Service Management and the Cloud

You knew you were going to have to get around to IT Service Management and the cloud someday. Some vendor has been talking to you about the importance of that CMDB for at least the last decade.

Here’s why all of this ITIL stuff is important. You need Service Management to measure the benefits of using cloud computing; for example, is your organization able to improve time to market consistently? By how much? Some sort of request fulfillment process is needed to understand time-to-market in a quantitative way. Consider this:

1. You need IT service management to build a cloud

    a. Service Catalog Management, as a process, is needed to ensure that self-service offerings are relevant

    b. Capacity Management is needed to ensure that the relevant offerings in your catalog are delivered in timely fashion

    c. Configuration Management and a CMDB is needed on a few different levels…to support other processes like capacity management but also to understand the infrastructure that supports an application so that you can outsource it once that makes sense for your organization

2. Your organization needs IT service management to understand the benefits of cloud computing

    a. See above discussion on improved time to market; your organization needs to first measure time to market and then track it to show improvement; integration with financial management would be nice to quantify the benefit in dollar terms

3. Investing in IT service management is a “middle way” to prepare your organization to take advantage of cloud computing without choosing a cloud product, vendor, or even a strategy

4. Investments in improving IT service management will not be lost if you ultimately decide that cloud computing is not a good match for your business

Food for Thought

I hope that this article inspired some ideas about how your organization might make use of cloud computing. Here are some closing thoughts to consider:

1. Does your organization make use of any outside “cloud” services today?
2. Which applications running inside of your organization are both stable and commodity?
3. When was your most recent investment in IT service management? Were the benefits measurable?