Independent research conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) into exploring ways to minimise outages associated with planned and unplanned changes in today`s complex IT enterprises has shown that enterprise IT leaders have made monitoring and managing the IT configuration a top IT priority, with 86% reporting an immediate or long-term need to manage it more accurately.
IT managers are, according to the survey, working on improving IT service management through adoption of process maturity models, with more than 68% currently using a standard process model. Of the group using a process maturity model, more than 51% are specifically implementing the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model.
According to Lynda Odendaal, CEO of leading IT service management specialist NSS, better management of IT change and configuration can only be achieved by using process maturity models, implementing CMDBs wisely, and modelling and visualising both the infrastructure and the relationships between elements.
"There is in the South African IT industry a clear push towards ITIL as the model of choice by the enterprise, financial sector and government," she said.
"We`re seeing substantial growth in applications for all levels of ITIL training - from the Foundations course through to management level."
Benefits of ITIL include standardised and systematic procedures, IT alignment to the business, a more stable IT environment, clear communication channels, quality of service delivery and improved manageability of changes.
EMA`s key findings include:
* Configuration management database projects are under way or will begin shortly - 46% of respondents say they have implemented a configuration management database (CMDB) and another 36% planning an implementation.
* Existing CMDBs are updated infrequently - 48% of respondents said they update the CMDB monthly or even less frequently, while only 21% reported updating their information either daily or in real-time.
* Mapping IT relationships and dependencies is a manually intensive process - only 33% reported using software to map relationships between elements in the IT infrastructure.
For further information: NSS (011) 519 8600.
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