Aligning with the business

and share your ideas in one of the three sections below; Getting alignment, Maintaining alignment, Optimizing alignment

Getting alignment
According to Michael Porter, strategic competetive advantage can only be gained through differentiation, and hence innovation. Simply benchmarking others and duplicating their successes will not guarantee long term survival. All businesses must innovate, and that includes the business of I/T (and should be applied to I/T operations as well). What does this mean? If the 'business side' of the company cannot elucidate the differentiation that drives sustainable strategic competitive advantage, then how can I/T? ITIL and any other framework or set of best practices will ensure the utility of I/T but not enable I/T to participate with the business in gaining and maintaining strategic competitive advantage.

Business Service Management
When faced with a number of IT problems, which do you fix first? The first one that comes in – or the one that poses the most risk to your business? Business service management helps you isolate problems, understand their business impact and prioritize solutions to minimize the impact on your customers.

HP Business Service Management solutions link business services, such as purchasing a book online, to the underlying IT components to provide visibility into the impact of IT failures and mitigate business risk. By understanding these relationships, you can take a top-down approach and proactively identify performance problems before end users are impacted. You can combine this with a bottom-up approach to identify the impact on critical business services when a specific server or network component fails.

With these solutions, your IT organization can:


 * Consolidate event management to clean up noisy monitoring and reduce duplication of effort
 * Automate service impact analysis to establish priorities, identify impacted users and provide estimated downtime information
 * Monitor and manage the end-user experience in order to proactively address events before they have a negative impact
 * Accelerate problem resolution by drilling down from application problems to IT components and allocating the service ticket to the correct team quickly
 * Pinpoint which high-value transactions are failing and at which step in the process
 * Integrate problem and incident resolution processes across service desk and application support teams

HP Business Availability Center
HP Business Availability Center is a comprehensive business service and application management solution that helps you to deliver on that promise. Your team can monitor the health of your business services and applications from the point of view of the consumers of those services


 * HP Business Availability Center software for Composite Application Management
 * HP End User Management software
 * HP Business Process Monitor software
 * HP Real User Monitor software
 * HP Problem Isolation software
 * HP Service Level Management software
 * HP SiteScope software
 * HP System Availability Management software
 * HP Business Transaction Management
 * HP Business Process Insight software
 * HP TransactionVision software
 * HP Diagnostics software
 * HP Universal CMDB software
 * HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software

HP Network Management Center
The HP Network Management Center is an integrated solution that delivers network lifecycle management. Based on the ITIL model, this solution enables your organization to achieve automation across the lifecycle phases of plan, deliver, operate and improve network service management. Through these capabilities, you can break down the traditional silos and functions across your IT organization.


 * HP Network Automation software
 * HP Network Node Manager i software
 * HP Network Node Manager(NNM)Advanced Edition software
 * HP Network Node Manager(NNM)Starter Edition software
 * HP Operations Support Systems Portfolio software
 * HP Performance Insight software
 * HP Report Pack Gallery
 * HP Route Analytics Management software
 * HP TeMIP software

HP Operations Center
Both automation and consolidation can improve your IT efficiencies. By automating event management and processes, HP customers have improved productivity by 36 percent. Consolidation of monitoring tools also helps reduce duplication of effort while empowering your teams to work across silos to solve complex problems. In addition, service impact analysis helps you map your existing monitoring to the business services impacted, enabling you to prioritize and manage IT problems according to business criticality.


 * HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software
 * HP GlancePlus Pak software
 * HP Operations Dashboard software
 * HP Operations Manager Dependency Mapping Automation software
 * HP Operations Manager i 8.0 software
 * HP Operations Manager software
 * HP Performance Manager software
 * HP Reporter software
 * HP SiteScope software
 * HP Universal CMDB software

Maintaining alignment
We encourage you to edit this section on how IT can maintain alignment to the business.