IT Management Moves toward Managed Services
Companies nationwide are finally starting to get the message that IT management means more than fixing something when it goes wrong. Technology must make business processes work better and more reliably, and that requires a commitment to constant upgrading and improvement…Gartner, Inc.’s Tiffani Bova, Vice President, Research, Indirect Channel Programs & Sales Strategies, emphasizes that business and IT people need to coordinate efforts with “tightly integrated and complementary business and technical goals.”
A recent Gartner survey cited business process improvement as the top priority among chief information officers. “This clearly highlights the needs to have IT leaders and business leaders connected at every level,” Bova points out.
She suggests automating IT management with a managed services program, in turn freeing up IT staff to work on improving technology support of business processes.
Losing critical IT specialists to retirement also is fueling forward movement. Many will retire over the next five years, and 25 to 30 percent of employees with legacy skills will be retirement-eligible during the next three years.
Putting into place automated IT management can reduce dependence on these specialists, as well as improve overall IT performance by identifying potential problems that can be fixed before they impact operations.
This also frees up valuable human capital to help address initiatives around improving IT support of business processes – a key element of which is to evaluate technology that is rapidly going extinct.
Growth in managed services utilization confirms that companies are taking technology improvement seriously. Network World magazine cites statistics showing that 63 percent of organizations plan to use some form of managed services in 2008, up from 46 percent in 2007.
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Tags: IT Management, IT Trends, Managed Services
