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NEW YORK, May 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a recent survey that polled more than 400 CIOs and IT directors in 24 countries, businesses today are at a tipping point when it comes to the transformation of their IT departments. The role of IT in the enterprise is rapidly changing from technology provider to services broker, and with those changes come expectations from both the C-suite and the organization's technology users for a better, faster, more streamlined route to the IT services they need to do their jobs effectively.  The fast pace of these changes has left many CIOs sidelined or, at the least, leading IT departments that are still seen as cost centers within their organizations rather than business partners driving value.  To change this, CIOs need a roadmap that will help them better meet the business needs of their organizations, and according to Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), the next-generation of IT service management (ITSM) – IT operations management (ITOM) – may be the answer.

"The function of IT operations management is ensuring the availability, security and optimum performance of the IT environment, but the purpose of IT operations management is the delivery of innovative services and applications to business users," says Mike Alley, Director, Service Management, Logicalis US.  "Therefore, the importance of this next-generation of IT operations management is that it allows IT professionals to reduce the effort they now spend on traditional incident, problem and change management tasks and move into being a more strategic thought leader for the business as they head, ultimately, toward a service-defined enterprise model."

<Talk with Logicalis' Mike Alley and other Logicalis US ITSM experts at Knowledge 16, Booth #1925.>

To help CIOs explore how next-generation ITOM can help them reach this IT nirvana, Logicalis US has created a white paper entitled "How to Use IT Operations Management to Become a Strategic Player in Your Organization." The key, the paper notes, is a three-step process: Get aware, get smart, and get automated.

Three Ways to Use ITOM to Empower Business Innovation

1. Get Aware: Buried as it is, deep within the ITIL v3 lifecycle of ITSM best practices, IT operations management can seem like a safe haven for technologists where they can immerse themselves in the familiar details of servers, networks and storage. For those who want to participate as strategic players within their organizations, however, the key to IT operations management is not drilling down into the details of the infrastructure, but becoming aware of operations management in the context of how their organization uses technology to accomplish its business goals and objectives. To "get aware," CIOs must start by closely aligning business needs with specific IT services in their configuration management database (CMDB).
2. Get Smart: IT teams often hit a bumpy stretch in their rollout of ITOM processes when they first implement an incident monitoring system in their IT environment. At this point, they are aware enough of the importance of a steady state in IT to support business agility, and they know they need to implement some level of ITOM to accomplish that level of stability, but they haven't yet learned how to cope with the sheer volume of alerts they are about to confront. Turning on the new monitoring system, as a result, can be a real eye-opening moment as screens fill with an outpouring of thousands of alerts. There are an almost uncountable number of events occurring hourly in a typical IT environment today. Becoming aware of them all with a monitoring system is only the first step. Knowing how to respond to them all is the ultimate goal…and that's where the event management process is critical. To "get smart," CIOs must employ event management and analytics to better understand and enhance IT operations.
3. Get Automated: The challenge many businesses have today is that most of the intelligence in terms of how they manage IT operations exists in somebody's head. If anything happens to that somebody, that intelligence is lost. A service-defined enterprise can use ITOM automation as a way to capture the collective intelligence of an IT team and put it in an appropriate tool where it can be applied consistently in a repeatable fashion.  So, to "get automated," CIOs must use their new-found awareness, event management and analytics capabilities to effectively automate responses to incidents, requests and provisioning. Automation is also key to building a software-defined data center in which all of the components – network, compute, storage – are virtualized and controllable from a single unified interface. By creating a management layer that spans all data center resources, IT departments can more quickly and easily define, develop and deploy services in response to an organization's rapidly changing business needs, the final step before becoming a truly service-defined enterprise.

Want to Learn More?

• Meet with Logicalis ITOM experts at Knowledge 16, booth #1925, May 15-20, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Resort & Casino in Las Vegas: http://ow.ly/4mOQgj.
• Download a Logicalis US white paper, "How to Use IT Operations Management to Become a Strategic Player in Your Organization": http://ow.ly/4ndgr0.
• CIOs worldwide are creating service-defined enterprises in response to the shadow IT phenomenon and the need to streamline their IT delivery; find out how ITSM can provide the roadmap: http://ow.ly/4mRV03.

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis employs over 4,000 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, deploy and manage complex IT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 6,500 corporate and public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow on an international basis. It has specialized solutions for enterprise and medium-sized companies in vertical markets covering financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services, helping customers benefit from cutting-edge technologies in a cost-effective way.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific and is one of the leading IT and communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $6 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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To learn more about Logicalis activities through a variety of social media outlets, click here.

Media contacts:
Nickie Peters, Director of Marketing,
Logicalis US
nickie.peters@us.logicalis.com
920-338-7622
www.us.logicalis.com

Karen Franse, Communication Strategy Group for Logicalis US
kfranse@gocsg.com
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com

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SOURCE Logicalis US