ITIL Helps CIOs Align IT with Business

As public and private organizations embrace new industry standards and technologies, such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library version 3 (ITIL v3) and configuration management databases (CMDB), the adage, "You can't see the forest for the trees," often applies because of the complexity generated when introducing new people and technologies into an already overtaxed ecosystem. Yet it's simply unacceptable to ignore the new technology landscape.

Sharing information across IT management domains is becoming more critical for government. Simultaneously information is expanding and becoming more specialized.

How can this paradox be resolved? It's not practical or sustainable to build a monolithic IT management system that processes and stores all business services information in one place. Nor is it feasible IT organizations to foresee and hardwire integrations for all permutations of cross-domain data sharing requirements.

Public CIOs must see the bigger picture to achieve success. Specifically CIOs must understand how ITIL can help align technology with business and increase overall customer satisfaction. That requires not just embracing ITIL, but also implementing the newest arsenal in IT management's toolkit - CMDB, a repository of information on IT system infrastructure, applications and services, and the relationships among them - and then evolving to the next level of enterprise IT management: a configuration management system, which creates a common view of CMDB information across IT silos.

Five Keys to ITIL Success
Any practical and sustainable approach to sharing information across domains should be as distributed and dynamic as the IT environment it's managing. A manager of one area should be able to access a current, detailed understanding of other areas on demand, and in an appropriate context that allows prompt actions in response to the data. ITIL v3 outlines a valuable concept that points the way forward toward making this a reality.

ITIL v3 marked the introduction of a broader end-to-end service life cycle orientation. It also recognizes that as organizations mature toward a greater focus on business outcomes through continual service improvement, they need greater business service visibility - not just of applications and infrastructure, but also service management information, how services relate to business processes and non-IT service assets, and how they all interact in the value chain.

As more public organizations embrace ITIL and implement a CMDB, there are tried-and-true best practices emerging, which include:

Understand the Landscape: Identify the Key Business Priority
By focusing on a specific business priority, IT can provide outcome-focused and easily measurable CMDB content.

Everything's Related: Leverage the Power of Dependency Mapping
Using automated dependency mapping helps IT overcome some key challenges presented by previous generations of CMDB implementations, including managing time-consuming manual processes, incurring huge start-up costs, obtaining questionable data quality and increasing difficulties keeping the CMDB up-to-date.

Play Nicely With Others: Federate With Existing Repositories
Valuable data resides in other tools and solutions; as a result, your CMDB should able to share data. It should also offer reconciliation so information can be leveraged in legacy systems, asset management systems and data repositories.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Deliver Actionable Business Information
Your business priorities may include business service management, IT service management (ITIL-related) or change management. To meet these priorities (and visualization and mapping), your CMDB should transform data into comprehensible information that helps answer critical questions and solve business problems.

Help Others Help Themselves: Enrich the CMDB to Support New Initiatives
Achieving success in your CMDB-supported initiative provides several key benefits. Demonstrable return on investment from the initial solution provides the justification for additional investments in others. Also, more organizations within the enterprise may be inclined to support new solutions that leverage the CMDB, which results in the development of a nearly continuous improvement