13 Summary

Download printable version

Many organisations still see IT service management as being predominantly a technology issue. ITIL promotes a much more “joined up”, “end-to-end” approach to IT service management replacing the ‘technology silos’ and isolated ‘islands of excellence’. The focus of IT management has been changing for some time and in the future management will be even less focussed on technology and still more integrated with the overall needs of the business management and processes. These new systems and processes are already starting to evolve and will continue to evolve over the next few years. This development will accelerate, as the management standards for the exchange of management information between tools become more fully defined, by organisations such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). This integration process may gather speed now that the itSMF is an Alliance Partner with the DMTF. In essence, management systems will become:

· More focussed on business needs
· More closely aligned to business processes
· Less dependent on specific technology and more “service centric”
· More integrated with other management tools and processes as the management standards evolve.

This will allow “joined up”, “end-to-end” IT management processes to be developed that will replace the ‘technical silos’ and isolated ‘islands of excellence’ that have previously existed within IT organisations.

This will only happen if we adopt practices and architectures that are focussed on business needs and business processes. The OGC’s ITIL framework gives a sound basis for achieving all of this once management tools and interfaces evolve to fully support them. The “big picture” of how all of these areas and processes together provide “end-to-end”, “joined up” Service Management is illustrated in Figure 14.

Figure 14: The “big picture” of ITIL Processes

Several organisations have already used this approach to significantly improve the quality of IT services delivered to the business. The benefits gained have included:

• Greater alignment of IT services, processes and goals with business requirements, expectations and goals

• Improved business profitability and productivity

• Support staff that are more aware of business processes and business impact

• A reduction in overall management and support costs leading to a reduced TCO

• Improved service availability and performance, leading to increased business revenue

• Improved service levels and quality of service.

However, care must be taken when developing IT Service Management within an organisation. It is easy to focus on the internal aspects of IT process rather than on the Customer and business needs and requirements. The processes should always be designed primarily to make the Customer experience simple and enjoyable and secondly to make the backend IT processes effective and efficient. This can only be achieved when business and Customer driven measurements metrics, CSFs and KPIs are put in place to measure the quality of service and its continuous improvement.

Table of contents | Previous | Next