The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework of best-practice recommendations for IT service management.

ITIL is an excellent set of systematic, integrated processes that can be effectively utilized, in conjunction with appropriate technologies, to substantially improve IT service quality.

The challenge, as Enterprise Management Associates' Dennis Drogseth points out, "is that few IT management tools do more than pay lip service to ITIL's concepts. [Managed Objects] ... stands apart because of its unique capabilities for organizing and managing to business priorities in concert with ITIL processes, particularly when it comes to service level management and availability."

Managed Objects BSM initiatives serve as catalysts for process improvement in their own ways.

Service Management provides a mechanism for consolidated service management giving companies the ability to integrate the data from multiple management tools onto a single pane of glass. Through BSM, companies have one centralized view of their service support infrastructure.

Managed Objects CMDB resolves the challenges created by today's realities by providing a catalyst to unify CMDB information into a single "virtual" repository. In doing this, companies don't need to search across their enterprises for CMDB data. they don't need to worry that it will get out of sync with what's really represented in their infrastructure.

Managed Objects provides the important Service Level Management capability necessary to monitor, measure, and report on the quality of services IT delivered to the business.

Managed Objects Dashboards give IT organizations have an IT service view of their enterprise. This gives them a fast and easy way to not only understand the specific servers, applications, and databases that are associated with a specific service, they also have a powerful and easy mechanism to interface with their best practices. For instance, our BSM solution gives IT operations a fast way to determine root cause of problems reported within the incident or problem management tool. Likewise, we can also provide impact analysis for pending changes within a change, release, or configuration management tool.

It seems clear that there is a substantial overlap between BSM, SLAs, and ITIL - not to mention SOX as well. Fundamentally, this overlap exists at the IT service level of virtually every IT organization who is seeking to better align themselves with the businesses they support. Without this important alignment, IT cannot be properly positioned to support the critical needs of the business.

In order to attain the alignment IT seeks with the business it supports, there is a set of fundamental factors that IT must come to realize. First and foremost, that there is still too much risk within the IT enterprise - too much risk translates to outages, poor performance and poor IT service quality as perceived by the end user community. Moreover, risk is most typically caused by too many changes in the IT infrastructure - whether planned or unplanned.

In reaction to this, IT organizations today are responding with the two most powerful weapons they have - process improvement and technology. ITIL is part of a growing wave of process maturity adoption across virtually all industries today. But once having chosen ITIL, integrating its best practices into an IT organization is often times easier said than done. That's where technology can help.

By providing key accelerators for ITIL process adoption, Managed Objects has become a catalyst in significantly shortening the amount of time, effort and resource required to adopt ITIL, or virtually any other process maturity model.

Read how your organization can accelerate ITIL adoption through Managed Objects BSM in our white paper.

Learn more about Service Level Agreements.