The business outcomes of IT

The IT organisation is evolving into a profit centre

Bithin Talukdar

HP’s vision is to transform IT into an organisation that operates as an agile, service-based business function so that it can enable business transformation by virtue of business technology interlock.

The company believes that this approach will enable the optimisation of business outcomes by reducing costs, enabling new revenue streams, and mitigating organisational risk.

IT is not a business, but it can be, believes Bithin Talukdar, Solution Marketing Manager, APJ, IT Governance and SOA, HP. “According to IDC, management and operational spend is going up at 10 percent CAGR among Indian companies. The biggest change that we have seen in the past four years is that IT departments have moved from a cost-perspective to an end-user perspective, which is a healthy trend.”

HP, through its ITSM approach, builds the bridge right from the business needs, strategies, applications and operations. All of these come down to managing the business outcomes for an organisation and closely linking outcomes to strategic initiatives.

“The objective of doing this is to make sure that IT initiatives in an organisation are aligned. For this to happen, first you need to align your organisation’s strategic IT initiatives with business goals and priorities. Second, and just as critical, is to ensure your functional IT initiatives (the ones your different teams execute across your organisation) align with your strategic initiatives,” says Talukdar.

A lot of organisations that we have seen are focussing on elements like the agility of the business, alignment of business to IT, business application deployment and compliance. “If your functional and strategic initiatives aren’t aligned, your teams’ siloed priorities will perpetuate inefficiencies and continue to reduce the value that IT delivers to your business,” adds Talukdar.

The HP way

Automation plays an important role in HP’s ITSM approach. Says Talukdar, “Automation plays a key role in how you manage the changes, how fast you can move the organisation in terms of changing it over time, and leading consolidation and centralisation. Not only IT initiatives but even your conditional departmental elements in terms of strategies, application and integration need to work together and that is where HP Software can help you.”

ITSM spans three vectors or layers. It fits in the bottom half of business alignment because one of the basic tenets of ITSM is to set and meet business expectations. It is all about what the priorities are and how things are done.

“Not all servers are equal in the IT environment in terms of how they support the business. Even the IT infrastructure that is critical to support the business differs based on the business function that it supports. We must optimise what is managed and how it is managed. This is a higher objective of ITSM,” says Talukdar.

HP OpenView Solution

OpenView is based on the ITIL Service management model. There are several best practices and IT processes that HP OpenView supports. HP OpenView at a high level enables, automates and enforces key processes once they are established in an IT environment. The core processes within IT Service Management, and best practices, are tightly integrated. In order to support these tightly integrated IT processes, HP OpenView’s solutions are also tightly integrated through an integration layer. At the core or heart of this integration is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) where information about the IT environment is maintained and shared between all the surrounding solutions.

“What we understand in ITSM is client services, asset management, identity-consolidate technology, infrastructure management, application management and configuration management. That is what CMDB stands for in driving your organisation,” concludes Talukdar.