How to Automate IT Service Delivery (
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The
primary objective of most IT departments in moving to a dynamic data
center is to automate 80 percent of existing requests so that they can
be fulfilled with minimal staff intervention, while ensuring that the
other 20 percent (which are typically more complex and custom) can be
given the attention and expertise they deserve.
Automating such routine tasks as
server provisioning and configuration management can make the IT
department as a whole entirely more productive. Moreover, removing the
human element where it is unnecessary significantly increases user
satisfaction and speed of delivery. It also reduces risk because it
decreases manual errors, heavy redundancies and painful time lags
synonymous with e-mail-based and ticket-based systems.
While many enterprise IT
departments have implemented an underlying service catalog technology,
a comprehensive solution for service requests, subscription, delivery,
cost allocation and measurement remains mostly elusive and an
aspiration. If automating self-service for a traditional IT
infrastructure is an ongoing goal, then it is an absolute necessity for
those seeking it to evolve to one that includes a mixture of physical,
virtual and cloud platforms. Only then can they address demand
management across the entire environment and ensure that their
resources are appropriately supporting that demand.
Automating service delivery
The key is to fully automate
service delivery today and leverage that foundation as an integral part
of the infrastructure—one where self-service extends to any and all
technologies including private and public clouds—in the future. As a
result, organizations can successfully optimize resources across the
operational environment, freeing up additional working capacity to
support ongoing and increasing business demand. To that aim, they must:
1. Centralize requests, automate delivery and tightly integrate the underlying technologies,
2. Ensure process automation across the enterprise including departments, domains and systems,
3. Incorporate the service delivery
strategy into the overarching cloud strategy in order to ensure a
dynamic infrastructure, and
4. Automate fulfillment channels of
that business demand across multiple IT domains including security,
asset management and infrastructure management.
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