Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children

How would you feel if you visited your financial planner's office and saw past-due credit card notices on their desk? Would you trust an auto mechanic whose car backfires and produces black smoke? A dentist with bad teeth? A banker in shabby clothes? An interior designer whose offices are a shambles?

This is the position of the IT capability in many large organizations. The designated custodian of critical business processes and data does not manage its own processes and data reliably. A response in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology is emerging from major companies, research firms, and vendors; they are labeling these offerings "ERP for IT," "IT Resource Planning," and related terms.

This groundbreaking, practitioner-authored book provides an independent examination of and response to these developments. An analysis of the large scale IT capability, with specific attention to business processes, structured data, and enabling systems, it is essentially a comprehensive systems architecture, not for the business capabilities IT supports, but for IT itself.

Features
The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through:

* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole
* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures
* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends
* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.
* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise.

He has held consultant and architect positions for Best Buy, Target, and Accenture, specializing in metadata, configuration management, IT governance, enterprise application integration, and ERP systems. He holds a summa B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Science in Software Engineering, both from the University of Minnesota. Charlie is an active member of the professional community, belonging to the IT Service Management Forum, IEEE, ACM, and Data Management Association (DAMA). He presents frequently both locally and nationally to professional associations and conferences.

He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.

Are you in the thick of sorting out how to make ITIL and COBIT work, and trying to make sense of the dozens of vendors clamoring to help?

Are you puzzled over how the ITIL vision for Change Management fits into the reality of your current processes? And how it relates to Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management?

Is the concept of configuration management and the CMDB giving off more heat than light for you? How can you make it real?

Have you found yourself wondering whether you really need an IT portfolio management tool, an enterprise architecture repository, a metadata repository, a service management tool, and a configuration management database (CMDB)? And if you have them, are you wondering if they should be related somehow?

The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through:

* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole

* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures

* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends

* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.

* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.

Among the specific topics addressed are:

* ITIL recommendations from a practical systems implementation point of view
* Configuration management: challenges, misconceptions, myths, and realities. Business justification for. Support for compliance and regulatory goals.
* Interrelationships between IT portfolio planning, solutions development, and IT operations
* The relationship between application development and hosting (infrastructure) organizations
* Business intelligence, performance management, and metrics for the IT capability itself
* Detailed, actionable clarification of the vague concept of "IT Service" and all its permutations and implications
* IT portfolio degradation through complexity
* Detailed models of IT information
* The various classes of systems used internally by large scale IT organizations
* The concept of "repository" and its relationship to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
* Process roles and responsibilities. Closed-loop, self-reinforcing processes for IT data management.
* Application as critical control point and portfolio entry. Clarifying relationship between "application" and "IT service." Application portfolio management: process, data structures, and systems.