping of business and IT processes. The software solution consists of five core modules for cost allocation, controlling, contract management, SLA management and reporting. Visual Rules is fully integrated as a plug-in and offers graphical modeling of business rules within the cost allocation module. netinsight: flexible and integral The designation of netinsight IT cost allocation is to provide clearly arranged information about the IT cost structure to the corporate management. Therefore the monetary defined performance usage for operative services rendered is strongly focused.
netinsight IT cost allocation gathers and valuates the deployment and consumption aspect of IT and telecommunication processes from various data sources and types. All necessary master data is then merged to services and allocated to the respective origin and cost centres, based on the business rules created with the business rule engine Visual Rules.
Business rules for verification and enrichment of IT service data
The business rules modeled with Visual Rules are used for consolidation and enrichment of IT service data. For a compilation according to actual consumption, the data records are checked regarding consistency and, if necessary, are enriched with information from the master data.
The following example is supposed to clarify potential of improvement for enriching IT service data with business data: A treaty has expired. Lack of control can lead to further fulfilling of services without rendering an account. The integrated Visual Rules functionality is responsible for instant identification of non-conformance and triggering of defined actions.
Flexible control of rules with Visual Rules
Visual Rules features graphical modeling of business rules. The high level of transparency of the rule models offers easy maintenance of the business logic - irrespective of its complexity. For this ease of use of the netinsight Visual Rules module, the IT controller is able to rapidly model even complex business rules without advanced technological know-how. Rules are then versioned in a repository and tagged with information on validity, thus enabling selective activation and deactivation of rules in operation. In order to guarantee high quality of rules execution at any time, changed rules can be debugged, simulated and tested prior to execution within the graphical rule editor.
Rule models in Visual Rules are similar to decision trees. Yellow nodes in the rule tree represent the decisions for verification and enrichment of IT service data. The green nodes are subtree calls for encapsulation of business logic. The blue nodes represent actions to be triggered automatically, e.g. sending an e-mail that contains error code or activating a defined error handling.
Visual Rules in netinsight holds further benefits in terms of flexible business rules: Access of data stored in external systems, e.g. SAP R/3 as well as invocation of external program modules can be done directly out of the rule model.
Conclusion
nicetec integrates Bosch Software Innovations Visual Rules into the netinsight suite to eminently optimize it regarding service delivery and business processes. netinsight and Visual Rules empower enterprises to further align their IT processes with business objectives. The "information" resource as an effective controlling instrument of the corporate management becomes the vital competitive advantage.
