ITIL Book:
The most recent ITIL book in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was recently released entitled Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business. The book focuses on the importance of managing IT resources from the perspective of what is important to the business.
One of the biggest challenges the ITIL book outlines is maintaining alignment of IS services with business requirements. Another challenge is maintaining alignment of various internal groups. Overall, the ITIL book highlights the business perspective approach to managing relationships and interfaces at all levels: between the business and the IS organization, between functions and groups within the IS organization, and with external service providers.
When trying to understand the business perspective approach in the ITIL Book, several topics from are especially noteworthy, including:
> Open communication
> Business value of IT
> Role of IT in the business value chain
> Understanding business impact
> IS internal alignment
In order to implement the best practices ITIL Book related to these important topics, organizations need technology designed to integrate and automate. These tools are needed not only to automate individual processes, but also to integrate the processes and functions within IT, and to link together best practice processes.
Two key enabling ITIL solutions that support important business perspective approach concepts are service impact management (SIM) and a configuration management database (CMDB). SIM is a solution that identifies the IT infrastructure components, maps their dependencies, and then manages IT tasks based on the business impact and priority. A CMDB is a single source of record that provides a logical model of the IT infrastructure to identify, manage, and verify all configuration items in the environment.
This ITIL book was written to enable IS personnel to:
> Understand how they contribute to business objectives
> Deliver and improve IS services to more effectively support business objectives
> Develop a complementary and integrated relationship between the business and IS
> Influence, innovate, and enable changes within IS to benefit the business
One of the biggest challenges is maintaining alignment of IS services with business requirements. All the capabilities within IS must be involved, including:
> People and culture So that IS is a part of the business
> Processes So that IS processes support business needs
> Technology To underpin IS and business processes
> Suppliers, partners and vendors To ensure they are focused on the needs of the business
