Overview

The enterprise is in a strange new position when it comes to providing its employees with the tools they need to perform their duties.

On the one hand, the tools continue to become, or come to rely on, information systems. Companies and industries convert processes that were paper-based (such as medical records management) to be all-digital. Physical tools (like packaging machines on a factory floor) continue not only to be driven by ever more sophisticated automation, but also are increasingly tied into the rest of the IT infrastructure by supply-chain management or other software.

On the other hand, enterprises are settling into a hugely dispersed state: approximately 90% of workers work from locations other than headquarters. Enterprises are also continuing to consolidate all IT operations into actual data centers (removing all application and even file servers from branches and departments), and consolidating the set of data centers from which they deliver services.

Consequently, most employees do not work in the same building, or even at the same location, as a primary corporate data center. IT departments

Volume 1 of the benchmark, "Service Delivery and Management” discusses the major challenges IT executives face as they struggle to manage application delivery and performance, and looks at some of the key organizational factors affecting how they address those challenges.

Volume 2 of the benchmark, "Management and Monitoring Business Case," discusses how IT shops currently see the basic business drivers guiding their strategies and then turns to building the base of a business case for using management tools, discussing some of the costs associated with management tools and the savings realized by implementing them.

Volume 3 of the benchmark, “Management and Monitoring Best Practice,” examines several management and monitoring activities commonly understood to be best practices and their relationship to SDM success, and explores aspects of management tool use and organization that affect success.

Volume 4 of the benchmark, “Product and Vendor Assessment,” discusses the management market, the factors IT executives use in deciding which management vendors and products to work with, and analyzes their ratings of their current tool sets and partners. Or lack of partners, as the case may be, since one key finding is that, although still not as broadly deployed as commercial products, open-source management tools are garnering high ratings from the people using them.

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