Background
Developments in IT have had a tremendous effect on the business market during the last decade. Since the appearance of extremely powerful hardware, highly versatile software and super-fast networks, all connected to each other worldwide, organizations have been able to develop their information-dependent products and services to a greater extent, and to bring them to the market much faster. These developments have marked the transition of the industrial age into the information age. In the information age, everything has become faster and more dynamic, and everything is connected. Traditional hierarchical organizations often have difficulties in responding to this rapidly changing market, and this has led to current trends for organizations to become flatter and more flexible. The focus has shifted from vertical silos to horizontal processes, and decision-making powers are increasingly bestowed on the employees. It is against this background that the work processes of IT Service Management have arisen. An important advantage of process-oriented organizations is that processes can be designed to support a customer-oriented approach. This has made the alignment between the IT organization (responsible for supplying information) and the customer (responsible for using these information systems in their business) increasingly significant. Over the last couple of years, this trend has attracted attention under the title of Business-IT Alignment (BITA). As organizations gained more experience with the process-oriented approach of IT Service Management, it became clear that the process must be managed coherently. Furthermore, it was obvious that the introduction of a process-oriented work method meant a big change for the primarily line and project-oriented organizations. Culture and change management proved to be crucial elements for a successful organizational design. Another important lesson learned was that the IT organization must not lose itself in a process culture. Just like the one-sided project-oriented organization, a one-sided process-oriented organization was not the optimum type of business. Balance was, as always, the magic word. In addition, it became clear that the customer-oriented approach required that an end-to-end and user-centric approach must be followed: it was of no help to the user to know that "the server was still in operation" if the information system was not available at the user's workplace. IT services must be viewed in a larger context. The need for the recognition of the Service Lifecycle, and the management of IT services in light of that lifecycle, became a concern. Due to the fast growing dependency of business upon information, the quality of information services in companies is being increasingly subjected to stricter internal and external requirements. The role of standards is getting more and more important, and frameworks of "best practices" help with the development of a management system to meet these requirements. Organizations that are not in control of their processes will not be able to realize great results on the level of the Service Lifecycle and the end-to-end-management of those services. Organizations that do not have their internal organization in order, will also not achieve great results. For these reasons, all these aspects are covered together within the following excerpts from "Foundations of IT Service Management Based on ITIL V3."
© 2007 itSMF International. Extracts are from the book, Foundations of IT Service Management Based on ITIL® V3, which is available from www.vanharen.net. |
