CA, one of the world’s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT for greater business results.
The demands on information technology continue to rise at an increasing rate. To keep up with the demand, IT departments are increasing the use of computing and associated resources. The demand on energy is also reaching epic proportions, and power grids are showing signs that they are struggling to meet demand through higher consumer energy costs and power usage caps for corporations. As a major consumer of power, IT departments are being challenged to find innovative ways to reduce power consumption and reduce the company’s overall carbon footprint. IT is now facing overall economic and socioeconomic pressures to reduce costs and go green.
Judging from the types of questions that come up at my talks and seminars, one of the hottest topics in IT Service Management (ITSM) today is the new ITIL® v3 guidance and what to make of it.
Today, organizations spend a large amount of their time delivering projects. While success rates have improved to approximately 34 percent, 15 percent of all projects still fail and 51 percent are somehow “challenged,” according to research from the Standish Group. There are many reasons why projects fail, often due to a lack of visibility into long-term project needs. Without proper visibility, organizations are unable to see what is needed six months, three months or even two months down the road, which results in poorly constructed project plans that do not capture critical dependencies, including assigning project resources and key milestones.
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.
After understanding the long-term vision of evolving the maturity level of your project management organization, ensuring flawless execution that maps to your strategies is another challenge. CA counsels its customers to follow industry standard best practices, as outlined in some of the leading project management methodologies that have been established for over 20 years to execute planned strategies.