Reasons to be cheerful in IT service management
It’s always dangerous to be too optimistic in this industry, but there appear to be signs of progress in IT service management, specifically with the adoption of best practice in IT operations. About a year ago, when vendors started jumping on the service management bandwagon, there didn’t appear to be much interest from potential adopters, that is, enterprise organisations with sizeable IT departments. As a self-confessed evangelist of best practice, this was depressing to say the least. More recently however, conversations have been turning from the “what”, or indeed the “why bother”, to the “how do we do it.” The signs of this are rife, including from the end-user community, both in personal discussions and more general research (I’ll point to some soon, when it is released), but also in how this is translating into sales activity from vendors. A briefing call with IT management vendor
Numara yesterday confirmed this; we are hearing similar things from the larger vendors such as
CA.
When it comes to the how, in our report “
IT service management: jumping on a moving train” we’ve been advocating an evolutionary approach, based on a 5-stage maturity model. There is no mega-suite of products that can transform a chaotic IT department into a well-oiled machine; however, tools can help support best practice adoption and the automation of key tasks. One such area would be the use of workflow (or business process management, depending on your taste and background) tools to control the operational processes of IT management, which is why we welcome in principle the
announcement by Lombardi and Covestic to release a set of process templates based around the
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice framework.
As well as being further indication that there is a growing market for such tools, the Lombardi/Covestic ITIL Change Management BPM product (snappy title, I know) offers a first step towards the “how do we do it.” Implementation of IT best practice is a change management programme in its own right, and using such a tool enables companies to compare their current approaches with the ITIL standard, deploying specific processes incrementally and using the reporting capabilities of the tool to gauge progress and, more importantly, whether the planned benefits are being achieved. If organisations want to get “there”, it’s a good place to start, better perhaps than the read-only equivalents from the major vendors (such as IBM’s Tivoli Unified Process,
ITUP).
Of course any such product is not going to be a silver bullet. We would recommend deployment alongside training in ITIL and more general notions of IT best practice; equally, we would recommend that organisations ensure such solutions can be integrated into the existing environment. The real value from these tools in the longer term will come when operational processes can link to automation of systems tasks – for example to trigger a password reset, a patch deployment or a restore from backup. Organisations should look carefully at Lombardi/Covestic’s long-term plans, for example - and we don’t know the answer to this yet - does the product offer suitable interfaces to enable integration with management tools from other vendors, for example to support the
recently announced standards for Configuration Management Database (CMDB) integration?
Yes, it is dangerous to be too optimistic in this industry, but keep in mind that it is all about supply and demand. IT vendors have catalysed best practice adoption through their own acceptance of ITIL-based standards; now it is time for enterprise customers to respond: by being more demanding, the supply side will be encouraged to grow and improve, and we should see more offerings such as this. We shall shortly be releasing our requirements on IT service management offerings: if any readers would like to share any insights, please do let us know.
