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With the way the relationship between IT and the rest of the business has evolved, CIOs and IT leaders need to carefully consider…Are you a business enabler or an IT roadblock?

Historically, IT was separated from the rest of the business by technical jargon, big equipment and blinking lights in a back room. But today, many IT pros struggle with a new reality—the need to align IT with business priorities.

Fortunately, IT Service Management (ITSM) provides the answer with tools that align initiatives to the business. This is important because IT leaders need to see themselves as business enablers. They need intelligence to create service catalogs and then map the relationships and dependencies among applications and the infrastructure—so that they can then quickly respond to line-of-business requests.

ITSM isn’t just for managing IT—the tools go far beyond to also manage services across a portfolio of organizational needs. With basic customization, the tools can also be used in new and innovative ways:

  1. Creating maps: ITSM creates a map of services the business relies on, the infrastructure, the support IT provides, and what else IT could IT thus become a service broker by defining, mapping and ultimately providing all the services the organization needs.
  1. Automating request fulfillments and restoration of services: Through orchestration and automation, ITSM streamlines request monitoring and fulfillment, service delivery, and outage recoveries.
  1. Accommodating traditional and Agile projects: Whether managing waterfall or Agile methodologies, ITSM supports both.
  1. Providing a service catalog: Business users want a consumer-like experience. Using ITSM, IT can provide a self-service portal from which they choose solutions.
  1. Meeting compliance requirements: ITSM helps IT centralize compliance requirements into a governance risk and compliance solution to make audits go faster and to stay current with new requirements.

To see how a bottling company uses ITSM to identify trends indicating needed changes in the way IT communicates with business users, visit http://ow.ly/Omp3K. You can also find out how a hospital enhanced IT processes, standardization and measurement with ITIL best practices through an ITSM implementation at http://ow.ly/OmqbP.