Over the past two years, the economy has forced IT departments to downsize, sometimes cutting their budgets to the bone. Priorities and processes had to be reevaluated, and one of the main tenets of ITSM — do more with less — became an imperative with teeth. With the economy motivating this drive to do more with less, it may have come as an unwanted change. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the folks on the “O” side of Forrester’s I&O team have long been focused on how you can reduce your IT costs through automation and industrialization — essentially, how to do more with less.

But now IT budgets are springing back, which may tempt some to stray from the path of IT service management. We urge you to resist this temptation. Our research shows that in 2010, most of the I&O budget is being spent on new infrastructure, not personnel. This means you're still having to do more with less, and to do this you need to focus on process. In fact, we want you to focus on process and industrializing your operations so much, we’ve built our holiday wish list around it.

The Ten Things We Want For The Holidays (and The Ten Things You Need To Improve Your IT Service Management )

• True active executive commitment
  • To achieve real results, you need to have CIO-level support.
• Behavior change – discipline of IT service management
  • To launch a successful program, you need to educate and enforce.
• Start with low-hanging fruit.
  • Don’t start too big. First, determine your pain points and work up from there.
• Consolidate operations.
  • Take a look at your service chain from end to end. Then eliminate protectionism.
• Consolidate and trim management tools.
  • Incorporate tools into a unified, integrated portfolio and eliminate redundancy.
• Fortify the information for decision-making.
  • Move your CMDB to a federated CMS.
• Blend ITIL with other frameworks or best practices.
  • Such as COBIT, Six Sigma, etc.
• Expand IT service management beyond operations.
  • Take a look at service quality needs and service optimization needs.
• Develop a sales and marketing function.
  • Run IT as a business to increase not only your service to clients, but also your business case for your organization.
• Develop an IT operations balanced scorecard.
  • Designed to help you develop a well-rounded, balanced organization.

Check out the accompanying presentation on the I&O Community and tell us what's on your IT service management holiday wish list!