The IT Standardization Opportunity
The complexity of today’s IT environment brings a number of challenges to the business. Provision of IT services becomes more difficult and expensive on a platform of heterogeneous devices, adding effort to the management of problems, changes, integrations, upgrades and business continuity. By planning and applying a policy of IT standardization, you can simplify the infrastructure, rationalize technologies and methods, and gain significant advantages in cost, service quality and agility.
The Value of IT Standardization
- Centralize technology selection and procurement
- Simplify vendor management
- Utilize bulk purchasing power
- Increase infrastructure stability and utility
- Reduce infrastructure redundancy
- Improve the quality of services
- Increase software release agility
- Reduce impact of change
- Reduce IT support burden and cost
- Reduce non-standard infrastructure
Next: IT Standardization with assyst
IT Standardization with the assyst Solution
assyst enables the benefits of standardization by incorporating tools to support projects and policies. The solution supports the management of IT assets throughout the full lifecycle and records related vendor information, allowing for detailed audit reporting to identify areas where standardization initiatives can bring value benefits. Assets can be audited by type, model and vendor to identify total cost of ownership, coupled with related incident, problem and change records to assess the impact and cost of each type on service quality. In this way, IT asset types can be evaluated for reliability and performance, and opportunities for replacement and standardization easily identified.
Next: Key Features of assyst
Key IT Standardization Features
Standardized Processes
Standard processes can be created to manage service fulfillment and service support using the assyst process designer, a graphical, ‘drag-and-drop’ tool for creating processes to be driven by the assyst workflow automation engine. Standardization of processes brings benefits in the form of predictable results at consistent cost and within known timescales – providing a solid foundation for Service Level Management (SLM) and Continual Service Improvement (CSI).
Vendor Management
Many organizations, especially global corporations, are missing out on savings that can be gained by maximizing bulk purchasing power. Globally distributed organizations often manage purchasing at site level, instead of at organizational level, meaning purchases are split across multiple regional vendors and bulk purchasing power is limited. Through a program of standardization, supported by tools such as the service catalog, purchasing can be rationalized and centralized, and significant cost savings can be achieved.
The assyst solution provides a central system for the management of IT services globally, supported by an enterprise Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that captures full lifecycle asset data, including vendor and purchasing information. By reporting on vendor information stored within the assyst CMDB, inconsistencies are easily identified and purchasing inefficiencies can be addressed. The assyst solution further supports standardization by enabling our customers to enforce procurement policy through a published service catalog. assyst supports stock management by storing current stock levels and locations, as well as automatically controlling stock levels based on pre-defined stock and re-order quantities.
Change Management
Implementation of a standardization policy inherently requires the control provided through management of change. In order to ensure business continuity and quality of service, change must be managed to mitigate risk, cost and impact. The assyst solution incorporates powerful change management functionality to ensure risk, cost and impact are assessed from the perspective of the business. assyst allows modeling and automation of change processes, which can include mandatory approval and authorization tasks to ensure continued compliance with the organization’s standardization policy. This functionality supports the changes required to implement standardization, as well as supporting ongoing policies through implementation of a service catalog and controlled service request fulfillment. It also allows all changes to be considered in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
Service Catalog
The value of an IT standardization project can be quickly lost as a result of change, unless a long-term policy is applied to enforce centralized control and maintain the agreed infrastructure standards. By defining and publishing a complete set of authorized purchases, as part of a service catalog and service portfolio, control can be maintained and the value of a standardized infrastructure retained. The assyst solution incorporates functionality to create and deploy a service catalog, supported by an automated service request management system and service fulfillment processes for end-to-end control of procurement.
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assyst has enabled us to consolidate incident and change management into a single system, thereby reducing software and support costs. In addition it enables us to improve effectiveness by linking incidents to changes, which allows us to better track the effect of changes across the environment.
University of Notre Dame |
