Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children

This book unveils a great model that managers and executives can use to maximize their technology investment. It develops an action plan for managing all elements of the technology environments as a business which is long overdue. - R. Todd Stephens, Ph.D., BellSouth Corporation How would you feel if you visited your financial planner's office and saw past-due credit card notices on their desk? Would you trust an auto mechanic whose car backfires and produces black smoke? A dentist with bad teeth? A banker in shabby clothes? An interior designer whose offices are a shambles? This is the position of the IT capability in many large organizations. The designated custodian of critical business processes and data does not manage its own processes and data reliably. A response in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology is emerging from major companies, research firms, venture capitalists and vendors such as Mercury, and Computer Associates; they are labeling these offerings ERP for IT, IT Resource Planning, and related terms. This book provides an independent, practitioner-oriented response to these developments. An analysis of the large scale IT capability, with specific attention to business processes, structured data, and enabling systems, it is essentially a comprehensive system architecture, not for the business capabilities IT supports, but for IT itself. Features The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through: * A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole * A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures * Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends * Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management. * Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.