By Steve O’Connor, Vice President of IT Transformation, BMC Software

See how quickly you can get answers to these questions:

• What’s the total cost of ownership for service delivery in your enterprise?
• What projects are IT running and how are they staffed?
• Does every IT initiative support strategic objectives?
• Which projects generate the highest return on investment?
• Who are your vendors and how well are they performing?
• Are you complying with corporate IT policies and legal mandates?

If you’re like most senior IT managers and executives, it takes too long and costs too much money to get the answers you need. Your counterparts in other areas of the enterprise — in manufacturing, supply chain management, product development, and finance — have enterprise resource management and other solutions that put this type of business-oriented information at their fingertips. Consequently, they can make sound business decisions that drive business results.

You need an equivalent resource — a service resource planning solution — that puts IT business information at your fingertips. This information is absolutely essential to the successful management of IT.

What is service resource planning? Well, you may already be familiar with IT resource planning (ITRP), IT planning and control, or specific functions, such as project and portfolio management (PPM). Service resource planning is consistent with, and in many cases goes beyond, what these approaches advocate. It consolidates and connects otherwise siloed and fragmented data to provide the information and insight that helps IT executives make better, faster, and more fully informed decisions.

The Power of Service Resource Planning
Best-in-class IT organizations have established processes and controls for managing IT services based on best practice frameworks, such as IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®). These processes and controls provide greater visibility and control of those services.

Many organizations also manage IT based on business priorities, and are turning to Business Service Management (BSM) for help. BSM is a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT that reduces costs and maximizes business impact. It’s important to make service resource planning part of your overarching BSM strategy. This will help you to gain the visibility and control to better leverage both people-related and financial IT resources.

How does service resource planning help you? By eliminating the five major obstacles to managing IT as a business:

1. Vendor sprawl. If your enterprise is a large one, you have relationships with hundreds, or maybe thousands, of IT vendors. With so many interactions and associations, it’s virtually impossible to track vendor performance, service, cost, and quality. The result is a steady leak of money throughout the vendor lifecycle.

2. Fragmented Financials. Rolling up asset, staff, vendor costs, and other financial data from multiple sources is time consuming and costly. Without this data, however, you don’t know how much it costs to deliver services, applications, and projects. Consequently, you can’t allocate financial resources efficiently or present financial information in a way that IT and business users can understand.

3. Inefficient Staff Utilization. Information on how your people are spending their time is scattered across different projects, operations, and IT groups. Without an enterprise-wide view into staff resources, activities, and bandwidth, you can’t determine how human capital is being spent.

4. Inability to Align Projects with Business Objectives. Project data is also scattered. Without a global view of your project portfolio, you can’t communicate the tradeoffs between new initiatives and sustaining operations or IT’s ability to take on new projects. Worse yet, you can’t drive project priorities based on the most urgent needs of the business.

5. Insufficient Visibility into Compliance. Spreadsheet-based compliance management tools are no longer adequate

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