The right IT service management approach to SaaS should provide built-in best practices. It should leverage a configuration management database (CMDB) with a discovery agent that can go out in the environment and discover all software and hardware, perform audits on the configuration items (CIs), and run reports on servers and software that are not being used and licenses that are not being used correctly. The discovery tool should also be able to map each CI to specific services to eliminate operational disruptions caused by equipment failure and poorly planned change processes. This is important in business, but even more important in government.

It’s crucial for the government to have a consistent system across all or most of its entities because they interact with each other. That’s why government IT needs a service management solutions vendor that has seen it all and done it all. The vendor should use proven solutions based on best practices from the IT Infrastructure Library. The solutions vendor should bring the expertise and knowledge of many different implementations to help each entity set up best practices and implement SaaS.

By Marc Ferrentino