IT can be your strategic business partner

IT investment has become one of the largest expenditures for companies, according to Gartner. "In 60% of large enterprises, rising IT spending as a percentage of gross value will level off between 8% and 10% by 2012."

Interestingly, Gartner estimates that roughly 11% of IT expenditures can be attributed to hidden spending - outside the control of organisations.

In order to stabilise spending and make it more transparent, IT companies have to start taking some form of control. A new mindset is required, treating IT as a value centre rather than a cost centre.

Maximising financial performance is becoming a core necessity and competency of IT organisations. Companies now require accurate and timely information about how their resources are being utilised, which includes up-to-the-minute inventory and knowledge of their relationships to business processes.

So, by thinking from a business perspective and using management insight to invest in systems, projects and activities can pay for themselves in measurable ways.

Research organisation, Enterprise Management Associates estimates that up to 60% of IT resources are under-utilised due to the lack of comprehensive resource management.

Much of this is due to over-provisioning caused by a lack of insight into business processes.

Resource management gives companies total insight into all their IT assets - from PDAS, to Unix servers, to mainframe.

One of the key elements of resource management is that it enables the IT department to function as a business rather than a cost centre.

It is, however, important to remember that the total resource management approach is multi-dimensional - it is not a "cookie-cutter" linear process that incorporates device types under asset management.

Resource management consolidates the functions of inventory and discovery, asset reconciliation, software licence management, maintenance, migration and disposal, business process automation and financial management - impacting every asset throughout the lifecycle.

It also addresses the economic impact that feeds into IT service planning, service usage and service provisioning. And what`s even more, total resource management assumes that the "living IT infrastructure" must be evaluated as a total asset in terms of how it performs, or fails to perform.

With budget pressures, increased complexity of infrastructure, and demand for ever-improving and increasing IT services, IT management needs to radically change their approach to running business.

Running IT as a business means having a business consciousness at all levels of the business, not just the top:

* The CIO/CFO requires simplified access to financial asset information for cost control, business planning and budgeting;

* Help desk administrators require rapid access to user asset details as well as remote access for speedy problem solving;

* IT operations managers require automated management and ease-of-use, transparent capabilities for rapid deployment of applications; and

* Data centre managers require automated server provisioning.

To adhere to these various needs, the well-publicised on-demand computing vision, for example, drives role-based management that cuts across all aspects of resource management.

Out-of-box Web portals provide role-based consoles tailored not only to a particular position, but also to the individual and his/her preferred work methods.

Role-based portals for resource management provide dynamic visualisation that dramatises the value of information in role context. Indeed, all aspects of resource management are brought together in views that allow companies to understand "at a glance" the impact of a resource on their organisation.

With IT resource management, organisations can achieve total infrastructure vision, detection of problems, and the automatic initiation of remedial actions and service become second nature.

Integration, automation, self-healing and transparency guarantees success - improving the management and precise use of IT resources to a point where it becomes a strategic, valuable partner.