Contact Whitlock
Promoting IT via ITSM
In order to ensure the business’s fundamental IT needs are being met there needs to be a convergence of IT process and technology. It is this convergence that is often captured under the title of IT Service Management (ITSM).
IT Service Management embodies the people, processes and technologies that IT must employ to develop, deliver and support appropriate and competitive IT services at the levels necessary to support the pace of business growth. Enterprises seeking to evolve IT operations to business-oriented IT service management must assess their level of IT management process maturity and determine a course of action for improvement. This is where Whitlock can help.
The promise of ITSM includes improving the work experience for IT professionals (escaping what The Gartner Group refers to as the “80/20 Rut”) and enabling IT to achieve ever greater levels of efficiency via repeatable and auditable processes and automation. This results in improved availability, reduced downtime and shorter problem resolution time because IT support focuses on solving the correct, high-priority, business-relevant issues.
The future of IT operations entails the controlling of costs through the extensive use of automation. The evolution of IT service management requires extensive knowledge and a new generation of solutions, for example, the CMDB CMS, mapping tools, process engines, run book automation, etc. Likewise, the evolution will require IT to more aggressively adopt and support (at the highest levels of management) a process-driven approach, that is, first defining what information is required by a process and who owns it, and then selecting the appropriate software solution (and not the other way around). This is exactly where we spend all of our time. It is why we have both a technology practice and a process practice, and why for the past ten years we have been considered by Hewlett-Packard as their “go-to” software partner in the mid-Atlantic.
A word about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and its role in ITSM: When we refer to the convergence of technology and process, for us the process component is ITIL. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently completed its 3rd year comparative survey to examine the level of acceptance of Service Level Management (SLM) at the enterprise level. In this study EMA saw best-practice usage continue to grow with ITIL being the most common approach. Sixty-one (61%) percent of the respondents are using ITIL.
In 2006 Forrester Research completed its study of Service Improvement Programs (SIP) in the U.K. Over three-quarters of the companies surveyed had a SIP in place, and seventy percent (70%) considered ITIL as their "prime reference guideline". Considering its fast growing acceptance (and existing success in Europe) and the need to inculcate the defined processes into your technology (to achieve automation and process workflow), Whitlock has standardized on ITIL within our process practice.
We appreciate you spending time on our site to learn more about our company, and we hope to speak with you about your business.
Whitlock: Promoting IT Innovation