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Glossary to the Future: ITIL, APM, and rank

NavyinsigniaA 3000 manager's career was once rooted in technology. In the future it will be rooted in management, even when the 3000 in the datacenter is a virtualized one. The most secure place to manage IT is on an executive team. ITIL and APM can help get you earn enough rank to get a seat at that table. (Rank, not stripes, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

Tomorrow, MB Foster offers a webinar on these two concepts. One is a standard (ITIL) and the other a strategy (Application Portfolio Management). Both are designed to make your work more essential to your employer.

"The challenge for IT is adopting a business- and customer-focused approach in terms of delivering high quality IT services," Foster's invitation explains. "Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) mitigates these challenges." 

Application Portfolio Management (APM) provides IT departments and management visibility and clearly defines insight into critical applications and data with actionable information on the business value and fit and the technical condition of each application.

The webinar starts at 2PM EDT tomorrow, with an online signup at Foster's website. When combined, ITIL and APM provide guidance to organizations on how to use IT to facilitate business change, transformation, growth and benefits -- and where to focus investment. It's an interesting time for enterprise server management, with cloud and virtualization options front and center. Investment is going to be a constant wedge to get into corporate discussions.  

What do ITIL and APM have to do with the HP 3000? More than five years ago, the enterprise computer user group Connect said the audience it serves includes far fewer technologists, as it called them. That doesn't necessarily mean there are few technologists out there, but it's become historic thinking to believe they'll get a place in the corporate conversation.

Or as HP's CEO Meg Whitman said in a speech at a conference hosted at Disneyland last month, "Everyone in this room is no longer down in the engine room of the ship. You are all up in the bridge consulting with the captain. She added that HP "is here to help you earn your stripes," which is where her nautical metaphor broke down. (A technologist would point out that most captains of ships wear their rank on their shoulders, but only sometimes on their sleeves.)

We've written about ITIL and APM before today (The new IT library that HP reads, and writes; as well as App Portfolio Management: Get IT into the Boardroom). But six years later, these are still in the future for some 3000 managers. Foster's webinar promises to explain how these concepts can help in the following:

• Aligning IT services with business needs
• Known and manageable IT costs
• Financial savings from improved resource management
• Effective change management
• Improve time to market for new products and services
• Improved user and customer satisfaction

ITIL defines the services required by the business units and puts in place service definitions for the services provided, including SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). IT services are crucial functions that require continual investments and resources to support, deliver and maintain IT systems. The challenge for IT departments and managers is adopting, a business and customer focused approach in terms of delivering high quality IT services. 

Implementation of APM and its process, measurement and framework will effect decision making, application lifecycle, current and future IT investments, upgrades, operations, replacements and budgets. Application Portfolio Management will make the current state of the application portfolio visible and quantify the current applications by business fit and IT fit.

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