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IT organizations are faced with an unpredictable, ever-growing and complex environment, yet IT leaders are being asked to create quantitative value for the business.

While complexity cannot be eliminated entirely from an environment, IT leaders can manage the complexity through processes, technology and people.

Be proactive
A successful campaign has caused an inordinate amount of traffic, affecting server utilization and causing customers some discomfort because their ability to receive services is diminishing quickly. If MacGyver were around, he would probably need chewing gum, a rubber band and a Band-Aid for a quick fix. But that doesn’t help create value for the company. Combining resourcefulness with a proactive approach can help.

Capacity management and change management are two ITIL disciplines that could prevent or mitigate this situation. Together, these two disciplines enable IT to understand business requirements and allow changes to the infrastructure with minimum disruption.

Capacity management processes allow you to:

• Get more out of existing IT resources and improve IT cost per service unit positions
• Fine tune applications and infrastructure components to improve performance, reduce consumption, and delay upgrades
• Eliminate redundant work and ensure consistent reporting
• Efficiently provision capacity
• Provide timely capacity and related cost information for more informed business decisions
• Provide more complete input to TCO of proposed new and/or major IT-related upgrades or initiatives
• Project consumption at future growth levels and uncover bottlenecks with sufficient warning to correct before business services are adversely affected

Change management brings processes and procedures in place to help alleviate the complexity of the IT environment. Problems that take place due to poor planning, for example, can cause a reactive response regarding change management. In the end, change management helps maintain a good balance between the need for - and impact to - live, test and training environments.

Less is more
Managing 10,000 of anything surpasses people’s ability to visualize component relationships, control them, or address issues and changes.

Take server consolidation for example. There are many reasons to consolidate servers, but a couple of underlying reasons are to save money by lowering the Total Cost of Ownership and increase ROI. Also, by increasing efficiency, IT leaders and their staff can do more with less and make optimal use of what they already have.

In a typical server consolidation effort, you can increase efficiency by:

• Reducing complexity
• Reducing staff requirements
• Increasing manageability
• Reducing costs for physical space, hardware systems and software
• Increasing stability/availability

In addition to simplifying the infrastructure through server consolidation create a simple, consistent and repeatable management process. Work will be completed the same way every time and the customer sees the same result each time - no surprises.