Any IT function within an organisation that is delivering services to its end-users with a goal of supporting the business processes, needs some sort of structure to achieve this. Historically, this structure was around functions and technical capabilities. But with the ever increasing speed of change, and the need for flexibility, this is no longer an option.

Increasingly the structure is formed around processes and customers (end-users or groups of users), just as in any other part of the organisation. This is further supported by the requirement to be able to demonstrate effective processes and controls in delivery of IT, to support the regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.  

For these reasons, organisations are eager to embrace frameworks and standards that claim to make this possible.

Some examples include:

• TQM for process orientation and continuous improvements
• COBIT for increased control
• CMMI for process control in software (and systems) development
• ITIL version 2 for process control in operational and tactical provisioning.

Using and implementing these frameworks, organisations hope to be able to capture and manage tomorrow's complexities and meet regulatory compliance.

With a growing number of frameworks, covering various elements of IT Management (eg service management, development management, procurement, strategy, information management, etc) the coherence between the elements will suffer. The overall picture, that is so essential to provide end-to-end services across the elements, is getting less attention. Most focus on the tight relationship between processes within a certain element. There are only a few frameworks which cover all elements, and even if they do they can lack integration or seem to high level. 

However, effective IT Service Management can only be achieved when both the cohesion of processes within an element and the inter-element dependencies are understood. Therefore, to provide effective service management we must especially understand the relevance and interdependencies of all elements involved. After all the end-user and your organisation are only interested in the results of the service provided.