Most IT organizations know that to be successful, key business initiatives don’t rely on silos of data, but on information viewed and analyzed collectively. For example, customer relationship management (CRM) integrates critical information on all aspects of customer interactions - such as marketing, sales-force automation and customer-service to provide a consistent or "360 degree" view of – "the customer."

Today’s progressive service-centric organizations realize that a similar approach is needed in IT. Because, when you think about it, IT organizations exist to deliver IT services, comprised of assets, projects, people and processes. Data on each of these components is useful in itself, but it's only truly valuable when it can be aggregated into information and viewed from a service perspective.

On just this subject, I was speaking with one of our customers recently (the director of enterprise architecture at a diversified oil and gas distribution company) – and he hit the nail squarely on the head. "Right now, I've got to be able to relate every activity, every dollar and every person to a positive business outcome." And that's pretty much no different from what his company does as a business. He explained that, "the guy who runs a pipeline needs to point to some activity, some project or some person and be able to relate the amount of value that’s going to come out of that barrel of oil they're involved with."

If you’re a CIO, I can hear you saying "yep, that's exactly what's going on for me today - but what’s actually required to make a 360-degree view of IT a reality?"

I've long held the view that a complete IT management solution should provide an overarching view of IT’s customers, services, risks, projects, people and infrastructure. But to take the 360-degree view from beyond hype to making it real for IT – it needs to incorporate what I like to call a "unified service model" (or USM, for short).

This USM consists of "service definitions" that reside in the system's configuration management database (CMDB). Now, these service definitions provide insight into the IT components (infrastructure assets, people and processes) that support a given service and the interrelationships between those components. And the CMDB - while not actually a database - is an application which consists of configuration items (CIs) and relationships that make up the IT components associated with a service (such as the assets, the processes and the people involved with that service).

More specifically, the USM aggregates the raw data associated with a service and captured in the CMDB. It does so by gleaning data from the associated, integrated management solutions (including those based on ITIL) — and then transforming that raw data into useful business information – information that can provide clear insight about the service across all of IT.

Simply put, the USM provides an overarching view into what’s going on under IT’s hood. That way, appropriate actions can be taken as they pertain to the bottom line. That, in turn, can empower the CIO, IT management — and everyone involved with that service. For example, a CIO can start doing things like quickly getting the total cost of a service, including the capital costs and the operational costs. Going further, such a common, unified view provided by the USM offers unprecedented insight across all of IT management: service levels, prices, costs, quality, risks and exposures, service consumers and more.

I'll be discussing the subject of the unified service model in future blogs – but for more on the subject of a "360-degree view for IT" - check out the recent cover story of "Smart Enterprise" magazine (http://smartenterprisemag.com/).

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