Touchpaper Introduces Best-Practices Methodology

Touchpaper, an international provider of IT business management (ITBM) solutions, announced March 15 the Touchpaper ITBM Maturity Model; a practical approach to best-practice service management.

According to the company's press release, the ITBM Maturity Model is a five-stage methodology that guides organizations towards aligning service management processes with corporate business objectives. The model establishes tangible solution and service deliverables that can be tracked and measured by in-built key performance indicators (KPIs).

With the third version of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) due later this year, the role of KPIs in the IT department is going to become doubly important, according to the company.

ITIL, in its current form, does not have the ability to measure performance change, making it difficult to measure the performance change of these IT processes. ITIL v3 is likely to address this, adding metrics and benchmarks to help organizations gain better visibility into how this can impact their return on investment.

Touchpaper developed the ITBM Maturity Model in response to requests from customers for a straightforward approach to implementing best-practice service management. In addition, Touchpaper held discussions with leading market analysts such as Gartner about market requirements and incorporated elements of relevant best practice approaches such as ITIL, COBIT and CMMi.

By integrating such elements, the ITBM Maturity Model creates a best practice methodology; including running day-to-day operations in service management and support through ITIL, consolidating disparate practices and ensuring IT governance through COBIT, and producing the essential elements to drive effective processes with CMMi.

Touchpaper also took into account the results of an independent survey of 100 CIOs, which measured the role of KPIs in managing the contribution of IT to business success.

The survey found that, while IT plays a central role in supporting today’s businesses, only 40% of enterprises currently measure IT’s contribution to business success with KPIs.

According to the KPI survey, 77% of IT directors agree that a key factor in IT budgets not being approved is an inability to demonstrate its relevance to wider business performance. A further 57% also agreed that this is one of the major reasons that IT is failing to achieve a place in the boardroom.