How ITOM Drives Everything as a Service

[kevin_murray]

Here at K15 this week, we had the pleasure of rolling out our IT Operations Management (ITOM) strategy to 9,000 live attendees and even more watching remotely. The real focus of our approach centers around how we can help make existing ServiceNow customers' service management experience even more valuable than ever.

By connecting our Service Management platform and processes to our customers' infrastructure, we can manage that infrastructure through a services lens — helping to ensure service availability, efficient delivery, compliance, and more. Here's a summary of how we're approaching this.

During the day 1 keynote, head of ITOM Product Management Mike Nappi told us how we are extending the value of the current CMDB - in effect using service mapping to make the CMDB "service-aware." Customers have been at the booth all week learning how service mapping can help shine a light on the CMDB to highlight CIs in the context of an individual business service. Once these maps are generated, the possibilities around service availability and assurance are numerous. The service map for a specific service not only shows a dynamic representation of the assets in the CMDB that are relevant to that service, but the connections, the dependencies, and ultimately root cause and the impact of change. Tying information representing business services doesn't end with the map - we incorporate connectors from leading monitoring solutions into our event management interface, correlate that data with the service map, and BOOM, alerts, events and incidents are seen the context of an individual business service. From there, remediation can occur through automation of processes and tasks, driven by our orchestration/workflow capabilities.   That "chain" of events is important, since many organizations are approaching these tasks separately - one system for incident management, another for monitoring, another for remediation. But tying these together against a single system of record is everything - it drives improved analytics, reduction in MTTR, and improves risk and compliance.

This is the point - how ITOM complements Service Management.

More later - this is just the beginning. Tell us your thoughts on the subject…