The next step in successful IT BPM

Complexity in today`s IT environments, which includes the prevalence of multiple vendors, platforms, applications and standards, coupled with the fragmentation of traditional management systems has caused IT management processes to become increasingly people-intensive.

However, and importantly, IT staff skills cannot be leveraged across silos of management systems if traditional management tools are already fragmented. To achieve integration between these fragmented management tools requires expensive and extensive services engagements.

And it cannot be ignored; the reality is that better management is required to help CIOs achieve their top goals: reducing IT costs by optimising capital and operating expenses; mitigating risk; data protection and compliance; and ensuring the infrastructure is also available and flexible.

So how do CIOs achieve the above if they`re faced with fragmented management tools? CA has developed strategy and resultant solutions called Enterprise Infrastructure Management (EIM) that aim to address the above in an open and integrated manner.

According to Gartner, more than 81% of IT operating costs is non-discretionary, spent on maintaining and administering existing systems. Thus, by reducing operating costs, CIOs can allocate more of their budget to strategic projects that do add value to the business as opposed simply slowing it down.

Our EIM solutions aim to reduce operating costs by automating management tasks, which in turn increases staff productivity and efficiency. Indeed, integration between EIM solutions enables better leveraging of people across management silos.

And because integration forms such an integral part of our EIM strategy, costs are saved because no expensive services engagements are required. The reality is that through vendor reduction, better IT decision-making and process improvement companies stand to save substantially.

It has been said once too often; the business cost of infrastructure downtime is staggering. Across major industries, the cost of a single hour of downtime is significant to say the least.

Again, our EIM strategy helps ensure the availability and performance of an infrastructure and supported business applications by guaranteeing that mission-critical systems and information are given priority treatment.

Only an end-to-end, integrated management solution can ensure availability and performance across all infrastructure components - from applications and databases to servers and network components. This all will deliver acceptable levels of reliability and responsiveness to end-users.

To ensure systems availability and world-class IT management processes companies should also implement best-practices such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) that in turn ensures IT management processes are robust, efficient and effective.

EIM enables the implementation and automation of ITIL-based best practices. This in turn also provides a unified view of all aspects of the infrastructure and how they relate to business activities and needs, enabling cross-functional automation of IT processes.

At CA we believe the proverbial glass ceiling has been reached with regards to improved IT business efficiency. Again, this is why our new EIM strategy is so tremendously important.

The next era of value delivery in the enterprise lies in standardisation and implementation of cross-functional IT business processes that improves collaboration between internal IT departments and similarly between infrastructure management technologies.

The following are examples of integrated IT business processes:

* Asset discovery to asset optimisation;
* Asset detection to vulnerability remediation;
* Service planning to billing/chargeback;
* Enterprise event detection to resolution;
* Financial management;
* Storage optimisation; and
* Application change optimisation.

And this is what EIM propagates, delivering that much needed value through integrated solutions.

Armed with EIM, companies can now truly understand how all their IT resources are being used and offer services tailored specifically to the needs of individual departments.

All of the above enables managers to achieve improved decision-making and how to direct business activities and assets.