The Question for the day is; Where are you at within your IT organization in creating a seamless IT department?
Imagine two companies with two different portfolios, processes and cultures. Company A has settled into traditional silos, each with its own toolsets. The business and IT execu tive leadership at Company A views IT primarily in terms of overhead, as a cost center. Within this siloed universe, Operations and the Service Desk function as fundamentally separate organizations, each mistrustful of the other. When trouble tickets are generated, there is no consistent approach to closure, as Help Desk personnel are too consumed by the volume of customer complaints, and Operations views Help Desk processes as little more than meaningless reviews inappropriately forced on Operations’ more seasoned experts. The result is, of course, chaos, poor service delivery, customer dissatisfaction, and sky-high operational costs due to ineffective processes and redundant and often conflicting technology investments.
Now take Company B. Company B has adopted a more service-centric model, with roots in ITIL and other best practices. Its leadership has made investments to ensure that its siloed organizations find more effective processes and technologies for working together. It has begun to reconcile its technology investments through a CMDB initiative. And Company B has invested in solutions that can help to unite Operations and the Service Desk and even automate processes between them – both for managing change and for assuring the effective delivery of services. The result is hugely improved business value, happier customers, and much reduced operational costs.
These two examples are admittedly extremes. But there are plenty of examples of both in the real world. The good news is that more and more companies are taking the path from A to B. And while there are plenty of areas where bridging operational silos is show ing real benefit, perhaps none is more critical than uniting the customer-facing service desk with back-office Operations, so that ongoing insights into customer satisfaction and customer requirements can be managed more cohesively in conjunction with day-to-day operational realities. But bridging these two groups remains a challenge due to cultural and organizational differences. Moreover, the fact that they’re using different toolsets only serves to reinforce their isolation.
Nowhere is this chasm more conspicuous than in the ITIL processes of Incident and Problem Management, which require a close and dynamic integration between Operations and the Service Desk from both a pro cess and a technology perspective. 
This is especially true as unplanned incidents may recur and increase the difficulty of diagnosing and re solving problems. However, IT organizations can significantly improve efficiency and reduce operational costs by creating environments with shared access to common data to support Operations and the Service Desk, and by evolving and automating key processes between the two groups. Such toolset integrations also help IT to deliver superior ser vice quality and responsiveness to its service consumers. The savings from reduced downtime in Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) and Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF), for instance, can be dramatic.