Appraising your existing IT sensibly

In an interview given to Vishnu Anand of CyberMedia Vivek Kumar Sharma, country head, Sales for Compuware, sheds light into the company's business service delivery model and much more.

What's Compuware's definition of business service delivery model and what does it mean to a CIO?

Business Service Delivery is Compuware's unique approach to ensuring that applications are available, performing, and meeting the needs of end users; that problems are proactively detected and resolved; that application investments are aligned with business priorities; and that IT can deliver a view of service that makes sense to the business.

By taking care of the above, we effectively capture the business service delivery model needs of a CIO. Through our experience in this field, our approach helps CIOs optimize end-to-end application performance for businesses.

It is because of this belief that we are able to successfully cater to the CIO needs of leading companies that include 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies.

Over the last few months, what additional questions does a CIO need answers to, with regard to performance of existing IT and what advice would Compuware give in terms of future deployments?

Today, IT is the business and the business is IT. This immediately raises questions about accountability. Is the IT service provider or the business process owner ultimately accountable for the success or failure of the business process? The correct answer is “both”!

Proving and communicating the business value of IT services and investments is a constant challenge for CIOs. Since IT enables critical business processes, understanding and improving IT service delivery become even more crucial. In an economic downturn, IT must do more with less while delivering better application service levels to users. The misalignment between IT and the business makes it difficult for IT to:

- Understand the business impact of IT service quality

- Prioritize IT resources and problem resolution based on business needs

- Communicate real-time business-relevant performance metrics

- Create value by leveraging existing IT management investments.

The issues that concern every CIO, namely meeting the needs of the end users, aligning application investments with business priorities and proactively discovering and resolving problems have been discussed above. In every organization, the most important question a CIO needs to answer is: do these initiatives make sense to the business?

Our advice at this point to all CIOs would be to opt for a partner who understands their business and offers the best of breed solutions that are scalable, flexible and rated as leaders in their domain by customers, partners and analysts.

They need a solution that is a combination of technical performance management, along with BSM, and extended into the realm of IT governance which are critical to both IT and business equally. This is something we are able to provide with our solutions Vantage (ITSM) and Changepoint (ITPM).

The Changepoint solution addresses IT governance and project and portfolio management within the IT governance space. BSM and IT governance are both aimed at aligning IT with the business. The fact that IT governance and BSM are not well linked in the market is an opportunity identified by Compuware to differentiate ourselves.

What are some of Compuware's tools that make most sense during slowdowns?

For its investment in IT, business leadership expects new operational capabilities, competitive innovations and enterprise agility. Business Service Delivery (BSD) is the unique platform Compuware uses to ensure its customers keep the business promise of IT.

Compuware has been the market leader in proving the most effective solutions for many years now. Organizations can use Vantage not just to improve the performance of applications but to make better use of existing assets and staff – and avoid unnecessary investments. More recently we announced the Vantage 11, built on a unique approach to ensure organizations achieve business value through enterprise applications.