IBM Wants to Help IT Manage Itself

Recently IBM unveiled a slew of new services and software aimed at helping enterprise IT departments manage their processes.

The IT department has always been less managed than other enterprise business units. After all, programming is more art than science, right? So schedules and budgets don't apply like they do in (every) other department. This drives senior executives to distraction, and has cost more than a few IT executives their jobs. Meanwhile, some big deals like Sarbanes-Oxley have focused, literally, the law on IT processes, operations, and controls. Something has to change. That's where IBM's new glogal program comes in.

"This is an integrated announcement supported by IBM Tivoli, IBM Global Services, IBM Rational and IBM WebSphere," said Susan Blocher, director of worldwide marketing for Tivoli, adding that the crux of the offering is geared toward helping IT departments more effectively deliver, design and implement better processes. The offering is based on the company's and IGS' customer experience, which has taught them that better IT process management, service and automation are sorely needed. Core to the solutions are "tool mentors" that help implement actions prescribed by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), an industry guide of best practices, she said.

The new services and software rollout includes IBM Tivoli Unified Process, a navigational tool for customizing and implementing best practices for mapping, modifying and improving IT processes; IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, a virtualized database that joins IT information speed across multiple databases; IBM Tivoli Process Managers, prepackaged software to automate IT processes that can be customized to a particular vertical industry; enhancements to existing Tivoli products to support IT service management; and customized services from IGS around the new IT service management solutions.

IBM will compete against robust specialists in IT management such as Niku. I believe that IBM is on the right track, as there is no alternative in the modern enterprise to getting IT more managed and more manageable.

-- Peter S. Kastner