Lifecycle management is the process of managing a service from the initial request through approval, provisioning, ongoing maintenance, and finally to decommissioning. But managing the lifecycle of IT services is a challenge for many organizations - most IT shops have little visibility into what services are still being used and for what purpose.
This applies equally to both the data center and the workplace services provided by IT. The complex IT processes associated with employee on-boarding and off-boarding are often inefficient, chaotic or ad hoc. The application hosting request is a similarly complex data center service - the steps required to build a new server represent one of the most time-consuming, complex, and expensive processes in enterprise IT.
Virtualization and cloud computing have compressed the process for on-boarding a new application - and virtual desktops may help with managing the employee workplace environment. But cloud instances and virtual machines can also represent new governance and compliance headaches due to the ease in which they can be provisioned and the lack of visibility into who requested them, for what reason, and what data may be running on them.
The difficulty begins with the initial request for service. IT service owners need to track the physical things as well as the intangible things - such as desktop software, cell phone plans, account IDs, shared folders, virtual servers and application workloads - associated with each service request. At newScale, we refer to these as service items - because what's important is not just the asset or configuration item data, but also the context of the service they are associated with. For example, who "owns" which laptops or PDAs or servers, in what business unit, and for what business purpose.
Without that service context and business-relevant information, it becomes difficult to manage updates, create invoices based on consumption or, ultimately, recover resources when they are no longer needed. It can be particularly difficult to recover service items once they are no longer needed (e.g. a project ends, a person leaves the company, roles or business conditions change). IT often has no way to easily know whether the project that required a virtual test environment is still ongoing, or if the user of that cell phone is still employed by the company. Yet an effective off-boarding process is essential to reducing costs, eliminating risk, and ensuring compliance.
By implementing newScale LifecycleCenter™ together with newScale RequestCenter®, IT can help ensure accountability and efficiency through self-service on-boarding and off-boarding for these IT services - from desktop to data center, across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. And while most service request systems focus on the ordering and fulfillment steps, that's just the beginning. Both IT managers and requestors can effectively track, manage, and update each service item associated with a request.
Many organizations have invested in a CMDB or asset management system to discover and maintain some of this data. Now you can easily synchronize your service request process with the asset and configuration item data in these systems. This unlocks the data that otherwise may be trapped in the CMDB, providing it to end users and service owners in a context that allows them to act on the data effectively.
With this lifecycle approach, IT can track the business context for each service item and manage all of your IT services from cradle-to-grave. From the initial ordering moment through to the fulfillment and ongoing management of the service, the result is improved user satisfaction, efficiency, and visibility. And whether for employee off-boarding or de-commissioning an unused virtual machine, effective management at the end of the lifecycle process can reduce risk and save millions of dollars.
To learn more, you can go to our Literature Request section to download the Data Sheet for the newScale LifecycleCenter.
