One of the barriers to an effective IT budgeting exercise is the language we speak in IT: technical jargon and complex tables of IT spend not directly linked to the business value or actual line of business consumption - hardly a language that would resonate with your average internal customer or executive board.

For many IT organizations, end-user computing services represent over 80% of the service requests they manage each day. Consequently, it's no surprise that "Improving Customer Satisfaction" is on the top 5 list of priorities each year by surveyed CIOs.

Version 3 of the ITIL Framework is decidedly more strategic, customer-centric, and focused on services and not processes. One of the main focal points is the Service Lifecycle - how services are conceptualized, defined, modeled, offered, accounted for, delivered, supported, and improved - and the Service Portfolio is the central management tool and "system of record" for the Service Lifecycle.

The increasing demands of compliance regulations, along with the need for better governance, are reshaping IT. The sheer number of compliance regulations in the market today, along with the certainty of new privacy and security regulations, mandate better control of IT operations. In addition, top management is increasingly unwilling to allow IT to function without better oversight and control.

A highly virtualized environment can lead to lower hardware maintenance costs, increased availability of applications, quicker server deployment, and more. The benefits are clear, but business customers must be clear on the cost vs. SLA tradeoffs of virtualizion versus dedicated infrastructure service options.

Many outsourcing initiatives are destined to fail because the demand for IT services is not well controlled or accurately forecasted at the organizational level. Most outsourcing is structured so that all new ("out of scope") services are charged on a "per drink" basis. This means that while the spend for "in scope" services may go down, the total IT costs go up over time because of the uncontrolled "out-of-scope" spend.

Not your old IT Service Catalog - Lontra's Service Portfolio Solution moves beyond simply defining IT services and managing the customer request transaction to become the central tool for the economic management of IT and the strategic delivery of IT services.