We've been hearing about it for years now. That communication gap between IT and the business. IT people traditionally view the IT infrastructure from the inside out; that is, from the perspective of the hardware and software components that provide services to the business. Lots of business managers view that same infrastructure from the outside in, as a collection of services that support business processes. The gap in the way they view technology and how they talk about it threatens business success. Why? Because it prevents companies from unleashing the power of technology to enhance efficiency, gain a competitive advantage, and drive business goals.
Fortunately, the landscape is changing. New solutions are making it possible to reach common ground that promotes effective dialog between IT and business owners. The solutions give business owners a better understanding of the IT environment, and give the IT staff a better understanding of the business. A major European bank, for example used such solutions to reduce its online credit application lifecycle processing to 30 minutes - giving the bank a competitive edge in an environment where the average processing time is two hours. A large manufacturing firm used them to increase availability of key revenue and customer satisfaction business services that support the sales process. If you'd like to bring this same type of success to your business, read on.
It's an Evolution
In case you haven't noticed, there's been an evolution. IT service management solution vendors have been working from the bottom up to develop tools that improve service management and enable IT to align the infrastructure more closely with the business. At the same time, the business side has been evolving business process management (BPM) tools from the top down.
On the IT side, three technologies are fundamental in this evolution: Configuration Management Database (CMDB), automatic discovery, and service impact modeling. The CMDB maintains information about technology assets, IT processes, and people, as well as descriptions, such as hardware and software configurations. Perhaps the most important function of the CMDB, though, is to maintain the physical and logical relationships of infrastructure components to each other and to the business services they support.
Automatic discovery solutions have evolved to discover not only hardware and software resources, but also the interconnections among IT assets. The result: IT professionals now have a view of the physical dependencies of assets, which helps them understand the impact assets have on each other. The solutions are now able to discover the logical relationships of the assets, providing visibility into the impact of physical assets on the logical assets they support.
Service impact modeling solutions are driving even greater progress by enabling IT to create and maintain models that map infrastructure components to business services. These models help IT view the infrastructure from a business service perspective.
On the business side, business process engineers have been developing methodologies, platforms, and solutions that help them model business processes. This provides an enterprise-wide view of business processes, enabling companies to:
- Define all business processes and show all activities involved
- Define the relationships among processes
- Reuse process definitions, creating larger processes by combining smaller ones and sharing processes across functional units
- Define the relationships of the processes to IT businesses services
By Mary Nugent, Vice President, Software Consulting, BMC Software and Dr. Thomas Struck, Consulting Manager, BPM, IDS Scheer , 05/23/2007
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