TeamQuest & IT Service Optimization (ITSO)

Specializing in Capacity Management software, TeamQuest works day in and day out with IT professionals dealing with performance and capacity related issues. This focus brings a breadth and depth of understanding to our mission and allows us a more intimate knowledge of the challenges concerning the planning, provisioning and delivery of IT services, as well as a grasp of the business context in which IT must perform.

Through our experiences and through listening to customers, TeamQuest has become a driving force in the Capacity Management arena, perhaps best known for our expertise and leadership in the capacity planning and analytic modeling fields.

As our relationships with customers have developed and expanded over time, TeamQuest has perceived a consistent need for something else – a systematic, repeatable process for proactively managing IT services. We responded by crafting a best practice process for optimizing the planning and delivery of IT services, called IT Service Optimization (ITSO).

IT Service Optimization (ITSO)

The goal of ITSO is to consistently meet IT service levels while minimizing infrastructure costs and mitigating performance risks. While this can be achieved in a multitude of ways, from consolidating servers to avoiding bottlenecks to better aligning IT with business objectives, ITSO provides the framework for proactively managing the infrastructure used to support business goals.

What are the benefits of ITSO?

ITSO increases the business value of IT, making the IT organization more efficient and effective.

ITSO helps organizations move from being reactionary to a more mature process of proactive planning, provisioning and aligning with business objectives.

ITSO offers several benefits:

• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Greater return on IT investment
• Consistent IT service delivery
• Improved asset utilization
• Enterprise view of IT
• Business and IT alignment
• Proactive adjustment to business changes

ITSO is focused on the following areas:

• Ensuring business requirements are understood and documented for all IT services
• Streamlining performance testing and provisioning processes to deliver applications with optimal IT resources while taking both business requirements and data center architectural policies into consideration
• Managing services to ensure that risk levels align with business priorities under a variety of conditions
• Ensuring service levels will be met as workloads increase
• Providing quick detection and remediation of problems before they affect users, ensuring a permanent fix over time
• Ensuring the most critical applications function as expected
• Managing data center resources in an optimal manner to maximize utilization and adaptability
• Identifying underutilized capacity for redeployment
• Consolidating servers and predicting how combined applications will compete for resources

ITSO Supports ITIL and BSM

ITSO observes many of the same common sense best practices as ITIL. However, ITSO is not as all-encompassing, so there is less impact on the organization as a whole to implement it. While ITIL is focused on provisioning services, ITSO is more about optimizing existing IT infrastructure usage.

While ITIL is a framework for managing your IT operations, Business Service Management (BSM) is a concept concerned with showing how IT performance affects business performance.

Like BSM, ITSO is concerned with understanding the business perspective and relating it to IT. ITSO, however, narrows the focus and provides more detailed processes for the optimization of the technology used to support business goals.

What is the ITSO Process?