You may have heard about or even seen the recently released movie, “War for the Planet of the Apes.” I have not, but I have been taken by a rallying cry for the apes used repeatedly in trailers and advertisements for the film: “Apes. Together. Strong.” I believe a similarly simple, powerful, and positive message applies to enterprise IT.

The Fundamental Question for IT

I’ve pontificated previously about how every enterprise wants and needs to be more agile, resilient, and trustworthy, or “ART-ful.” And I’ve posited that every workplace should be secure, automated, and digital, or “SAD.” Fanciful acronyms apart, it occurs to me that a common question links all of these goals.

That question? How best to get there?

The Answer: Unified IT

If your enterprise is to maximize the business value of its IT investments, your first and most important job just might be to eliminate as many IT islands and silos as you can find. None of your most critical IT initiatives—asset, endpoint, service, or security management, to pick four big ones—can or should exist in a vacuum. Indeed, you really can’t get any of these completely right without at least some cross-pollination from one or more of the others.

  • Truly comprehensive asset management requires detailed knowledge about what’s happening at all of your endpoints, and benefits from knowledge about the services that rely upon those assets.
  • Truly comprehensive endpoint management benefits greatly from detailed knowledge about the assets and services users access from their endpoints, both fixed and mobile.
  • Truly comprehensive service management relies upon comprehensive knowledge about assets, endpoints, and the services themselves, including security.
  • Truly comprehensive security is impossible without comprehensive, timely knowledge about assets, endpoints, and services.

These interconnections and interdependencies make clear that for IT to be of maximum value, it must be unified. This does not mean that every IT function must be completely integrated with every other. Instead, it means that wherever it makes sense and is possible, critical IT tasks must inform and support one another. It’s the difference between, say, attempting to take a Dr. Frankenstein approach to creating an ultimate athlete (a disturbing vision), and instead recruiting the best available players and forging them into a smoothly collaborating team.

This means less focus on integrating everything with everything, and more focus on determining, accessing, normalizing, and sharing the best available information among your key IT management solutions, processes, and workflows. It also means extending the discussion of what constitutes “the best available information” beyond IT, to include business decision makers across the enterprise.

ITSM: A Harbinger of Modernized, Unified, Business-Driven IT

Ivanti surveyed IT professionals at this year’s Service Desk & IT Support Show (SITS) in London. Some 72 percent of survey respondents cited “improving the end user experience” as one of their top three strategic management priorities. Other top priorities cited included “advanced levels of workflow automation”, “analytics for incident/problem and availability management,” and “analytics for user experience and visibility into end-user problems.”

These priorities indicate that many IT professionals are looking to ITSM as a business enabler, not just a foundation for more and better service or help desks. This is a perspective underscored by recent research conducted by Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™). As you may have read in any of several recent blog posts here, EMA found that “in many organizations ITSM is becoming a hub of innovation,” increasingly taking on a “hub-like role as a center for IT governance.” “To support these needs, ITSM-related management software needs to become increasingly dynamic, more analytically advanced, and better integrated in support of a growing number of tasks, initiatives, and stakeholders,” EMA writes in its report conclusion.

Ivanti: Helping You Tap the Power of Unified IT

Ivanti solutions for modern, advanced asset, endpoint, IT and business service, and security management, and for better reporting and analytics, are all designed to aid, ease, and speed your IT modernization and unification efforts. Those goals even drive our acquisitions. RES Software, for example, will help Ivanti to improve automation of user workspace and identity provisioning, onboarding, and offboarding. Similarly, Concorde Solutions enables Ivanti to extend the power and value of our IT asset management offerings.

It’s an exciting time to be in IT. Click on the link below to get a copy of the complete EMA report. Then contact Ivanti, and let us help you turn that excitement into benefits for your business, by bringing more automation, modernity, and unity to your IT environment.

What's driving the next generation of itsm