Could RAM be moved off server blades?
No, POV is not some hot new data-center technology that you haven't picked up on yet. It's a completely non-technical term that you might remember from freshman composition: POV means "point of view," the perspective from which a story is told. Just as in fiction, the point of view from which an IT story is told can have a dramatic impact on what it means and how we respond.
Both IT and users tell stories about technology. One of the biggest problems with enterprise IT has been the fact that differing points of view made sure that the user stories and IT stories didn't agree. The users' POV was centered on what they did each day for their jobs - managing customer accounts, developing marketing campaigns, whatever - while in IT, POV centered on the hardware, software, and network systems.
IT told stories about how applications, servers, routers and switches were performing; users told stories about how well the services that they depended on - e-mail, financials, CRM - were meeting their needs, without reference to the underlying systems providing those services. When a story had to be agreed upon, whether one promising something (call it an SLA) or one documenting something (call it performance against SLA), there were inevitably disagreements and misunderstandings.
There has been a sea change in IT over the last several years as ever more enterprises seek to address this problem of divergent points of view by bringing the idea of "services" to the center of IT's thinking about what it does and how it needs to communicate. IT service management (ITSM) is becoming the norm for talking about IT's role and performance, a point reflected in organizational structures, IT practices, and management tools.
Organizationally, we have seen the transformation of help desks (the place to call for help) to service desks (the place to call to talk to IT) as the first and most obvious change.
We have also seen the erosion of barriers between user-facing staff and data center staff driven by that transformation, and enabled by ticketing systems that explicitly embody service-centric thinking. These systems are built on the assumption that in order to fully address a user-reported incident, the technical problems underlying it, and any changes that might follow, the whole complex of activity needs to be tracked from report to resolution across any and all organizational and technological boundaries.
Nemertes found that all participants in its recent service delivery and management benchmark research used some kind of ticketing system, and that fully 87% had a single system touching all IT staff.
IT is structuring other aspects of operations around an ITSM point of view as well, ranging from change management to budgeting and planning. Enabling and driving this change has been the diffusion of ITSM best-practices frameworks and guidelines. Just under 75% of benchmark participants were using some form of best-practices framework, most often - 86% of the time - the IT Infrastructure Library.
On the management tools side, vendors large and small are attempting to help IT cope with the ever more complex interactions amongst component systems in providing services to end users. By automatically finding, or allowing IT to define, the inter-relations amongst the parts, these tools allow IT to monitor operations from a services-oriented perspective; to have the icon for "e-mail" go red, for example, rather than the icon for a cryptically named NAS appliance on which mailboxes live.
ITSM is, at its root, a change in POV for IT, but it is not just altering how IT understands and communicates with users: it is reaching into the data center and the NOC to change the substance of the core of that work and the tools with which it is accomplished.