Logicalis US: Smart ITSM Strategies Can Solidify IT Pros' Value within their Organizations

NEW YORK, Jan. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- For some time now, CIOs have been bombarded with messages about becoming an internal "partner" to the business.  The fact is, most IT departments have been – and many still are – seen as cost centers, not strategic players in the organization's overall growth strategy.  To change that, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), says CIOs have to quite literally think outside the box, changing the way they manage the company's IT infrastructure, the way they respond to resource requests, and the way they add value to both the process and experience of delivering information technology tools to the organization's users.

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"IT operations management is a very hot topic among CIOs today," says Mike Alley, Director of Service Management, Logicalis US. "IT organizations in general have done a really good job of implementing efficiencies which drive costs down in the data center.  What they haven't done is add value to the business. The challenge we're trying to address is IT being viewed as a cost center and an impediment to the business moving as fast as it needs to move.  Because internal users see IT in this way, they're going outside IT to procure their IT services; this means IT is no longer in control of the entire IT service delivery model, a fact which introduces significant risk to the organization overall."

The solution, Logicalis says, is for IT organizations to be more proactive, implementing IT service management (ITSM) tools and processes that deliver a more value-added operations management strategy for internally and externally provided services. CIOs can take this proactive approach to the next level by employing event management tools, orchestration and automation policies, and a service-aware decision-making philosophy that drives true business agility and enforces standards that reduce both cost and risk.

Next Steps in a Value-Added ITSM Strategy

1. Implement Event Management: Event management ITSM tools receive events from a data center's various monitoring tools, consolidate them and add intelligence to the evaluation of those events to both reduce the number of events presented to the operations center and to deliver increased information alongside actionable events, allowing IT staff to act more quickly.
2. Use Orchestration and Automation: Providing structure to routine processes and the automation of everyday tasks, IT can use orchestration and automation tools to speed the remediation of incidents as well as the provisioning and configuration of the infrastructure.  While this reduces the level of effort needed to perform these tasks, perhaps the most important reason to use orchestration and automation tools is to allow a very quick, agile response to the business units as compute needs change. With event management and with orchestration and automation, IT pros can either deploy the tools themselves or partner with a third-party managed services provider to deliver these tools as a service.  In either case, CIOs may benefit from consulting with an expert before implementation.
3. Be Service Aware: IT has traditionally been technology focused, but to become a partner to the organization, it must become more service aware, seeing the impact IT decisions or events have on the business as a whole.  If, for example, the company allows customers to place orders through a service, rather than just knowing that a server is down, IT needs to understand how that server being down is impacting customers' ability to place orders.  This allows IT to prioritize responses to events or the fulfillment of change requests based on the impact to the overall organization, mapping service delivery to an understanding of the impact changes have on the business units and their functionality.

Want to Learn More?

• Can ITSM really make a difference in your organization? Take Logicalis' 11-step quiz to find out.
• Explore five innovative ways to use ITSM, then read an article outlining the top reasons ITSM must be part of any cloud strategy: http://ow.ly/WOyeb.
• Watch as Logicalis' Mike Alley explores the benefits and challenges of ITSM as well as important implementation strategies in this brief video: http://ow.ly/WOyNQ.

About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis employs over 4,000 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, deploy and manage complex IT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 6,500 corporate and public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow on an international basis. It has specialized solutions for enterprise and medium-sized companies in vertical markets covering financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services, helping customers benefit from cutting-edge technologies in a cost-effective way.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific and is one of the leading IT and communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $6 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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Media contacts:
Lisa Dreher, VP, Marketing & Business Development,
Logicalis US
[email protected]
425-201-8111
www.us.logicalis.com

Karen Franse, Communication Strategy Group for Logicalis US
[email protected] 
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com

SOURCE Logicalis US

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