Implementing a world-class IT service management strategy

For companies looking to manage their IT effectively, the game has moved on as they find it increasingly difficult to provide the internal cost savings and external service quality essential for clear and sustainable competitive edge. Just a brief snapshot serves to highlight some of the daunting challenges facing today’s CEOs and CIOs:

• Are you losing control of your infrastructure?
• Are you under pressure due to the lack of a coherent strategy?
• Are you struggling to manage multiple vendor contracts, with management and deployment costs spiralling out of control?
• Is there a basic lack of information on what the business is doing today?
• Is creeping legislation giving you sleepless nights?
• Does the business really understand its reliance on IT?

None of these concerns can be ignored. However, FrontRange Solutions is at the forefront of technology developments that can tackle all the issues they raise – ensuring that IT plays its full part in creating an efficient, yet truly customer-facing, business.

Business alignment

There is a growing awareness that, in order to achieve real business efficiency, the IT infrastructure is about much more than simply ‘keeping the lights on’: rather, it must be optimised and more closely aligned to the requirements of the business. Or, put another way, the CIO or IT director must be totally and fundamentally engaged with the business and play a central role in key decision-making.

This is a two-way street, however. It is not uncommon for the CIO to come under pressure from their sales or operations counterpart, who complains that IT is somehow ‘holding us back’ or ‘not supporting the business’. Yet the equally common response is for the head of IT to claim, with some justification, that he was, as usual, ‘the last to know’ about a planned business initiative.

Such criticisms betray an enterprise-wide rather than a departmental weakness. Thus, if marketing is planning a major campaign that will generate millions of web hits, it is essential that the IT team is made aware in advance and takes the necessary steps to ensure that the infrastructure can cope, ensuring business continuity and a positive customer experience.

Best practice

To avoid sleepless nights – especially in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom debacles – the CEO and CFO also need to be absolutely assured that financial and other mission-critical data is being transmitted around the network daily in a totally secure and managed manner. And here, it is especially important that IT plays its full role in preventing unauthorised data access and ensuring financial transparency in order to meet tough auditing requirements.

There is no doubt that the pressures around staying the right side of the law, aligning IT with the broader business and rigorous management of key business data are interlinked and increasing. And it is here that best practice will typically have a significant impact, by addressing problems around poorly defined or implemented business processes.

It is not surprising therefore that awareness is increasing and adoption of best practice principles is at record levels – though still with some way to go. For example, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), at the forefront of best practice for some time in both public and private sector organisations, continues to gain huge traction.

In the US, over the past 12 months the numbers of companies examined on ITIL certification has increased from just 50 to 300 per month and industry analyst, Forrester Research Inc., anticipates ITIL implementation levels in US$1 billion-plus companies to reach 40 percent by the end of 2006.

Similarly in the case of UK companies – generally more advanced in the adoption of best practice – membership of the IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) continues to grow at 40 percent per annum.

Forrester’s research also indicates that companies should take a step-by-step approach to ITIL adoption, by identifying those services designed to solve immediate issues within the business – such as incident management – which can have the greatest return on investment.

This is not unexpected, believes Forrester, “considering that setting up a structured process for reacting to a crisis makes good sense as a starting point.” In short, companies should adopt those parts of ITIL that make sense for the organisation.

Yet in driving towards IT service optimisation, it must also be recognised that ITIL, as with other best practice exemplars, is a means to an end rather than the end itself. It is a framework which should be seen as a guide rather than an ‘implementation blueprint’: indeed, too rigorous an adherence to ITIL principles is likely to inhibit the very responsiveness required for a business to be truly competitive.

Legislation

Governments at a national and supra-national level are now, more than ever before, using legislation to drive business behaviour. The result is that companies are facing unprecedented demands for regulatory compliance in many directions.

In vertical and horizontal markets, they must address the implications of Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, for example. Similarly, with environmental concerns moving centre stage, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction of Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) Regulations are just two of a growing number of constraints relating to the manufacture and use of products throughout their lifecycle.

How to respond however is not always clear-cut. In the case of Sarbox, legislation was rushed through in the US in response to high profile cases of corporate mismanagement, with the result that it is far from clear as to what companies need to do to ensure compliance, prompting reactions ranging from ‘belt and braces’ to ‘wait and see’.

