About IT4IT

What is IT4IT

IT4IT is a vendor-independent open standard for managing the business of IT. It is developed by The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum, in which consumer organisations, IT vendors and academic institutions participate. The aim of IT4IT is to manage and control your entire IT chain, from software development to release and management. IT4IT helps you transforming your IT department into a coherent, agile unit with fast and flawless operations. The highly automated processes lower costs, reduce risks and enable rapid adoption of future IT trends.

Many companies in several sectors all over the world are carrying out a digital transformation in order to be able to serve their end customers quickly and efficiently. Ordered today before 12 midday, delivered the same day! This change over to a digital business is putting huge pressure on IT organisations. Somehow, they must ensure that the out dated IT environment that their organisation is still leaning on can keep up with the calls from their customers for greater speed, quality and service.

There is also an unprecedented technology push to cope with, including the Cloud, Social Media, Big Data, DevOps, Mobility and the Internet of Things... It is clear that the whole IT set-up, the IT management methods, have to be changed root-and-branch in order to be able to keep pace with all these developments and business demands, and to keep tabs on and manage the growing number of IT vendors. In short, an entirely new way of working is needed. The necessary IT management methods and frameworks require skills and competences that are different to those that IT professionals have needed up to now. The big question is ofcourse: what is the best way to handle this change?

Good news!

Once you have fully implemented the IT4IT™ model – and that may well take some years - , you will have firm grip on your operation and will be able to always follow the business needs. And there is more good news. The IT4IT™ reference architecture does not replace existing standards like ITIL, COBIT and ISO/IEC 20000 but is in fact designed to be used with these standards. IT4IT is a IT management methodology, an IT management framework. It does not focus on processes but rather on capabilities and information that is needed to manage your services through their lifecycle.

Most important is that IT4IT creates meaningful coherence between all the conceivable aspects of IT, including tools, processes, portfolio, costs (and their charging on) software development and the management and guidance of external vendors. This IT management framework provides practical lines of action to make a controlled changeover to becoming a fast, agile IT organisation that can provide de business with outstanding service at all time.

Benefits IT4IT:

• Better support of the digital enterprise
• Operational excellence
• Less errors, risks and employees
• Faster deployment of software
• Better orchestration of external service providers
• Faster adoption of new technologies
• Motivated employees

Read more on IT4IT in our selected articles