(Length: 18 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

The IT operations role has moved from backstage to center stage in many enterprises. A major reason for this is the importance of IT service delivery in a business world that is now entirely dependent on all facets of technology. Another reason is the realization that IT operation costs are growing in sync with technology implementation. Years of improvement in application development and infrastructure technologies have created a steady flow of business applications. This has created a major delivery bottleneck, because the operability and manageability of infrastructure components has not made any significant progress for the past 15 years. Because of the attention it receives, we now see IT operations moving fast in the direction of improved management processes with ITIL and advanced management technologies with BSM and the CMDB. The first step in the evolution has been to move from a technology orientation to a service orientation in IT operations. The next step is to introduce more automation and reach a point where IT operation management processes drive management solutions that function as support for processes, not technologies.