Changing Needs of IT Service Management

Changing Needs of IT Service Management

Changes in the IT Infrastructure landscape have led to massive changes in the needs of the IT Service
Management scene. A formal help desk, for example, came only in the late 80s and early 90s. Client
server computing brought a huge surge in application portfolios. Therefore practically anything and
everything could be computerized. This further meant that the number of vendors also grew rapidly and a
variety of services started getting outsourced. And the business of IT infrastructure outsourcing soared.
With the growth IT service portfolios, there was an unprecedented increase in users as well as service
providers. This ensured that complexities of IT services grew. One element in the service landscape could
unknowingly impact the service from another element. Thus as the complexity of IT service management
equations grew, the need to manage those equations for the purpose of managing the services became
even more urgent and imperative. For example a growing number of products and services created a
strong need for managing the compatibility matrix among those components.

While the product compatibility matrix was very well understood and analyzed, the service compatibility
matrix, in its real meaning, was not appropriately analyzed. Today the basic flaw in the IT Service
Management world is that the technology management is seen as service management and therefore the
deployment of tools to manage the technology is often relegated to simple process implementation. This
flaw is even more expanded with clouds as more and more tools are coming in to manage clouds.

Technology management, which is seen as a part of service management because it is the core part of
producing the service, is not however seen as separate service management. With advances in
virtualization and distributed computing, there are corporate network and datacenter administrators that
have turned into service providers that try to meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.

Now there are internal or private clouds that can emulate cloud computing on private networks. The
private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is basically a marketing term employed for a
proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a
firewall. But even with the private cloud there is little change in the service management equation in this
environment over the legacy service management schemes. This essentially means that the support
mechanism remains unchanged and the internal service desk will remain the same. Therefore rather than
abandon the existing data centers and use the public cloud exclusively, or, conversely, rely on private
cloud only and ignore the public cloud, enterprises should opt for a combination of private and public
cloud, popularly known as the hybrid model. This allows it to keep control of its key IT services while
leveraging cloud computing in places where it makes sense. For instance there are many companies
which found it beneficial and economical to use Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) to store things like
images, videos and documents. So even if one thinks that it makes sense to move most or all of your
applications to the cloud, it might seem too risky to move everything all at once.

When multiple enterprises are part in the service delivery chain then multiple groups in different
companies will be the key actors in customer owned service delivery processes. It is therefore not
unusual to notice that some of the service delivery processes are partly internal and partly external,
making the process of ownership completely heterogeneous. So while it is true that multivendor
ecosystems in the traditional IT service environment have existed for a long time, our movement towards
the cloud will further ensure that this ecosystem will by default exist and become even more complex
because vendors could be unknown and hidden behind an opaque layer.

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