Management
Issue No. 12 - August/September 2003
Aligning IT with the Business using Best Practice
The Role of Best Practice in IT
A firm’s technology is the front line of its customer service and organizational efficiency. Organisations depend on their IT resources and factors such as availability, access and reliable data are fundamental to effective IT management.
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a process—based approach to IT service management that focuses attention on key activities and optimised service quality, within reasonable and justifiable cost. Initiated by the UK government, ITIL outlines a series of best practices for optimising IT service delivery within an organization. Basically, it defines best practices.
Improving IT service perception and cost to internal customers is a key goal of best practice. ITIL aims to change the perception of IT from that of a cost centre providing little measurable business value, to one of a facilitator of continuous process improvement, incorporating Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to improve customer communication and manage expectations.
Microsoft uses ITIL principles in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) embedded in many of its enterprise products including Systems Management Server. HP’s OpenView, CA’s Unicenter, and IBM’s Tivoli all support ITIL along with many other vendors’ applications.
ITIL provides a set of practices that directly measure quality of service. It puts technology into the service of business goals rather than making the business subservient to the capabilities of the technology. T...
