Today there is tremendous pressure on IT organizations to reduce costs, increase service levels, and deliver demonstrated business value. In light of these pressing concerns, the success of continuous improvement depends on addressing people and process as well as technology.
Operations And The State Of IT
The role of information technology in business has come a long way from the days when CEOs would ask IT managers why anyone would want to use e-mail to communicate. Today, information technology is widely recognized as an integral part of business operations. However, this recognition brings its own set of challenges. IT organizations now bear a significant share of responsibility for developing and maintaining new, more efficient IT services to strengthen the competitive advantage of their businesses.
Not only must IT managers find creative ways to deliver high-quality services that drive competitive advantage, they must do so at a time when IT budgets are under increasing pressure. To enable business to compete more effectively, the corporate IT structure—including infrastructure, processes, and personnel—needs to work as a single, highly functioning unit in an environment where resources may be scarce. The systems they create must provide recognizable business value, enhancing internal and external processes.
IT services are now delivered in a global marketplace where the prevalence of high-speed communications and means of travel extends operations across geographic and political boundaries as well as multiple time zones. IT organizations must take into account national and international market regulations and laws when implementing new processes and technologies. They must also provide secure ways for mobile users and customers to access company data from outside corporate firewalls. The applications they support may consist of many different platforms that must now be made interoperable since formerly isolated business units now seek to take advantage of new technologies that enable them to work more closely together.
The Importance Of IT Service Management
Many organizations are looking to IT service management as a way to organize around services and continuously improve the quality of those services. IT service management is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are implemented in direct response to the organization’s business requirements. It is essential that an organization’s IT services support core business activities, and it is also increasingly important that these same IT services facilitate change as businesses evolve and compete in a global marketplace. IT must become a primary stakeholder in the process of business decision making.
Businesses also need their IT service providers to support corporate governance and compliance requirements by delivering detailed IT service management metrics. Providing those services and their supporting metrics requires IT organizations to have a clear understanding of where they are in relation to where they want to be, how they are going to get there, and how they will know when they’ve arrived.
Building On IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
In order to provide you operational guidance that enables you to achieve mission-critical system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability, we use the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which is a collection of best practices, principles, and models that offers guidance to IT organizations for managing their IT services. Built on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) from the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom, MOF is a framework for managing the operations and support of IT systems, making adjustments due to changing business needs, and optimizing processes for greater efficiency. MOF simplifies IT processes using a model illustrated with clear, easily understood diagrams that divide IT services into four quadrants: the Supporting Quadrant, the Changing Quadrant, the Operating Quadrant, and the Optimizing Quadrant. All components and their relationships can be seen at a glance.
The ITIL Publication Framework
MOF Process Model and Service Management Functions (SMFs)
The goal of MOF is to help IT organizations achieve reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability in their mission-critical systems. Because MOF practices are easy to incorporate, either selectively or comprehensively, operations staff can realize tangible benefits by following the model. Applying the principles of ITIL to the Microsoft technology platform, MOF provides a foundation to help IT organizations meet the challenges described above and support the goal of continuous improvement
Using the MOF, we help you to :
- Assess your current IT service management maturity
- Prioritize your processes of greatest concern
- Apply proven principles and best practices
