To stay competitive, organizations need to constantly evolve and improve all aspects of their businesses. They also have to engage measurable practices to ensure that all implemented changes are cost-effective and vital for their businesses.
ITSM, or IT Service Management, is a modern approach to planning, implementing and managing IT services of an agile, service-oriented organization. The practice is business, rather than technology-centered. IT services add the most value when they are in complete alignment with the needs of an organization. Otherwise, they impede a company's ability to react to market changes, put a strain on the budget, and, ultimately, result in dissatisfied customers and lost business opportunities.
The ability to measure progress and calculate ROI of IT projects is an important part of ITSM. Without a clear idea of project costs, organizations can't plan for the future and choose projects that would add the most strategic value at the lowest cost.
Organizations interested in implementing ITSM practices can follow the ITSM guidelines presented in three frameworks:
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) consists of five books - Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. The books are published to help organizations design, deploy, as well as measure the impact of their ITSM projects.
MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) includes a number of guides to help design and deploy IT services in the most effective and affordable way. The guides break down the process into three phases - the Plan Phase, the Deliver Phase, and the Operate Phase.
COBIT (Control Objective for Information and Related Technology) offers guides on the ways to align IT objectives with business goals. It breaks down the process into four steps - Plan and Organize, Acquire and Implement, Deliver and Support, and Monitor and Evaluate.
ITSM frameworks are not dependent on one particular technology. The idea is to choose systems and applications that fit best the unique needs of each organization. The winning combination can include several products and services that deliver the best result at the lowest cost.
Some IT solutions can support a number of objectives of ITSM. A comprehensive infrastructure monitoring solution enables organizations to oversee in real time the performance of critical applications to ensure that all business processes are running smoothly.
Four key solutions that help deliver ITSM benefits include the following:
1. Distributed Application Monitoring
By monitoring groups of applications and processes, rather than individual components, an organization can get a better insight into its current business situation, since IT managers can instantly see how the monitored items are connected. The system can separate minor events that can wait to get fixed, from major accidents that require IT managers' immediate attention to prevent a major outage.
2. Notifications
Notifications can be forwarded to IT managers using email, IM, or SMS, ensuring that the right individuals are alerted about any potential problems right away.
3. Historical Data Collection
Historical Data Collection allows IT managers to generate reports on past events, analyze them, and draw conclusions to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.
4. End-user Monitoring
End-user Monitoring enables IT managers to ensure that the end users are not experiencing application performance issues.
ITSM practices can help organizations create flexible and productive IT environments aligned with each organization's unique business goals. There are a lot of solutions that offer a wealth of monitoring features to enable businesses to implement some of the basic principles of ITSM straight away.
Dennis Rietvink is Co-Founder and VP of Product Management at Savision
The Latest
Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 2 covers more on Observability ...
The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, covering IT performance topics. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, observability, AIOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 1 covers APM and Observability ...
To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...
Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...
Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...
Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...
This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...
As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...
