EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Cloud computing can speed up deployment, reduce costs, and increase efficiency and connectivity. It can open up new ways to get computing work done, but more importantly, the inherent connectivity can change the way employees interact with each other and with customers. It can also change the way companies interact with suppliers and partners. The ease of standing up new apps and connecting with users through mobile devices, as well as the minimal capital investment, can spur innovation.

Both the “rules” and the “roles” governing IT service management (ITSM) are evolving to support a far-broader need for inclusiveness across IT, and between IT and its service consumers. Recent EMA research, “What Is the Future of IT Service Management?” (March 2015), exposed a number of shifting trends that might surprise many in the industry. [...]

Discovering, capturing and making sense of complex interdependencies is central to running IT organizations more effectively, and it is also a critical part of running the businesses IT serves. Whether it’s optimizing a network, or an application infrastructure, managing change, or providing more effective security-related access—more often than not these problems involve a complex set [...]

For the past two decades or so, several leading IT management vendors have tried to convince us that organizations should invest in a single unified management platform for supporting all of IT management needs.  Setting aside for the moment the fact that such an animal does not and cannot possibly exist (no vendor has the capital to develop every possible IT management product– I don’t care who they are), the value proposition of a single vendor uber-solution is flawed.  Sure, it sounds great to have one centralized console for accessing all automated support functions, and being able to deal with one vendor and one product set may seem like it will simplify management processes, but in reality this is not likely to be the case.   Primary deterrents to all-in-one solutions include:

I had originally intended to make this blog about mental health.  A supportive article for those of you trying to support change in your own environment wrestling with the stubbornly persistent caricatures and silos still so dominant in many IT organizations. It was inspired by a rather nasty line in a novel my one of [...]

When you are looking at buying a new IT Management tool, do you put most of your emphasis on features, with only some consideration to cost to acquire?  What about the effort to deploy and operate?  You may only spend a few weeks or months doing the initial deployment, but you will have to administer the product for years.  How do you factor these other considerations against features?