All ITSM objectives are important, but the key objective is often forgotten

On Friday we began to look at whether or not capacity management has relevance in a world of rapidly configurable, cheap hardware.  Let’s consider this further.

There are five ‘So-called Objectives’ of IT Service Management. These are ‘so-called objectives’ because they identify an ideal. Reality is very different.

All ITSM objectives are important, but the key objective is often forgotten. The ultimate objective is to increase revenue and profit and this is its true contribution to the business sphere.

Everybody concerned with business has to address the twin problems of increasing productivity while reducing costs. This is the ultimate goal of ITSM and it is affected by five main factors:

• increase productivity

• reduce costs

• do new things

• win competitions

• provide IT services.

The big question is how to increase Revenue and Profit and there are two main strategies:

 • Do something new creating new products or services, or expanding into new markets.

• Differentiate yourself from competitors, in order to hold a dominant position and beat

their attempts to control the market.

By being effective in these two areas the company will increase productivity and reduce costs.

The important point is that IT service provision can help and support these areas.

Employers’ misgivings about IT investment are in these first two areas and to answer that, we must explain how the IT service contributes to the business itself.

It's important to divide IT services into direct and indirect, as related to business results. So we should divide IT into two groups:

 • IT services that have a direct influence outside the company such as on customers, clients and partner companies.

• IT services that influence only internal users within the company.

We then need to prepare an explanation for management of the degree of contribution that each IT servicemakes in order to reach the right decisions.

This brings benefit in that we can prioritize the service level of each IT service based on the importance to the business, so that then we can control the service level according to the business priority.

In this way, meaningful reports can be produced and presented to help in business decision making.

This is how capacity management becomes proactive and makes a major contribution to the business.
Capacity management done reactively and passively is inherently done badly and also makes it seem an overhead to be minimised.

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer