How To Automate IT Service Delivery

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Step No. 2: Ensuring process automation across the enterprise

Once the comprehensive, underlying service technologies are in place, companies can cross business units and domains in order to orchestrate processes beyond IT and into the departments and functions necessary for execution. All necessary tasks, communications and status can be facilitated, managed and viewed throughout the enterprise from a centralised location, delivering a single version of truth. This helps to coordinate and control work efforts. This also reduces the time it takes to provision physical server and virtual machines. It provides the necessary foundation for orchestrating service delivery across complex environments consisting of the cloud, service providers, suppliers and customers.

Step No. 3: Automating fulfillment channels of business demand across multiple functional domains

Such a highly orchestrated environment also helps to connect the silos within an organisation such that they no longer exist in terms of user experience and enterprise procedures. With automated service delivery, for instance, a single action can seamlessly trigger multiple actions and tasks across an organisation’s domains — without any additional human intervention necessary.

Step No. 4: Incorporating the service delivery strategy into the cloud strategy

Done right, a comprehensive cloud strategy addresses the specifics of what will be provisioned, as well as how it will be delivered. For instance, a private cloud might provide capacity for typical IT services and a public cloud might be employed when a specific operational group requires a quick, finite burst for a special project.

If both technologies have been incorporated into the dynamic data centre, users can automatically provision these options as easily as they currently consume physical and virtual resources. This, in turn, facilitates the agility attracting enterprises to the cloud to begin with, essentially delivering on the promise of the technology. Moreover, the flexibility helps minimise overall IT complexity by allowing organisations to use a single tool to manage virtualisation and cloud technologies from various vendors.

Ryan Shopp is a Senior Director of Product Marketing for CA. In this role, Ryan focuses on thought leadership, strategy, positioning, sales enablement and evangelism for one of CA’s product portfolios. Ryan’s 15+ years of domain expertise in IT infrastructure and management span leadership roles in marketing, product management and sales engineering for Dell, INS (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), AT&T, EDS and startups such as Securityworks (acquired by Lumension), NetVMG (acquired by Internap), Centrata (acquired by Lontra) and AlterPoint (acquired by Versata). As a subject matter expert, Ryan has blogged and presented at numerous trade shows and events. Ryan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University and has multiple industry certifications. He can be reached at ryan.shopp@ca.com.