Managing IT infrastructure in a world where the right sourcing strategy is increasingly important, to achieve cost containment while improving agility, is not only aligning with current industry buzz but is also essential for the development of and survival of traditional IT Services.

In the drive to contain cost and support growing demands for better defined and higher service levels, more and more CEO’s challenge their CIO’s to embark on fundamental strategic business initiatives.

These often include:
Aligning IT services with the needs of the business units;
Improving customer satisfaction levels;
Deploying standardized processes.

These initiatives can be realized in an IT infrastructure service catalogue!
But wait a minute. What do we understand by the term “service”?
What do you expect of a “service”? Think about the services you experience in your daily life. You flip a switch, the light comes on; you turn a tap handle, the water flows; you press an elevator button, the elevator stops at your floor.

We expect these basic services to just be there; to be reliable.
What makes theses services reliable is the application of consistent best practice and the continual improvement of these practices, through the refinement and improvement of technologies, combined with the improvement of facilities service management.

We expect basic infrastructure services to be as efficient and consistent as possible. The expectation that these infrastructure services are ubiquitous and will work all the time makes them foundation utilities in our daily routine.

The Business Value of IT Service Management.
In many ways, information technology (IT) systems and technologies are a similar foundation of our business functions. However, IT services are still in a very early stage of service maturity; they work most of the time and eventually deliver the services necessary to support business, but are generally thought of as being costly, inefficient and not completely reliable.

Perhaps we should define what we expect of IT Services!
Effective and dependable IT services deliver value to businesses and help business units to achieve their goals, without requiring each of the business units to address the specific management risks and costs for each of the IT services. Automation of IT service delivery increases business value by making IT services more reliable and consistent and shortening service delivery times.