Yet ironically, perhaps, at a time when actual implementation of its key imperatives remains unclear, the principles of Sarbox have been adopted by many in the international auditing community. CFOs are now faced with internal and external auditors using ‘Sarbox-speak’ and so have to respond in ways beyond those originally envisaged by the legislation, in order to protect their business.

The alternative

It might be argued at this point that many large, established vendors paint a similar picture in order to promote their best practice-based ITSM tools. And for many CIOs of enterprise businesses, the received wisdom to-date has indeed been that implementing a mission-critical service management solution company-wide requires many months of expensive consultancy, which in turn does not necessarily deliver everything that you need within the timescales you want.

Whichever way you look at it, so the thinking goes, an IT service management deployment will involve risk and a considerable investment in both time and money.

It doesn’t have to be like this however. FrontRange Solutions provides a perfect example of new thinking, by delivering enterprise quality solutions that meet the changing needs of both IT and the business, yet which can reduce deployment times by more than half, so driving lower total cost of ownership and improved return on investment.

And this is built on a strong track record of success. In a tough software market, FrontRange has delivered nine successive quarters of revenue and profit growth and continues to commit more than 16 per cent of revenues to research and development.

At the same time, the company has an unparalleled pedigree in this market. It has brought to bear more than a decade’s experience with HEAT as the industry’s leading help desk automation tool to develop its enterprise ITSM solution, capable of supporting the IT and customer service teams charged with delivering and managing service for growing and distributed organisations.

The keys here are convergence and simplicity. Research by both Gartner and Forrester has shown that up to 80 per cent of a typical company’s IT budget is spent on maintaining the status quo, with little left for business alignment and driving the business forward. Over time, the IT infrastructure has become hugely complex, with the result that the majority of spend is geared simply to making it all work and keeping the business going.

In addressing this, FrontRange’s ITSM solution is part of a fully integrated suite of solutions based on a common .NET foundation, designed to simplify the operation and management of IT across the business.

Pink Elephant, the worldwide leader in ITIL best practice education and consulting, has verified the FrontRange ITSM solution as achieving the highest level of ITIL compatibility – the best of best practice. Equally, FrontRange ITSM is open standards-based (including SIP, AJAX and SOAP) and supports a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. All this means that FrontRange ITSM helps avoid duplication within applications across the business and enables line managers to implement change without recourse to specialist – and expensive – internal or third party IT expertise.

Critically, however, it is the ability of the FrontRange solution to deliver convergence at a business applications level – bringing together service, infrastructure and communications management as the key components of any successful customer management strategy - and making them easy to purchase, easy to use and provide considerably better service, which ultimately leads to increased competitive edge.

This is a world away from the original help desk. It offers complete visibility of change and its impact throughout the business, through a single, centralised point of control. It replaces the administrative nightmare and cost of multiple supplier contracts with a single supplier relationship.

Access to real-time, role-based dashboards within the FrontRange ITSM toolset is especially important here, providing employees throughout the business with up-to-the-minute analysis of what is happening in their part of the operation. The result is that CEOs at a strategic level, and managers and first line operators more tactically, are able to take better-informed decisions based on the latest, most accurate and relevant information.

For ITSM is about understanding better the challenges facing internal and external customers and being able to react immediately and proactively to resolve their issues. For the first time, a solution is available which not only drives increased efficiency throughout the organisation but also increases the quality of customer service as the basis of real competitive advantage.

Common understanding

The days when long-term implementations and uncertain outcomes were the only option are now consigned to history, as the deployment focus switches from vendor convenience to the achievement of ever-tighter customer and end-user deadlines.

John Ragsdale, senior research director of Forrester Research has summed up this sea-change in approach as follows: “The most significant vendor events in the service desk arena… may not be from the enterprise level players, but from the mid-market. [FrontRange ITSM] could change what ‘enterprise service desk’ means.”

Today, it is still too often the case that business doesn’t understand IT. In response, at the very least it seems clear that IT must change its terminology and speak the language of the broader enterprise. Yet if IT is truly to bridge the gap and play a full part in achieving the customer-centric business, third party providers and in-house strategists must recognise that joined-up problems require joined-up solutions.

In short, the time is right for ITSM. But not without some joined-up thinking.

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