For weather-obsessed Britons, the Met Office is an instantly recognisable institution, and one much loved despite its tendency to publish gloomy forecasts.

But providing estimates of expected rainfall for the early evening weather forecast is just one facet of the Met Office's work – commercial pilots, firefighters and radiation leak investigators all rely on reports regularly delivered from the Met Office's Exeter headquarters.

In all, the Met Office produces about 650 services to external agencies. Each service is supported by a breathtaking assortment of interconnected IT systems, including supercomputers, mainframes and servers.

That complexity creates problems, as Clare Hubbard, a service manager at the Met Office explains: "In many cases, the first we'd know about a problem with one of our services would be when the customer called up to find out what had happened to their report."

Furthermore, identifying the root cause of problems was challenging, as the client reports are generated using a variety of different systems.

For example, FireMet provides regional fire services with weather information that gives firefighters information on wind directions in specific locations, which helps them understand how the fire is likely to spread and identify a safe approach when dealing with major incidents. Building up this local picture requires input from a huge number of systems – so a problem with one of the 100-plus internal IT systems could cascade down and interrupt its client services.

The Met Office's IT team realised that it needed a mechanism to trace on which IT systems individual services were dependent. The ultimate aim is to be able to follow a line from one of the Met Office services, such as FireMet, " all the way down to the plug in the wall" says Chris Beighton, team leader for knowledge management at the Met Office.

Ultimately, the goal is to achieve a business service management approach to IT, where the key elements of the IT infrastructure are aligned to meet the goals of the business. However, the Met Office had some groundwork to do before this was possible.

In 2006, it initiated a programme to update its service management suite. It had been using version four of the Remedy service management software from BMC Software, and as part of its licensing arrangement it already had the option to upgrade to Remedy 7.

The Met Office currently has about 500 support users and 1,300 end users, and Remedy has been used as the operational application for change, problem and incident management.

The upgrade was necessary because BMC had stopped supporting Remedy 4, reports Hubbard, and the system had been so heavily customised over the years that patching had become increasingly troublesome. But the upgrade was additionally attractive because Remedy 7 could support ITIL, the IT infrastructure best practice framework.
"We also have a large number of Linux and Firefox users, so having a system that supports them was also necessary," she adds.

The next stage of this process was to build a configuration management database (CMDB), to capture and store information on its entire IT infrastructure.

The first phase of populating began in January 2009. This has been aimed at filling its "asset gaps". As Beighton explains, much of the knowledge about what systems the various services rely on is "carried around in people's heads".

Capturing that information was essential to successfully populating the CMDB and it was essential that staff bought into the project. When staff have a sense of ownership over the process, it increases the chances of getting accurate information, says Beighton.

The process is complicated by the variety of systems that feed into each of the Met Office's services. While supercomputers and mainframes are relatively easy to classify, the Met Office also uses a colony of stations to take atmospheric measurements which then feed data into its modelling systems.

For the Met Office to be able to consider all constituent parts of a service, it needs to be able to record the status of these external stations as part of its CMDB, says Hubbard. "In effect, we're treating some sheds as if they were IT racks," she jokes.

The final phase of the CMDB project is due to be finished by March 2010. Once complete, the IT team at the Met Office expects to be able to provide a comprehensive report of operational performance. And for Hubbard, that would be a particularly rosy forecast.