The Emerging IT Shift Toward Business Service Configuration Management

Historically, enterprise IT organizations have struggled with creating standardized processes across IT "silos." In fact, many IT organizations have been challenged with the notion of simply defining what a change is and how it should be executed, tracked, and verified. To address these challenges, many IT organizations are adopting process frameworks such as ITIL or Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology [CoBit]) to improve the communication and deployment of processes that improve service quality and availability. Based on conversations with IT organizations and survey results, IDC estimates that 50%+ of Global 2000 IT organizations have adopted at least one ITIL process; this trend will continue to grow with the recent release of ITIL version 3. ITILv3 is backwards compatible with ITIL and moves from a tactical perspective to a service-based, life-cycle approach to enable tighter business and IT alignment.

While process standardization is taking hold and is a strong starting point, it is not enough. IT staff skills must be reengineered, refreshed, and sometimes retrained to match new demands that processes bring forth; training becomes a critical factor in the success of efficient business service delivery based on ITIL or CoBit. Change request workflows, impact analysis and collision identification, and the ability to efficiently and reliably trigger change deployment are also key points of integration.

To complement process and IT staff skill set improvements, IT organizations must also consider their technology decisions as they relate to change and configuration  management. A trend that started during the early part of this decade is automation. Automating processes and tasks has become a top priority for many IT and business executives. IDC has done extensive research on this topic and concludes that IT organizations are automating some of the core foundational operational processes necessary for meeting service-level agreements (SLAs) in areas such as change, configuration, and patch management (see Figure 1).