Bridge the IT Service Lifecycle

Service management is taking on an even greater role: It is driving business innovation by encompassing the full service lifecycle, starting with the business of IT itself, and including IT operations and development. This broader focus is designed to bridge the disconnect that often exists between the business and the IT organization, and between the development and operations management domains within IT. It provides the best practices for understanding business requirements and translating those requirements into corresponding IT objectives - enabling IT managers to take the next step beyond optimization across the lifecycle. IBM can help.

The ever-increasing digitization of business processes and the associated sensitivity of underlying information have left IT organizations with unprecedented responsibility. Success is no longer a simple matter of keeping the lights on. Rather, IT organizations are now asked to be drivers of value, data integrity and competitive differentiation across the full IT service lifecycle.

Achieving such an end requires a delicate balance:

• Innovate tirelessly and respond quickly …
• BUT do so ever conscious of cost, quality, and security

IT leaders have turned to companies like IBM to help optimize the efficiency of their IT organization. Working with IT experts such as IBM Rational for business driven development, IBM Tivoli for IT service management and IBM Global Services for strategic governance, these leaders have taken great strides toward streamlining their IT organizations.

While IT has performed heroically to keep up with the growth in IT complexity and criticality, this effort has had a price. IT operations are labor intensive and prone to human error. As a result, businesses have had to gradually shift much of their IT spending from development to operations. According to Forrester Research Vice President Jean-Pierre Garbani, “In a typical $1B+ organization, 40 percent of the IT budget goes to labor, and at least 60 percent of the labor cost goes to IT operations.” However, overall IT budgets have typically remained flat. So, IT today has less time to focus on delivering innovation. (mValent, Inc., mValent Analyst Series: Focus On: Configuration Management, 2006.)

The key is for organizations to adopt a more holistic approach, an approach that takes a top-down, end-to-end view of the IT lifecycle. Ongoing optimization efforts must be coupled with a new perspective that breaks down the silos on either side of the operations and development divide. Tools, metrics and processes must be normalized across the organization to ensure that all real and virtual lines of business are equally measured and equally accountable for the success - or failure - of the business. The alternative is a highly disconnected organization with islands of efficiency in a sea of lost opportunity.

To help customers tackle this complex effort, IBM provides a set of service management solutions - combinations of integrated tools, processes and services - to enable the communication and collaboration of business, development and operations stakeholders. Each solution is specially devised to help teams address a key cross-lifecycle activity that is fundamental to the delivery of timely, cost-effective value to the business. Four solutions are available today, designed to help companies …

Govern IT
Improve visibility - balance portfolios, prioritize investments, set objectives, monitor and measure status, align resources with strategic enterprise objectives.

Ensure Functional Quality
Prevent, avert and resolve service quality issues - ensure applications meet or exceed end-user functional demands.

Ensure System Performance
Ensure applications meet or exceed SLA performance and availability demands.

Accelerate Deployment
Build and deploy solutions into development, test, pre-production and production environments quickly, reliably and consistently.

Successful management of the IT lifecycle balances agility with quality, innovation with cost sensitivity - and ensures that any organization in the midst of an on demand transformation is prepared to meet the demands of new top line growth initiatives without sacrificing the lessons learned through bottom line optimization efforts in the past.