Prevailing Service Management

Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. IT service management (from IT strategy to operations) cannot support this change if it continues to be underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. Contemporary IT service management (ITSM) incorporates concepts such as cloud, infrastructure as code and Continuous Delivery (CD), where ITSM must be able to manage the complexities of numerous elastic and dynamic IT environments that can change in size and location at short notice.  Manually executing the underpinning activities and tasks will lead to higher probability of errors and longer service provisioning times. Automation is a solution since it imposes consistency and reduces the manual work that is tedious and error prone. As an example, an Australian financial institution was embarking on a digital transformation prog

Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. In response, IT leaders are seeking to leverage technologies and delivery models such as cloud, infrastructure as code, Continuous Delivery (CD), Big Data and IT Process Automation.  This intersection of contemporary concepts is deriving new IT delivery patterns which are impacting on traditional IT service management (ITSM). From my recent experiences working with Australian enterprise-sized IT organisations, it is my view that ITSM & Operations teams are not keeping pace with their peers in application development to meet current business demands. ITSM and Operations cannot remain effective and efficient if the teams continue to work in disjointed practices that are underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. To remedy this situation, ITSM & Operations teams need