Q&A With Logicalis' Mike Alley: ITSM Is Not Just For IT Anymore

This seems to be a good way to bridge the problems that are brought about by shadow IT, don't you think?

It is, absolutely. A really good example is a manufacturer and retailer that we worked with [and] had implemented service management for their IT organization. Their supply chain operations vice president had a major problem and he had been out looking everywhere but the IT organization to get that problem solved. And not finding a solution, [the vice president] actually came back to IT and ultimately, we built [an] incident management [solution] for the products they manufacture that they send out to their retail stores. It reduced their costs about 25 percent. There was just a lot of defective stuff [in] their stores and they didn’t have a way for the stores to report it and get it back in. It was a data issue; once they got the data into a single location and they could report on it and see it, the problem became obvious to them.