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The strategic management process uses qualitative and quantitative information under conditions of uncertainty in order to integrate both intuition and analysis. Management intuition is based on judgment, past experiences, and feelings and is used in conditions of great uncertainty or conditions where there is no precedent to assist management in making decisions. At all levels within the organization, management must make decisions under conditions of uncertainty on a daily basis and it is their intuition which influences that interpretation of analyses that affects the strategic decisions taken. A key attribute of the strategic management process is adaptability to change, and organizations must monitor internal and external events as an iterative process in order to ensure timely adaptation is effected.

Over the past 20 years, the magnitude of the rate of change in information technology as well as its acceleration, combined with increased access to global marketplaces and increased national and international regulation have forced change upon organizations at a rate never before seen. This increased the pressure on management to develop adaptive strategies in order to stay in competition and even to stay in existence. Strategies, overall, are the means by which longterm objectives are intended to be achieved and could include geographic diversification, product development, service differentiation, acquisition of other organizations, divestitures, retrenchments, or even liquidation.

Strategic management is an attempt to utilize existing knowledge to forecast the outcomes of events and the degree to which they can be influenced by management actions.

Simple comparison between Insourcing, Outsourcing, Co-sourcing, Partnership, Merger & Acquisition

The readiness assessment provides a structured mechanism for determining an organisation’s capabilities and state of readiness for delivering a new or revised application in support of the defined key business drivers. The information obtained from such an assessment can be used in determining the delivery strategy for a particular application, IT system, or IT service. The delivery strategy is the approach taken to move an organisation from a known state, based on the readiness assessment, to a desired state, determined by the business drivers. There are many ways to prepare an organisation for deploying a new application. The method and strategy selected should be based on the solution the organisation chooses for fulfilling its key business drivers, as well as the capabilities of the IT organisation and its partners. The scale of options available is quite large and not every option need be considered in every case. However, keeping all the options available for consideration is key for building and operating innovative solutions to the most difficult business challenges. In the end, this may be the difference between a failed project – or even a failed company – and a successful one.

1. Service Delivery and Process Automation
Create effective, high quality management processes for service delivery and support, and reduce cost via automation and data integration.

2. Service Availability and Performance Management
Monitor, manage, correlate, visualize and control critical service support and service delivery processes to ensure applications and services meet service level agreements and business targets.

3. Storage Management

The primary standard for IT Service Management is ISO/IEC 20000. The standard and ITIL are aligned and continue to be aligned, although the standard is currently to be extended with the development of Parts 3 and 4:

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 Part 1: Specification Defines the requirements for Service Management

ISO/IEC 20000-2:2005 Part 2: Code of Practice Provides guidance and recommendations on how to meet the requirements in Part 1

ISO/IEC 20000-3:2007 Part 3: Scoping and applicability (Not available yet)

As technology is a core component of most business processes, continued or high availability of IT is critical to the survival of the business as a whole. This is achieved by introducing risk reduction measures and recovery options. Ongoing maintenance of the recovery capability is essential if it is to remain effective.

The purpose of ITSCM is to maintain the appropriate on-going recovery capability within IT services to match the agreed needs, requirements and timescales of the business.

ITSCM includes a series of activities throughout the lifecycle to ensure that, once service continuity and recovery plans have been developed, they are kept aligned with Business Continuity