Business Process Management: The Key to ITIL Success

In many organisations the IT department is the last bastion of homegrown, non-standardised management practice; but the restless forces of competition, compliance and cost control are massing at the department gate. Management is increasingly insistent that IT, no less than finance, HR, manufacturing or legal, conduct its affairs according to generally accepted industry standards. IT professionals with a career-long focus on managing technology are now required to redefine their role in terms of services delivered, to measure and track performance, to set and meet quality goals, and to create both a methodology and culture of continuous improvement.

As a result, IT managers worldwide are evaluating ITIL—the most comprehensive and widely accepted framework of best practice IT management processes—for its potential to help them reduce costs, improve service quality, increase efficiency, tighten security, achieve regulatory compliance, and align IT more closely with its business unit customers.

The Problem of Process Management

ITIL approaches IT Service Management (ITSM) in terms of processes or workflows—defined and repeatable sequences of actions and events orchestrated to achieve a specified objective. It describes the processes necessary to ensure efficient and consistent service delivery, but provides no guidance on the selection of tools or agents to carry out individual process stages, or on the matter of tools to manage the processes themselves. Commercial software vendors offer a wide range of task-specific tools for the core workloads of enterprise IT management—system and network management, software distribution and maintenance, asset tracking and security administration. Many of these products provide a degree of task automation within the limits of their functionality.

Until now, however, no software solution has existed for linking and integrating the functionality of existing IT management tools into defined, repeatable ITIL-compliant business processes. There has been no IT-specific capability for process modeling and documentation, automated and monitored execution, managed change, quality assurance and compliance.

In short, the primary challenge of implementing ITIL-compliant processes for IT management has been the lack of integrated Business Process Management (BPM). It’s more than a little ironic, given the central role of IT in implementing BPM in the larger organisation.

Introducing LANDesk® Process Manager

LANDesk® Process Manager simplifies and expedites ITIL implementation with a comprehensive toolset for creating, documenting, automating and optimising ITSM processes. It was designed from the outset to simplify and expedite BPM implementation, and unlike most competitive solutions, requires no additional application services or integration framework software. Furthermore, while it is in every sense a full-functioned, general purpose BPM solution, LANDesk Process Manager was created first and foremost to support the Service Delivery and Service Support disciplines that form the core of ITSM.

Built on the Microsoft .NET Web services foundation, LANDesk Process Manager provides full support for creating, executing and monitoring complex management processes, and for integrating a wide range of assets through industry standard interfaces. Core components include:

• An execution engine that manages, validates and escalates process activities, eliminating manual stages and process interruptions wherever possible.
• A process designer that provides simple, intuitive process modeling through a graphical drag-and-drop interface. LANDesk Process Manager eliminates manual code generation, making ITIL process design accessible to average business users.
• A business monitor that provides rule-based process tracking and audit logging, manages routing and approvals, and supports browser-based reporting and log access.
• An integration module that links business processes to other applications and IT assets through open, standards based interfaces, including Web services (SOA), Java, scripting, ODBC, and Process Integration Modules (PIMs).

More about the Process Designer

The process designer in LANDesk® Process Manager also serves as the workflow execution engine and enables collaborative orchestration and modeling of complex processes using visual design elements like drag-and-drop to map and define processes. With only minimal IT involvement, the straightforward interface enables any process owner to easily design, model, document and optimise their IT processes. Automated processes can be designed and deployed in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.

The Process Designer in LANDesk® Process Manager provides a robust process editor in an intuitively simple format that allows novice or expert workflow designers to easily navigate and design workflows.

Taking the Cost and Complexity out of ITIL Best Practices

With LANDesk® Process Manager, implementing ITIL-compliant processes for ITSM becomes a vastly simpler, faster, less expensive and more easily manageable task. With best practice processes in place to ensure service quality, management can be sure that its IT investments will be repaid in performance, efficiency, agility, discipline and bottom-line business value. LANDesk Process Manager:

• Reduces process design and implementation time from days or weeks to hours or minutes.
• Lets users develop a library of reusable process functions. Widely used functions can be edited once and instantly updated in all process instances.
• Supports automation of manual processes to expedite execution, reduce costs, and eliminate the most common source of human error.
• Provides a detailed audit trail and central log repository to support reporting and compliance requirements.
• Allows disparate applications to be linked in seamless workflows.
• Provides a change process that is ITIL-compliant and also fulfills elements of ISO, COBIT, Six Sigma and other standardisation methodologies.

Conclusion

For IT departments struggling to transform themselves from technology asset managers into technology service providers, ITIL offers an indispensable guide to the processes required for successful service delivery. To the uninitiated, however, and the unequipped, the workloads associated with creating, documenting, executing, tracking and amending the ITIL-compliant processes required in a large and complex environment can initially appear endless and overwhelming.

LANDesk® Process Manager supports every aspect of process creation and management, from conceptual modeling to compliance auditing. It integrates with the LANDesk® management portfolio and with most other leading IT management applications, linking their functionality in self-executing processes and extending the value of existing management investments. By using LANDesk Process Manager to standardise and streamline service delivery, IT organisations can reduce operating costs, improve service levels, and align their own operations more responsively with enterprise business objectives, which is the entire point of ITIL and IT Service Management.