Service Management for Dummies®

Chapter 10. Governing the Service Universe

In This Chapter

• Considering IT governance in context

• Striking a balance with business requirements

• Measuring performance

• Governing with best practices

You can't implement effective service management unless IT takes a holistic approach to automation, oversight, and comprehensive asset management across the organization. How can you do this? We recommend establishing a strong IT governance program that can provide the framework to make this happen.

IT governance in service management requires carefully combining rules for IT and business processes. You need governance rules for everything from IT security to general policies about service levels. In essence, think of a life cycle of business processes that focuses on the goal of improving service quality and business agility. Governance from a service management perspective requires that your organization apply sound business and technical judgment. You have to make trade-offs. At times, you need to allow one service to degrade in favor of a more-business-critical service.

This chapter describes the importance of monitoring and measuring service performance, and discusses why IT governance requires companies to take a composite view of all the components of service management.

Understanding the Roles of IT Governance

IT manages a complex infrastructure of hardware, data, storage, and software environments. The data center (some of the largest organizations have many data centers) is designed to use ...