The rapid growth of DevOps in the last decade changed the landscape of the entire project development to be more collaborative and spontaneous. This has now resulted in the rise of integrated services that blurs the traditional lines between operations across departments and offers greater control to the decision makers. In IT, the current mainstream system of maintaining individual ITSM and ITOM (IT Operations Management) practices within an organization has now evolved into the culmination of Integrated ITOM.

ITSM + ITOM = Integrated ITOM

The rising Integrated ITOM practices mirrors the trend in bringing together regular service desk activities with IT operations thereby adding greater dimensions for both. From the ITSM perspective, the enhanced view of everyday operations that integration ITOM promises helps them transform their service-oriented silos to a more “Service-aware” future. On the other hand, overlapping the workload with ITSM for the ITOM managers has empowered them with faster and better collaboration for their process-oriented routines.

For example, the traditional Configuration Management Database (CMDB) in ITSM acts as a centralized database for the IT assets of the entire organization. In the Integrated ITOM world, CMDB gets a whole new business flavour, as this evolved role brings in service mapping with particular business-lines and their affiliated services. While this CMDB 2.0 model offers a greater view of the IT setup for the decision-makers, it also enables IT managers to have real-time traction of how connected every individual IT asset is with other layers of the organization.

Similarly, the simplest of Incident, Problem and Change management operations in the ITSM lifecycle can be given an ITOM overhaul with holistic dashboard and accurate mapping between the pain-points, the corresponding stake holders and the associated service lines. The other practical advantages include:

  • Right from CMDB, the integrated ITOM service can be designed to regulate and maintain the entire life cycle of assets in the organization. This yields greater power for the IT team to track individual assets with precision and helps them cut unwanted spending on additional infrastructure.
  • A system like integrated ITOM offers improved visibility of an organization’s data centre by streamlining its usage directly with everyday business decisions; this also enhances the IT teams’ accountability and subsequently results in increased operational efficiency.
  • This centralized system also enhances the visibility of IT assets and its corresponding knowledge base until the last line of service desk operators.
  • The business users, on the other hand, will be able to build detailed and customized trend-analysis reports with real-time IT updates. This immediate and continuous flow of crucial information will also empower them in creating instantaneous, strategic action plans for the future.

The Coming of Age of Integrated ITOM

The future of integrated ITOM services extends beyond processes and operations to a widespread adoption of Algorithmic IT operations (AIOps). The AIOps platform integrates data collection, storage and analysing functions into everyday ITOM processes to offer a clearer, more analytical approach to decision-making to all the stake holders.

The complete integration of intelligent big data processors into mainstream ITOM services will happen faster than expected as, according to Gartner’s assessment, existing ITOM tools and IT operations are ill-equipped to data of varying types and speed. In fact, by 2019, Gartner even believes that 25% of global enterprises will have “strategically implemented an AIOps platform supporting two or more major IT operations”.

From the trends and innovation in IT, it is quite clear that the organizations of the future will not be satisfied with simple hierarchical systems and silo-ed services; the major service providers are also keen about extending their IT management structure to an all-inclusive connected system. The onus is now on the CIOs of today to be informed and be futuristic about their IT innovations and implementations.