Driving Value in IT Through ITSM

Within your enterprise, have you seen current IT service trends shift from significant IT spending to IT being viewed as a significant cost to the business? If you operate in this department, this fickle approach to the value of IT to the enterprise can be nothing short of discouraging. And, when it comes time to distribute budgets to different divisions of the enterprise, you can find yourself with needs that far outweigh the money you are allowed to spend. If you find yourself in this situation, ITSM may be an important concept to consider.

This dynamic puts a whole new demand on those running the IT department as you have to determine how you were going to meet all of the needs of the enterprise, without compromising your systems or spending outside your budget. This balance is a difficult one to achieve without ITSM, particularly in an environment where the functions you perform and the service you deliver is not directly related to revenue for the company.

IT service management–or ITSM–has long been understood as a meaningful way for IT to position its services to deliver on business requirements, while service level agreements serve the purpose of providing a way to measure overall IT performance. To truly achieve delivery on ITSM and reap the benefits from this platform, you have to be able to integrate the IT lifecycle through a connection of the application developer, the business user and IT. This helps to drive a closer connection between IT service capabilities and business requirements.

Another concept that must exist to leverage ITSM is the consistent improvement or optimization of the overall IT infrastructure. This idea is often referred to as an increase in the IT maturity as a way to achieve better alignment with the changing needs of the business. It also helps IT to be more responsive to business needs over time. To increase the operational maturity of the total operation–not just the IT department–ITSM is often used.

Connecting IT to the user’s profile or even preferences is much easier said than done. And, the speed in which applications are becoming available and businesses are changing the way they do business–or even their sheer size–puts increasing demands on IT to meld according to business needs and not the other way around. IT can certainly benefit from ITSM in helping to align that driving change before the needs of the user get ahead of IT’s ability to deliver.

To take full advantage of what ITSM has to offer, you should investigate service management software that enables your knowledge of the entire IT system to be modified, operated on and transferred throughout the lifecycle of the system according to changing technologies and changing needs. When this approach is taken from the creation and launch, it is much easier to meet demands later at a much lower cost.

As long as IT remains a vital part of the overall enterprise–and don’t expect that to change anytime soon–ITSM can provide a valuable tool for ensuring IT can deliver on expectations. And, with the advancements of technologies and more and more solutions moving to the cloud, IT managers have more options today than ever before. Deciding how best to leverage those options to benefit all involved is where ITSM can deliver the best value.