5 Steps for Better IT Operations Management

IT Operations Management (ITOM) is more important than ever in today’s fast-changing world. It helps IT to ensure availability, maintenance and deployment of hardware, software, services and processes. By providing IT with a single platform for operations management, ITOM is the enabler of speed, agility, complete visibility and rapid problem detection. This maximizes business return from IT investment by cost-effectively achieving optimum IT performance.

ServiceNow provides a firm foundation for full-featured enterprise ITOM. It lays this foundation by emphasizing the discovery process. Discovery is about finding every single service, device, network, application and all forms of storage operating within the organization. ITOM depends on discovery to maintain an accurate and up-to-date catalog of the entire IT landscape. With the complete environment mapped and understood, as well as all ongoing and evolving dependencies, IT personnel can confidently maintain and manage organizational systems in alignment with strategic objectives.

ITOM decisions and actions must be based on complete data, otherwise errors are inevitable. If virtualized systems or cloud resources are not properly discovered, for example, problems may result and availability will suffer. Similarly, if vital systems such as IBM mainframe or IBM i are not included during discovery, IT managers will be operating on incomplete data. This can lead them to reach incorrect conclusions – and this can have a direct impact in terms of lowered availability and troubleshooting effectiveness, as well as latency issues and poor responsiveness to business requirements.

There are five key ITOM enablers to gain complete visibility into all areas of the infrastructure, and optimized management of IT environments.
1. Configuration Management Database
2. Discovery of traditional IT resources
3. Discovery of cloud and virtual resources
4. Discovery of IBM i and IBM mainframe resources
5. Service mapping

Read this whitepaper to learn how five key IT Operations Management enablers in place, IT personnel can effectively manage and monitor operations and services.