CA-sponsored study highlights best practices for achieving IT service management excellence

The study, conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI) and sponsored by CA, also pinpointed five specific best practices that are crucial for achieving excellence in IT service management.

'Although studies for the Middle East are still in process, initial results indicate that the best practices crucial for achieving IT excellence in the Middle East are in-line with the global study. However, local companies and organizations are lagging behind in terms of ITIL implementation, so there is extensive work that needs to be done on awareness and training levels in order to create a sustainable culture that will guide ITIL practice to higher maturity levels,'

stated Feras Abou Shackra, Executive Committee for itSMF Gulf.

The results revealed five sets of IT service management best practices that consistently improve the effectiveness of IT organizations' change, configuration and release practices. These improvements typically result in higher IT resource utilization, more consistent quality of end-user experience, and/or reduced overall risk from poor change management practices.

These best practices are:

Rigorous release management

Top performers roll back 46% fewer failed releases and measure 90% fewer unauthorized changes than others in the study. So, while change management may often be a logical starting point for ITIL implementations, IT organizations seeking the highest levels of performance should also focus on more rigorous build, test, and rollback process for releases.

CMDB deployment

Top performers with CMDB-enabled processes resolve 28% more incidents within SLA limits than others in the study.

Process

IT organizations that actively encourage compliance with documented processes and procedures achieve higher levels of performance. Top performers with a strong process culture have an 11% higher change success rate than others in the study.

Standardized configuration

Standardized configuration practices predict top levels of performance in configuration drift and security breaches automatically detected, with top performers able to automatically detect security breaches 42% more often than others in the study.

Tight control of access to production systems

Access control is also a key best practice for high-performing IT organizations. Top performers have 60% fewer emergency changes than others in these areas.

The study noted that these best practices are ideally adopted in conjunction with each other.