By Mike Alley, Director, Service Management, Logicalis US
Many IT departments penciled in “develop an effective ITSM strategy” on their shared departmental to-do list years ago. By now it is an accepted, if inconvenient, truth that the only way to survive at the speed of business today is to have an ITSM strategy that functions as a center of governance and control to navigate the cascade of challenges that modern corporations face.
Most organizations have implemented a ticketing system for incident management, and may have a service catalog and the beginnings of a configuration management database in some stage of development, often across different toolsets. They’ve got the dots, but not the big picture.
The trouble with the “big picture” of ITSM is that it’s just so big. In the ITSM galaxy of functions and processes, it can be hard to find the traction you need to drive measurable value for your business, especially when a random assortment of short-term crises keeps crashing into your best long-term intentions.
Solid Ground
IT organizations that have progressed along the ITSM maturity continuum have found that IT operations management (ITOM), a set of capabilities that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of day-to-day IT operations, provides the solid ground they need to gain momentum and harness the full potential of IT to empower the business objectives of their organization.
The function of IT operations management is ensuring the availability, security and optimum performance of the IT environment, but the purpose of IT operations management is the delivery of innovative services (i.e., applications) to business users.
Benefits of Strategic ITOM
- ITOM, as part of an ITSM strategy, keeps the IT platform running effectively and efficiently on a day-to-day basis.
- Maintaining a steady state for the IT environment empowers both IT and business agility.
- Automating day-to-day processes reduces costs and risk by standardizing tasks and removing the human factor. Automation also speeds restoration of disrupted service.
- Consistent and automated processes provide an audit trail that can be used to improve your compliance posture.
- ITOM provides for the transfer of cost from maintenance to more strategic activities that increase agility, enable new delivery models and shift IT focus from reacting to crises to participating fully as a business leader.
The Way Forward
Several factors make achieving the goal of “technology and business working together as one” increasingly do-able today. They include the affordable availability of a diverse range of service management toolsets coupled with the emergence of an intelligent infrastructure in which devices are able to communicate directly with each other as well as a broader and deeper understanding of the dynamic web of interwoven processes that connect compute, network and storage with innovative applications and services that drive business success.
Directly aligning business and technology today is not only possible but mandatory. The organizations that accomplish it first are going to pull ahead of competitors in their markets. An effective ITOM strategy can help your organization be among the winners.
Want to learn more? Download the Logicalis white paper “How to Use IT Operations Management to Become a Strategic Player in Your Organization,” then watch Logicalis Director of ITSM Mike Alley discuss “The Promise of ITSM.” You will also find answers to many of your ITSM questions at the Logicalis microsite ITSM answers.com as well as on our corporate website.