SINGAPORE, 27 AUGUST 2008 -- Quick responsiveness has become more crucial than ever as enterprises face changes in world markets, IT and customer demands. But without proper process integration, businesses can not maximise competitive advantage.
Such was the key message at the recent IBM Service Management Summit in Chiang Mai, Thailand. “Process integration has a major impact on quality, customer satisfaction and revenues,” said John Frech (picture, top), director of worldwide sales, IBM Tivoli.
According to Frech, most enterprises today approach process integration, in IT and in the business, separately. “If the enterprise can bring all its processes together, the benefits could be even greater.”
Service management
Proper process integration in turn helps ensure effective service management. “Service management is the knowledge and capability to deliver a specified business outcome when it needs to occur within set time parameters and budgets,” Frech said.
He noted that a key challenge is stakeholders’ lack of the visibility needed to directly support and deliver services in line with business objectives. Poor control over assets and inefficient manual processes also stand in the way of good service management.
“Targeted real-time dashboards can improve visibility, while integrated asset control features manage change processes across all business and IT investments,” Frech said. “Automating operational processes also helps.”
He pointed to IBM’s Tivoli software as an example of a service management solution, with features for process, task and change management.
Addressing complexity
Effective service management requires more than just technology. “Service management is a continuous process,” said Michael Shallcross (picture), IBM’s executive consultant for IT strategy and architecture services.
Citing an IBM 2008 survey on some 1,100 CEOs worldwide, Shallcross noted that respondents expect CIOs to be “hungry for change” and even disruptive to “gain not only incremental but also sustainable competitive advantage”.
He added that as organisations become more globally integrated, CIOs must break down silo barriers to such integration.
“Complex environments are inherently difficult and expensive to manage,” Shallcross said. “Until enterprises reduce this complexity, they will always be spending more than they should to control it.”
To respond quickly to changes, IT organisations should employ some important strategies, he said. Besides simplifying infrastructure, enterprises should progressively adopt service management best practices. For example, the extension of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) initiatives to ‘higher order’ processes focused on service quality, customer satisfaction, business value and governance is essential.
Additionally, processes should be integrated to enable end-to-end service management and automation. “Enterprises must shift from systems management to business service management,” Shallcross said.
Asset management
Asset management plays a key role in service management. India-headquartered Birlasoft needed to upgrade internal IT service and support operations to keep pace with its rapid growth. Challenges included the need to establish global visibility of assets, lack of an IT asset tracking mechanism and absence of standardised processes.
In response, the IT services provider deployed IBM’s Maximo asset management solution. “As the solution involved web-based deployment, no client installation was required,” said Santosh Nair, Birlasoft’s business director, Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
He added that other considerations were scalability and customisation, as well as the solution’s easy integration with ERP, monitoring and project governance tools.
Following deployment, Nair noted that incident resolution time was reduced by 10 per cent, and the number of helpdesk calls dropped from 110 to 40 a day. “We were also able to improve IT asset information accuracy by 15 per cent, and achieve ROI in six months.”
