A lean economy creates difficult choices for IT departments. Customers, forced to do more with fewer resources, are demanding greater economies of scale. We see IT managers grapple every day with the challenge of ensuring the health of the services their businesses depend on while keeping the cost of service delivery down. Is it possible for IT departments to achieve optimal results and greater economies of scale while lowering the cost of service delivery? Business and economic realities are telling us - and our customers - that we have to.

The hard reality is that as business challenges mount, the quality of business services must as well - now is not the time to lower expectations for service delivery. With less buying power in the market, it's important to ensure your customers continue to value your services. But you have to be smart about where and how you spend your resources, knowing you have to accelerate your time-to-value and achieve a rapid payback and continuous ROI.

We see customers embracing new solutions that put them ahead of the curve, let them manage technologies top-down according to the services they provide and proactively address issues before they impact their business services. This kind of proactive approach requires service-centric visibility that gives the "heads up" needed to avert developing IT issues that present risk to service delivery and the insight needed to quickly fix issues and regain service quality when it is compromised. A service-centric approach to IT management with keen visibility into service quality impact and risk enables IT to maintain a robust infrastructure that results in significant business benefits that are rewarding for everyone - end users and providers:

• Compliance with OLAs/SLAs
• Faster MTTR (mean time to repair)
• Elimination of unproductive troubleshooting for lower OPEX and increased IT staff productivity
• Greater insight for capacity planning and capital investment decision-making

The bottom line is that with a better view of its services, IT can improve service quality while operating more efficiently as a lean organization. To learn more about the challenges a lean economy presents and strategies you can employ to meet these challenges more effectively, take a look at: Innovations in Managing IT Service Quality: Managing Service Quality and Risk to Service Delivery in a Lean Economy.