Building Operational Excellence: Strategies to Improve It People and Processes

This book shows IT managers exactly how to assess their own organizational processes, and then improve those processes to "best practice" levels -- starting today. Drawing on META Group's worldwide enterprise consulting experience, it introduces a new way to understand IT processes, and a step-by-step approach to defining goals, filling in gaps, eliminating weaknesses, and achieving excellence. This book focuses on five core areas of IT management: operations, engineering support, finance, security, and customer relationship management (CRM). The authors introduce Centers of Excellence (COEs): clusters of interrelated IT tasks that, when properly sequenced, can be the building blocks of "best practice" processes. Building on this concept, they show how to define IT processes that optimize efficiency and effectiveness across the IT organization; integrate and automate similar tasks and processes; improve accountability and correlate IT processes with service-level agreements; assign costs more accurately; and -- above all -- provide a consistent, excellent customer experience. For all IT managers seeking to improve the quality, timeliness, and value of the services they provide.