IT Service Management and ITIL 3.0-HP leads the way

With the year-end looming and business units requesting next year’s must-have IT projects, many IT departments are looking for ways to fulfill more and more requests—usually without the luxury of bigger budgets or more staff.

IT service management, or ITSM, is a way to close the gap between what’s expected of IT and IT’s actual capabilities. ITSM offers enterprises industry-standard IT processes and best practices, leveraging integrated management tools to take the pain (and expense) out of process creation and enforcement.

More than a supporter or adopter of ITIL, HP has taken a leadership position through education, advocacy and by helping establish itSMF user groups throughout the world. In recognition, HP has been awarded the distinction of writing the core IT Service Operations volume for ITIL 3.0. The forthcoming ITIL 3.0 will have a new focus on an HP specialty: Service lifecycle management. SLcM provides end-to-end processes with enabling technology for managing IT services throughout their lifecycle from inception to retirement.

More than 80,000 professionals have trained in HP’s 80-plus ITIL examination centers worldwide. Read on to see how three different companies—out of HP’s 800-plus successful ITSM implementation projects around the world—transformed their operations through IT services management.

Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communication systems, needed a solution that would support fast customer growth, ensure business continuity and enable consistently high service levels without increasing pressure on the IT department. The HP OpenView suite was an ideal fit for Avaya because it spanned virtually all IT infrastructure and IT service management disciplines.

“To support Avaya’s business objectives, our IT operations support organizations are expected to do much more with much less,” says Mark Whatman, principal IT architect at Avaya, an international IT service organization. “Today, we have a service management solution in place that enables us to maintain consistently high service quality with reduced effort.”

After implementing ITSM based on HP OpenView, Avaya experienced a 30 percent reduction in IT costs. Ninety-five percent of network events are detected automatically and the system manages more than 2,000 devices on the company’s distributed networks. The company now has an infrastructure to handle whatever growth comes its way.

Real-time visibility into its processes enables ING Service Centre Budapest to precision-tune its resource allocation to match business requirements. The underlying solution—HP OpenView Service Desk Process Insight—supervises the execution of workflows in real time, generating alerts for corrective action as soon as IT processes start taking too long.

“We handle large service volumes at comparatively low cost levels,” says Gábor Patay, CIO of ING Service Center Budapest. “HP OpenView Service Desk Process Insight helps us to align the allocation of resources with business priorities and supports us in consistently delivering on the service level expectations of our customers.”

The HP solution took just three weeks to implement. Now that service levels are consistently higher, customers are happier and the organization is empowered to use its resources more productively.

Swedish Medical Center wanted to increase the quality of patient care by letting nurses and doctors access patient information anytime, anywhere. However, with skyrocketing workloads and low system reliability demanding a great deal of attention, the Seattle hospital’s information services department  found itself constantly playing catch up.

To realize its goal, SMC needed to go from reactive to proactive operations—the only way to achieve a dramatic increase in system reliability and response times. That’s where HP OpenView based on ITIL standards entered the picture.

“Our IS department is committed to helping our patients, nurses and doctors by keeping our IT systems available all the time,” says Dr. Chris Leininger, CIO of Swedish Medical Center. “Our goal is IT system uptime of 99.7 percent, and HP OpenView is helping us achieve that goal.”

Nurses and doctors can now provide better care because they have instant access to records from anywhere, at anytime. The IT staff can produce reports on utilization and performance, as well as track assets through change and configuration management. And, with high availability and a more efficient IT foundation, SMC is poised to digitize more of its processes in the future.

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