• Competitive pressures are coming from many new quarters
  While merger and acquisition activity continues, new external pressures, such as smaller, fast moving internet-based competitors are driving the need for greater flexibility at the business level. For larger organisations, dealing with different technology environments during and after merger or acquisition activity may well stress the capabilities of the IT department to service the business
• Compliance comes in many different forms - and should not just be regarded as a cost
  Putting in place a means of monitoring events and actions and reporting on them will automatically create a means of demonstrating compliance. However, it also helps to uncover poor existing business processes and enables more effective approaches to be applied. Even internally, the need for governance and the management of processes around such simple areas as expense claims, vacation booking and add/change/deletions of employees will drive the need for more effective automation
• Automation is key; manual processes tend to be slow and error prone
  Wherever possible, low-level processes should be automated and human intervention minimised. Processes that are seen as being differentiated from similar ones in competitive organisations should also be automated wherever possible, and the human and cost resources freed up should be applied to ensuring that the highly differentiated or unique processes are made as effective as possible. Through these means, investment can be targeted where it makes the most impact - at areas such as innovation and flexibility
• "Best Practice" processes are available
  The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a set of best practice processes for automating standard processes within the IT environment. These should be adopted, and the advances within ITIL v3 should be examined to see how these can further help the business.
• Bridging the gap between the business and IT is a necessity
  Linking business service management (BSM) and IT services management (ITSM) creates a means of automating the matching of technical capabilities to business needs. Current approaches, where there is a gap between what the business states it needs and how the IT department believes it can help, are no longer effective. Knowing what technical capabilities are available, being able to provision these rapidly and effectively as the business defines its needs and automating the various steps will create opportunities enabling a business to excel within its market.
• IT has to become a flexible platform to support the business
  Moving from an application focus to a business process focus will create greater complexities in the IT infrastructure, but will be required to ensure that IT is no longer a constraining factor on the business. Newer architectures, such as SOA and utility computing, will provide the basic platforms going forwards. The tools to effectively manage these platforms in a manner that supports the business are then a necessity.

Conclusions
IT can no longer act as a constraint on the business, yet creating greater flexibility will inevitably lead to greater complexity at the technical level. Implementing tooling that enables highly granular levels of event monitoring and reporting not only creates a more flexible infrastructure but also provides a platform where IT governance and organisational and legal compliance are built in from the outset.