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There is no doubt that IT has become pervasive. According to Gartner, Inc. enterprises will spend $470 billion on hardware and software this year, and another $670 billion on IT services. On top of that are more than two billion mobile phones and close to a billion PCs, laptops, iPods and PDAs. IDC reports that 653 petabytes of disk storage were sold in just the last quarter of 2005, an increase of 54.6 percent over the previous year.

But if IT staffs think they are overloaded now, they had better start making some plans for the future. City-wide Wi-Fi and WiMax wireless networks in the developed countries will mean more people expecting instant access to services anytime, anywhere. Projects such as MIT professor John Negroponte's Google-backed $100 PC effort will spur computer usage in the rest of the world. Together with embedded devices, Gartner predicts there will be more than 200 billion processors in use by 2013. But it also predicts that by 2010 the IT organizations in mid- to large-size organizations will be a third smaller than they were in 2005. This requires a complete change in the way IT conducts its operations.

"To survive, IT must constantly express the value they bring to the business and do so in terms the business understands," says Ron Potter, TeamQuest's Manager, IT Best Practices in Manchester, Conn. "Fire fighting and the considerable resources it consumes must become a thing of the past."

The Service Based IT Economy
During the computer age, the world has shifted from manufacturing to a service-based economy. IT made that possible by automating the production machinery, moving the workers into more of a supervisory and decision making role, rather than standing there personally tightening every nut and bolt. IT is moving in that same direction with monitoring, diagnostic and provisioning tools. It is much easier to hot-swap a failed blade server and let the system load the software and reconfigure the new blade than it is to sit there feeding floppies into a box sitting on one's desk. As IT staff move out of the "nuts and bolts" of running their infrastructure, this frees them up to move into the service economy as well.

"Over the next few years, IT will become more process driven, and we will see Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) being more widely accepted and implemented," says Potter. "Technology implementation will be driven by business needs rather than for technology's sake, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analyses will be used as the measure of the expected business benefits."

This change requires a tighter coordination between IT and Business organizations to determine exact needs and the best way to address them. It also means a change in the role of IT from a direct infrastructure provider to a facilitator of business processes, and a blurring of the line between internal and outsourced services.

"In order to facilitate interchangeability between internal and external service providers," he continues, "roles and responsibilities will be more clearly defined, service delivery requirements identified and cost justified, and the 'IT budget' will be transformed into a series of business budgets for purchase of IT services."

Making the switch requires repeatable and measurable processes which demonstrate the value of the services IT provides. One route to this is implementing the procedures described in the IT Information Library (ITIL), and many organizations are doing so successfully. But many are not. "Many organizations start with change and configuration management as their initial foray into ITIL and find themselves less productive after their first implementation of those processes," says Jon Hill, a TeamQuest product manager in Fort Worth, Tex. "Beginning with capacity management is easier and more likely to result in measurable savings. Organizations can use the savings from capacity management to fund their next step towards ITIL adoption."

Three Factors for the Successful IT Department
Whether plotting a course across the ocean or the future course of an IT department, one needs to know three things: where you are, where you've been and where you are going.

While early mariners used sextants and compasses to map their progress, more recently they've turned to GPS navigation to instantly gain a far more accurate position. Similarly modern organizations can't rely on older methods of measuring IT's effectiveness. They require instant insight into what is happening right now and a clearer ability to predict the future. This begins with well-defined and detailed roles and responsibilities for all parties involved in providing IT services.

"Service Level Agreements must be put in place to define the bounds of the service so cost and performance optimization activities can be successful," says Potter. "The degree of that success will be determined through the use of meaningful and measurable metrics."

This is where TeamQuest software comes into play, giving organizations an accurate view of their IT processes - past, present and future:

• TeamQuest agents on the servers gather data and store it in a historical database, enabling reporting and analysis. By using built-in reporting tools, managers can identify trends so corrective actions can be taken before problems occur.
• TeamQuest View facilitates the ongoing performance improvement process by easily identifying those applications consuming more resources than they should. Usage data can be exported into chargeback systems to correctly apportion costs.
• TeamQuest Model gives managers an accurate view of future IT infrastructure needs, so they don't waste their budget on overprovisioning resources. It also allows them to see the effect of a new application or process before deployment, and without having to build a costly test environment.

"We can assist businesses with finding the optimal configurations for handling forecasted future business loads minimizing wasteful excess capacity," says Hill, "while also ensuring that key business processes are available and responding according to agreed upon service levels."