The Need to Integrate IT Operations and IT Service Management

By ManageEngine GuestBlog 1

Outside of IT, none of your clients appreciates the distinction between IT operations management and IT service management. They only care about whether what you do helps them get their jobs done. That’s important because, to your clients, IT is a monolithic enterprise, a single service.

If the service they rely on starts to perform poorly and they call you, you can use your monitoring tools to identify the source of the problem. But if you then have to turn to a service management system to create and track a trouble ticket–if you have to manage technicians and other resources with yet another system–you lose the connection between the problem and the solution. You lose the ability to manage the entire service delivery ecosystem, as one–and that ability is critical to the delivery of the highest quality of services to your clients.

Integrating IT operations management and service management enables you to view and manage these entities as one, aligning you and your operations with your client’s needs.

So, how can you achieve this kind of integration? There are two basic ways to do this:

Do we need to dwell on why the first approach is least desirable?

The pain starts with the cost of engaging the consultants and grows as you manage the developers to integrate products that were never designed to co-exist in a highly demanding production environment. It grows even more acute as you struggle to manage the patches, upgrades, licenses, and so on, that hide behind the “single pane of glass” that you have pieced together.

Deploying a solution that is integrated out of the box–what we call a “unified IT” solution–is much simpler, easier and faster to deploy, and less costly in both the near and long terms.

Broadly speaking, a unified IT environment provides the following functionality:

The benefits of unified IT

For data center and NOC users, an integrated operations and service management solution enables distinct benefits:

For service desk users, still other benefits arise:

For business users, the benefits are:

Unified IT for better end user experience

In today’s highly competitive and demanding business, a focus on delivering outstanding service to the end user is the focus we need to adopt. End user demands are changing, too, even as I write this–which argues for an approach to service delivery that enables maximum flexibility and agility. Unified IT provides that. It’s a true single pane of glass that provides insight into the entire IT infrastructure and enables all your IT users to engage in an organized and coordinated manner (which is, as we have noted, precisely what the client expects).

Cheers,

Suvish

Suvish Viswanathan manages product marketing and analyst relations at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp where he manages the product-marketing department for its Unified IT management offerings. He plays a key role in addressing various issues and solutions in enterprise IT and MSPs with decision makers and organizations on increasing their IT productivity. Prior to ManageEngine, he worked as a global market/sales analyst for Syscon. You can reach him on LinkedIn or follow his tweets at: @suvishv.