A survey of 300 companies by analyst Ovum has discovered
the IT initiatives that lead to successful IT
operations.
These are the things that have received "top priority
investment" from the most successful firms, said Ovum, and are
designed to improve business performance and productivity.
The initiatives include aggressive use of consolidation and
virtualisation technologies to create more dynamic and flexible
infrastructure architectures; significant investment in service
oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications to promote reuse and
business process flexibility; and broad-based implementation of
ITIL IT process management recommendations.
Highly effective organisations have also made a significant
investment in a comprehensive set of automated IT management tools;
have substantial levels of business and IT alignment, in terms of
governance; and have high levels of willingness to take on new
challenges.
These challenges range from the development of end-of-life and
recycling strategies to experimentation with emerging social
software tools to improve IT operational productivity.
The study examined 300 North American enterprises. Its author,
Mary Johnston Turner, Ovum Summit vice-president, said that roughly
22% of the total survey sample met these criteria.
“These highly effective organisations have laid a lot of
groundwork over the last couple of years by implementing
virtualization, SOA and ITIL,” said Turner.
“They are well positioned to take advantage of the soon to be
release ITIL V3 recommendations that aim to
more closely integrate software development, release and operations
processes.
"They are also in the best position to take advantage of
emerging collaboration and enterprise social software
solutions.”
“The other 78% of organisations need to rapidly develop both
infrastructure and operations roadmaps to achieve these same levels
of effectiveness if they are going to stay competitive in the
coming years,” she added.
The latest ITIL standard >>
SOA toolbox
>>
Service Oriented Architecture in action >>
Ovum website
>>
Organisations that use IT best practices >>
Tony Collins'
IT projects blog >>
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