Today the IT organization and the CIO are evolving from merely managing technology towards driving innovation and business growth. As IT becomes more and more integrated with the business, and perhaps, in some cases, even is the business, the actual technology elements that were for so long its focus are just far too removed to be truly business relevant. After all, does a car buyer really care about how many pounds of steel went into the car rather than what its gas mileage is or what the warranty program entails?

Who in the business unit really cares about server availability? Worse still, when individual groups, such as a network or server group, can't see how their area contributes to the greater good, they remain inwardly focused on metrics to justify their own capabilities (i.e. network availability, bandwidth or capacity) and the tendency then becomes to blame other departments when things go awry.

Transitioning to a business service oriented perspective can change the focus of IT to one which is fundamentally customer and business value centric. In order to do that, IT needs to assess everything it does for its customers and define them as "IT Services”.

Best practices such as the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL, with its focus on service management processes that transcend organizational boundaries, have been helpful in enabling this transition. But even these can fall short if IT lacks two critical capabilities:

• Firstly, the means to automate activities within and across ITIL processes so that the benefits of a service-centric approach can be fully realized. Without this, IT faces the danger of becoming “better organized” but is unable to actually deliver any improvements.
• Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, a way to build an abstraction layer between what’s traditionally been managed as technology elements and the business processes. Business processes reference one or many IT services and are comprised of IT assets and a combination of people and projects.

It is only by building such a layer of abstraction that will enable IT's focus to truly change from their traditional asset perspective ("what we have"), to the new value-oriented perspective ("what we deliver"). Furthermore, aggregating data at a service layer reveals far more potent information sources and the knowledge needed to drive service improvement and shift the culture and mindset of the IT organization.

What do I mean by that? I'm talking about the CIO and IT having a "360-degree view" or a "unified view of services." Such a common and unified view can offer unprecedented insights across all of IT management: service levels, prices, costs, quality, customer satisfaction, risks and exposures, compliance, service consumers and more. Those insights span the core concerns of enterprise IT management, namely, efficient and effective governance, business service management and security management.

This 360-degree view is powered by what's known as a "Unified Service Model" (or "USM" for short). This USM can aggregate raw data associated with a service captured in the configuration management database (CMDB). It does so by gleaning data from a system's built-in best practice management solutions and by transforming that raw data into useful and comprehensive business information. That information, in turn, provides insights about the service across all of IT.

There’s an organizational aspect to this that should not be overlooked. Simply put, CIOs and high-level IT managers should begin empowering their staff to think of themselves as not just, say, database administrators, but also as critical players who support particular services for their customers. The role of an “IT Service Manager” is often used to organizationally embody the shift towards a service oriented IT culture.

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