Demands for more services are increasing and high performance and reliability are expected, yet budgets, labor and floor space are all being constrained. I guess nobody said running a data center was easy.
The need for increased efficiency and reliability points to capacity management processes. And like anything else, you have to crawl before you walk, but the value of capacity management practices is there. So what’s it take to adopt more mature processes?
Following the lead of Gartner’s IT Management Process Maturity Model, we’ve drilled down even further to highlight the levels of Capacity Management maturity specifically.
After all, moving to mature Capacity Management tools and processes lowers costs, improves service quality and increases IT productivity since staff can focus on the most important duties rather than fight fires.
Ten years ago it was all about data collection and working to get good performance from infrastructure components. Toward the end of the last decade the emphasis changed for the better, with IT management tools providing more of a service point of view rather than looking at things from a strictly technical infrastructure point of view.
So what’s next? Jeane-Pierre Garbani at Forrester Research recently wrote about “The Next Decade,” summarizing the progress we are making in the IT management software industry.
Business management looks at IT from a value perspective. They want to know, what business benefits am I getting for my IT dollar? Is my IT organization providing me with the ideal value-to-cost ratio? IT organizations are going to have to focus more on that value-to-cost ratio, says Garbani. I think he is right.
IT management and IT management tools vendors need to focus on optimizing that value-to-cost ratio, helping to ensure that business benefits are realized at the lowest overall cost. As Garbani says, IT management vendors need to position their tools “in the global context of the ‘IT Enterprise’ and show how they will contribute to internal IT optimization.”
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Posted by Jon Hill on January 19, 2010 12:03 pm January 19th, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)