As IT organizations worldwide make the conceptual transition from managers of technology assets to providers of quality-managed services, many are turning to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as a source of standardized best practices for service-oriented IT management. The goal of ITIL is to improve the quality and efficiency, and reduce the cost of IT services through standardization. But many who attempt to implement the framework discover that manually creating ITIL-compliant processes and managing them over time can be a complex, time-consuming, and ultimately expensive undertaking.
This paper describes how ITIL implementation can be rendered simpler, faster, more effective and more affordable by combining new service-oriented Business Process Management (BPM) tools with the established functionality of task-oriented IT management software. In particular, this paper describes LANDesk Process Manager, a complete toolset for modeling, documenting, executing and monitoring IT Service Management processes, which is tightly integrated with the entire LANDesk suite of enterprise systems management applications.
Introduction: Standardizing IT Management
In many organizations the IT department is the last bastion of homegrown, non-standardized management practice; but the restless forces of competition, compliance and cost control are massing at the department gate. Management is increasingly insistent that IT, no less than finance, HR, manufacturing or legal, conduct its affairs according to generally accepted industry standards. IT professionals with a career-long focus on managing technology are now required to redefine their role in terms of services delivered, to measure and track performance, to set and meet quality goals, and to create both a methodology and culture of continuous improvement.
As a result, IT managers worldwide are evaluating ITIL-the most comprehensive and widely accepted framework of best practice IT management processes-for its potential to help them reduce costs, improve service quality, increase efficiency, tighten security, achieve regulatory compliance, and align IT more closely with its business unit customers.
ITIL: An Introduction
ITIL is a customizable framework of best practice procedures for managing IT operations that was developed in the late 1980s by the British government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), which was succeeded by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an office of the U.K. Treasury. ITIL describes IT management processes in terms of core functions and services, and is both vendor and tool agnostic. For more than a decade, ITIL has been promoted as a standard for IT Service Management (ITSM). It has been incorporated in the British standard BS15000, and in an international standard, ISO20000.
The Problem of Process Management
IITIL approaches IT service management in terms of processes or workflows-defined and repeatable sequences of actions and events orchestrated to achieve a specified objective. It describes the processes necessary to ensure efficient and consistent service delivery, but provides no guidance on the selection of tools or agents to carry out individual process stages, or on the matter of tools to manage the processes themselves.
Needless to say, commercial software vendors offer a wide range of task-specific tools for the core workloads of enterprise IT management-system and network management, software distribution and maintenance, asset tracking and security administration. Many of these products provide a degree of task automation within the limits of their functionality.
Until now, however, no software solution has existed for linking and integrating the functionality of existing IT management tools into defined, repeatable ITIL-compliant business processes. There has been no IT-specific capability for process modeling and documentation, automated and monitored execution, managed change, quality assurance and compliance.
In short, the primary challenge of implementing ITIL-compliant processes for IT management has been the lack of integrated Business Process Management (BPM). It's more than a little ironic, given the central role of IT in implementing BPM in the larger organization.
Introducing LANDesk Process Manager
LANDesk is introducing the first BPM solution specifically targeted for IT management applications. LANDesk Process Manager 2.0 is a robust BPM solution that integrates seamlessly with most commercial IT management tools, including the complete LANDesk portfolio. LANDesk Process Manager simplifies and expedites ITIL implementation with a comprehensive toolset for creating, documenting, executing and optimizing IT Service Management processes.
