The phrase “butterfly effect” has seeped into popular culture and come to denote how a minute action (such as a butterfly flapping its wings) can have unforeseen large-scale ramifications elsewhere (causing a hurricane on the other side of the world). In a business setting, it is the responsibility of enterprise architecture to identify such potential scenarios before they negatively impact the organization. The more effective the EA practice, the more it will understand the implications of even the smallest change.
Independently of EA, sitting at the heart of the organizations, IT service management (ITSM) is responsible for a wide array of activities, delivering helpdesk support, optimizing infrastructure and providing the IT service catalog. In essence, it is responsible for managing the IT of a business. Traditionally these services react on a case by case basis, operating separately from the rest of the business – indeed some organization have gone so far as outsourcing the function. However, in the digital age, a slow, reactive and disconnected IT function is increasingly problematic – you are, after all, only as fast your slowest moving part.
While enterprise architecture and ITSM have not always been natural bedfellows – each competing to prioritize its immediate targets – as the demands of digitalization affect the way business runs, the two must find a way to work together. Get it right and a symbiotic relationship can develop, ensuring fast, precise and proactive IT and decision making. Failure to do so give competitors an upper hand as they develop robust applications and processes, which can deliver accurate results to customers quicker than you.
Integrating iServer with ServiceNow
In order to harness this relationship between enterprise architecture and ITSM, the appropriate tooling is required – and too often it is not. Organizations will attempt to combat this with a plethora of ad hoc, unregulated practices, tools and architectural repositories, which simply exacerbates the issue.
In light of this, we have developed an integration between iServer and the Now Platform, connecting the leading enterprise architecture tool with a mainstay of ITSM. The connector enables you to exploit the breadth of IT data ServiceNow provides by leveraging iServer’s market leading analysis, road mapping and visualization capabilities. This provides complete transparency into your ITSM function, ensuring that IT is aligned with the rest of the business. iServer unifies and standardizes data, using it to model out future strategies, so that you can make decisions quickly and on the basis of accurate information, rather than relying on conjecture and hypothesis. It also ensures constant communication between ITSM and EA as information and insights are exchanged, creating a collaborative environment that ensures the departments are pulling the same direction.
Moreover, waste and repetition are eliminated and it is possible to see which technologies and tools have become redundant or are reaching the end of their use. Similarly, potential vulnerabilities in an IT architecture can be identified faster and any issues resolved, lowering the risk of attack. Ultimately, this safeguards a strategically aligned and implemented target ITSM architecture, as well as an understanding of what this will mean for the wider enterprise. By developing a symbiotic relationship between ITSM and EA, you are able to ensure a wide array of benefits to the organization. Speed, accuracy and collaboration help deliver rapid effective decision making, while at the same time eliminating unwieldy processes, toolchain sprawl and repetition.
You can find out more about iServer's integration with ServiceNow here.