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The Business of IT: Delivering Transformative Services Requires Process Improvement

Ben Farrell
October 4, 2008

IT departments are tasked with two primary, and sometimes competing, objectives. The first, driven by executive management, is to make IT transformative to the business through new and innovative services. The second, driven by the realities of complex technology infrastructures, is to fight the daily fires and do the maintenance and upgrades required just to keep the lights on. With fewer and fewer resources available (the result of cost cutting across the organization), managers on the IT front line know they are often lucky to meet SLAs for the services already available, let alone develop, deploy and maintain new services.

Business Process Management technologies are emerging as the common solution to both the executive mandate, and the IT management nightmare. BPM lets IT create, document, execute, manage, and modify standards-compliant processes to ensure consistent execution. This process standardization and automation in IT Service Management (ITSM) leads to more efficiency and increased productivity in what IT is already doing. More importantly, it enables a redirection of IT resources to focus on strategic projects that can move the needle for the business.

Success happens when both IT and the business harmonize, using appropriate technology underpinnings to support a process-centric mentality that looks for and eliminates waste and inefficiency. Using BPM for ITSM is a single solution that solves both of IT's primary challenges, thereby enabling transformative new IT services with unlimited potential for the business.

Appian will be a sponsor at the Gartner IT Expo in Orlando from October 12-16. If you're going to be there, stop by our booth so we can talk about the team effort required to make the shift in IT mentality from one of managing assets, to one of delivering valuable and high-quality services.

Ben Farrell

Director of Corporate Communications