Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

While there is no doubt on the quality of technology solutions provided by the vendors, how many times have the technology solution being able to solve the business problem and yet the return on investment was not realized? Was the technology not effective or was the organization not able to make optimum use of features provided by the technology? How will the organizations manage complex infrastructures created by technology solutions like virtualization, consolidation etc?

In order to address all such questions, organizations need to have well defined processes and procedures with “green” action points embedded in them as control points. They also need to have people who are trained and are willing to contribute to “green” efforts made by the organization. Hence, the organizations need to start looking at their “green” initiatives from all the 3 dimensions, viz. process, governance and technology. IT Service Management comes out as a perfect solution to this situation as it takes care of all 3 dimensions the organizations need to address.

Process: ITSM advocates provision of organized services by IT to its business customers and hence the philosophy of ITSM revolves mainly around processes. The probability of success of “green” initiatives of the organizations increases when the “green” action points are injected in IT operational processes like asset management, configuration management, change management etc. At the same time, it becomes easy for the business to visualize ROI on such initiatives by incorporating “green” agenda in IT strategy and preparing a strong business case for them. 

Governance: Success of “Green” initiatives also depends on presence of trained people and good governance structure. ITSM is also seen as a primary enabler for IT Governance.  Various frameworks like CoBIT, ITIL etc. provide guidance on establishing governance around IT. These frameworks can also be utilized as a base for setting up processes and governance for Green IT. 

Technology: Large numbers of software tools are available in the market for ITSM. The vendors of these tools have observed the rising adoption of technologies like virtualization and are preparing their ITSM solutions for managing services in virtual environments. For example, HP has come up with an approach for end-to-end service management in virtualized environment.

Hence, going green is not just about technology implementation; instead it requires a holistic approach and the IT organizations need to understand that ITSM is an important element in their endeavor to be sustainable.