How Microsoft Helps Overcome Obstacles to Service Management Success

Published: March 3, 2008   Business and IT pros face many challenges in turning service management initiatives into business benefits. The most common barrier is the “knowing-doing” gap between the abstract theories of service management frameworks and the day-to-day activities IT pros perform. While such frameworks have obvious value, they also tend to emphasize process steps, performance indicators, and controls, whereas IT pros must focus their attention on the immediate operational tasks at hand relevant to their respective roles. This gap between knowing what to do—change management, for example—and actually doing it, creates the following issues in a typical organization: IT service management processes that are documented but not part of the real-world activities of the IT pro. Procedures that work for IT pros at the operational level but are not in sync with or supportive of the organization-wide service management goals to support the business. “Localized” IT tasks and activities that are not effective in achieving over-arching customer-focused outcomes. For these reasons, IT pros need task-level guidance aimed at their roles and implementation platforms that can take the abstract concepts and best practices of ITIL and integrate them into their daily work. This is precisely what Microsoft’s strategy is: the combination of products and guidance for solving timely, relevant issues for business and IT pros. Microsoft supports IT service management best practices, including ITIL v3 and its approach to the IT service life cycle, by extending ITIL v3 through processes, tools, and guidance across the life cycle for the Microsoft Core Windows Platform. By doing so, Microsoft makes service management tangible to the IT pro and directly applicable in the Microsoft environment.  Aidan Lawes sees that support by Microsoft as highly valuable: “ITIL is and always has been generic good practice guidance which enterprises need to adopt and adapt for their individual circumstances,” Lawes explains. “While it was implicitly acknowledged that complementary material would add value, v3 explicitly recognizes the need for complementary guidance that will assist enterprises to develop solutions in specific market sectors or for managing specific technologies. Such complementary material can, and in many cases should, come from those who best understand the specific environment. Hence, the Microsoft suite of offerings is seen as adding immense value to the marketplace. “The comprehensive nature of the suite demonstrates how important Microsoft considers Service Management to be,” Lawes continues. “The emphasis on business needs and value as the driving force for decision making fits perfectly with the core ITIL thrust and the various components in the suite can enable enterprises to accelerate the development of their own quality solutions. Addressing the key areas of people, process, and tools, the suite provides a comprehensive toolkit for those wrestling with the complex challenges inherent in Service Management.”

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