Architecture & Patterns for IT Service Management

"This book unveils a great model that managers and executives can use to maximize their technology investment. It develops an action plan for managing all elements of the technology environments as a business which is long overdue." - R. Todd Stephens, Ph.D., BellSouth Corporation. How would you feel if you visited your financial planners 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, venture capitalists and vendors such as Mercury, and Computer Associates; they are labeling these offerings "ERP for IT," IT Resource Planning, and related terms. This book provides an independent, practitioner-oriented 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 system architecture, not for the business capabilities IT supports, but for IT itself. 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. It offers specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific tools and technologies that enable IT governance: a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what?