5 Early Resolutions for Better IT Management in 2019

ByMike Bombard

Table of Contents

Because it’s never too soon to think about improving IT!

It’s December, which means you and your team are probably already starting to worry about what 2019 will bring to your IT management and improvement efforts. Whatever the specifics of those efforts, there are five things you should resolve to make happen as soon as possible, if you haven’t already done so.

  1. Know your environment.
  2. Build a configuration management database (CMDB).
  3. Automate everything.
  4. Build a service catalog.
  5. Communicate greatly.

Get these done, and they will help enable and support all of your IT management efforts, through and beyond 2019. Whether you’re pursuing your first IT service management (ITSM) solution deployment or your next step toward digital transformation.

This post will address all the items on the above list.

IT Management Resolution #1: Know Your Environment

It doesn’t matter what you are trying to do with, for, or about your IT estate. You cannot achieve complete success without accurate, comprehensive, timely knowledge about your environment.
This involves relationships and interconnections linking your IT elements, critical business services, and users. That information will help you avoid pursuing initiatives that have unanticipated effects on your environment.

IT Discovery: A Movie, Not a Snapshot

Make sure to treat discovery of your environment as “always on” and not “one and done.” This means you need to be able to discover everything in your environment. Also, discover every attempt to join or connect to it. Undetected new connections represent potentially crippling threats to the security of your IT environment and your business. This is especially true given the growth and constant threat of “rogue” or “shadow” IT access requests. Whether from legitimate users or malefactors.

If your IT team doesn’t know about a device or connection, your team cannot secure it. And the growing business use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, from smart video cameras, speakers, and connected displays to break room appliances, multiplies the possible threats considerably. Many IoT devices have limited or no “business-class” cyber security, something many legitimate users fail to notice or check before attempting to connect those devices to the corporate network. Ensure that your discovery technologies and processes are intelligently automated and constantly vigilant, so nothing dangerous or disruptive finds its way into your environment.

IT Management Resolution #2: Build a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

If you’re going to collect information about your environment comprehensively, you need a place to store that information, and the ability to report on it. If you want to maximize the value of that information, where you should keep it is in a configuration management data base, or CMDB.

Your CMDB is designed to capture, store, and help you make use of the information unearthed by your discovery tools and processes. Eventually, the CMDB is where your business can and should store everything it knows about every IT resource it uses. And as with your discovery efforts, your CMDB should also store information about the relationships that connect your hardware and software with your services and their users.

Your CMDB solutions and processes should be well integrated with those devoted to your discovery efforts. And like your discovery efforts, your CMDB implementation should be as intelligently automated as possible. Your goal should be regular, automated scans of your environment, automated updates to your CMDB, and automated notifications of the appropriate people in response to unexpected changes or other events.

Your CMDB: A Foundation for the Future

The right CMDB is sufficiently flexible and easy to use to enable changes to your information store as your environment changes. Your business may start by simply capturing basic information about your core IT resources. But as your business grows and its needs and goals change, you need to be able to extend your CMDB accordingly. Some IT decision makers store so much important information in their CMDBs, they say privately the acronym should actually stand for “control my da_n business.”

A sufficiently flexible CMDB will be invaluable as your business increases its pursuit of digital transformation. Your CMDB contains information that can and should inform your chosen IT management solutions and processes. Your CMDB can and should also share relevant information with the tools and processes your business uses to develop, deliver, and manage business services, and those focused on cyber security. Further, those links connecting your CMDB to other resources should be automated, governed by business processes, and easily changed as business conditions warrant.

IT Management Resolution #3: Automate Everything

You may have noticed a theme repeated throughout Part 1 of this post: automation. In addition to discovery and CMDB tasks, you and your team should identify and pursue as many opportunities to automate as possible across your IT environment. Intelligent automation all but guarantees repetitive and mundane tasks get performed more consistently than they get done manually. Automation also improves alignment and compliance with relevant business processes.

IT Automation: It’s Good for Your Team, Too

The benefits of intelligent automation extend beyond your business and your users to your team members. When repetitive, mundane tasks are automated, staff previously saddled with those tasks can be reallocated to higher-value, more challenging projects. This can increase their value to the business, their professional profiles, and their personal satisfaction. These benefits can even improve retention and recruitment for your team, even despite the IT staffing challenges expected by many to increase during the next few years.

IT Management Resolution #4: Build a Service Catalog

As you and your team discover tasks worth automating, you may find that automation makes it easier and faster to deliver services, to your IT team and to the business users they support. A service catalog that presents services in a consistent, consolidated way and enables centralized management and security can complement and extend the value of your automation efforts considerably.

A solid service catalog is much more than a pretty menu of links. When done right, a service catalog can provide your team with a foundation for building, and achieving, specific operational goals. This can help you and your team become and remain more closely aligned with business operations and goals, which can improve both the performance and the perception of IT at your organization.

Your Service Catalog: An Opportunity for Collaboration

As your business pursues intelligent automation of IT tasks and better IT asset and service management, you and your team should begin collaborating with your users and business decision makers. Subjects of discussion should include definition and prioritization of the services most critical to the success of your business. By including users and business stakeholders early in the process of considering and constructing your service catalog, you can focus on services and automation efforts of greatest value to the business. You will also avoid the problems and negative perceptions that invariably accompany IT-driven initiatives that affect those beyond IT not included in their planning.

IT Management Resolution #5: Communicate Greatly

Service catalog is simply one opportunity for your IT team to improve communication and collaboration with those it serves. In fact, every significant IT initiative at your business should include plans and metrics for early and frequent communication with all affected stakeholders. This may require efforts that seem unfamiliar at best and onerous at worst. However, the alternative is the risk of your users seeing IT as impediments to, not enablers of, user productivity of business growth.

Given the increasing business criticality of IT resources and services, you and your team simply cannot afford to be seen as anything but beneficial. A strong step in that direction is to proactively communicate with users and business decision makers, and to seek their input into the early stages of significant IT initiatives. Those communications could be a simple as regular emails or a dedicated web or intranet page. Where appropriate, more detailed communications can include reports tailored for specific constituencies and based on information generated automatically by your IT management solutions. You and your team might even consider collaborating with your counterparts in marketing to identify and pursue the most effective appropriate communication options for your specific situation.

From Resolutions to Reality with Virima

Virima’s solutions for IT asset discovery, IT asset management (ITAM), and IT service management (ITSM) can help with some or all of the resolutions described above. Virima solutions can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users. In addition, they’re built to be easy to use and configure, and to produce useful, actionable reports about your IT environment, for IT managers and business decision makers. These features can help you and your team improve IT and business services and support, today and tomorrow.

Learn more about Virima’s IT and service management solutions online, or contact Virima today. Let us help your business improve its IT management and accelerate its digital transformation.

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