The IT industry has long been looking to better align IT with business. Books—actually entire libraries—have been written on this subject, frameworks have been invented, vendors have created countless products to address this, and, in more general terms, IT professionals are all "atwitter" about alignment.

There is indeed value in IT-to-business alignment. An IT organization truly aligned with the business can (1) help the business run more efficiently, (2) uncover new opportunities for business growth, and (3) change the perception of IT from "necessary evil" to "key business partner."

But how to do we accomplish this alignment? IT and business-unit management personnel don't understand each other's worlds. Heck, they don't even share the same vocabulary. I've been to plenty of meetings in which the IT representative is asking questions like, "How many servers do you think we need?" and the business unit representative is responding with answers such as, "Well, however many it takes to meet our quota for customer demand."

The trend of late has been to bridge this gap through the introduction of "business services"—groupings of IT functions that represent a meaningful service to the business unit. For example, "customer ordering" might be proposed as a service to the business even though it actually spans a number of application and infrastructure components within IT.

Sounds like progress, right? Well, yes and no . . . .

Not Hot: Service Management

Before all you ITIL, COBIT, and other framework fans start sending me hate mail, let me be clear: I'm in favor of presenting IT in the context of business services. It lets IT and the business units share a common understanding of delivery, response times, and other SLA objectives. A service orientation is good. So why is it in the "not hot" section of this column? Because it's really, really, really hard to accomplish.

Some of the barriers that stand in the way include the need to (1) understand the business perception of services and expectations for delivering them, (2) assess all the application and infrastructure components that make up a business service and create dependency maps for those components, and (3) find ways to monitor and manage those components from the business service view.

In short, the journey toward service orientation is a complex, multi-year journey; you can't get there in a hurry. Unfortunately, most organizations lack the patience and funding for multi-year journeys right now. Economic pressure is forcing IT to show ROI in six to nine months. And that makes business service management "not hot" in today's climate.

Hot: Application Management

If the journey to service management is too long and arduous, does that mean that IT organizations should simply give up? Not at all. There is an area on which IT can focus to deliver business value in the short term and support a future journey toward business service management. And that area is where the applications live.

You may think I'm splitting hairs here and that little difference exists between a business service and an application. But this belief is false and serves to highlight the difficulties associated with a service orientation. For example, you may think that the Microsoft Exchange application represents an email service. But for most organizations, that's not the case. The email service typically also includes the client-side software (e.g., Outlook), portable device support (e.g., iPhone, Blackberry), and the network links that tie everything together. Exchange is just one component in that larger service.

Still, getting your arms wrapped around an application is a good thing. Maybe you can't monitor and manage all the elements of a service yet, but if you can monitor and manage key applications or supporting components, that's a good start. Who could argue that the ability to manage Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Oracle DBMS and WebLogic, IBM DB2 for i and WebSphere, and SAP R/3 is bad?

Oh, sure, application management isn't the same as providing a business-oriented service and monitoring on that level. But it's a start, it's doable in a shorter time frame, and it supports the long-term goal of service orientation. All those factors make it hot.

Sean Chandler is a computer and network consultant with more than 30 years of field experience. Astro, a border collie with more than 40 dog years of data processing experience, provides technical support to his master, Sean.

Astro's Pick of the Litter

My master has been burning through netbooks faster than I burn through Beggin' Strips (they do taste like bacon, by the way). He started a few months ago with an ASUS 9" netbook then quickly tired of the cramped keyboard and went to a 10" HP mini. He loved that one . . . for about a month. Then the quirky mouse pad finally got on his nerves, and he moved on to the Dell 10" mini. This one looks to be a keeper, mostly because it has an HDMI connector on it. That connection lets him hook up the Dell mini to his TV for better streaming of Internet video and audio. As a result, I think he's all caught up on "Wolverine and the X-Men."

—Astro