Are you in the thick of sorting out how to make ITIL and COBIT work, and trying to make sense of the dozens of vendors clamoring to help?

Are you puzzled over how the ITIL vision for Change Management fits into the reality of your current processes? And how it relates to Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management?

Is the concept of configuration management and the CMDB giving off more heat than light for you? How can you make it real?

Have you found yourself wondering whether you really need an IT portfolio management tool, an enterprise architecture repository, a metadata repository, a service management tool, and a configuration management database (CMDB)? And if you have them, are you wondering if they should be related somehow?

The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through:

* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole

* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures

* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends

* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.

* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.

Among the specific topics addressed are:

* ITIL recommendations from a practical systems implementation point of view
* Configuration management: challenges, misconceptions, myths, and realities. Business justification for. Support for compliance and regulatory goals.
* Interrelationships between IT portfolio planning, solutions development, and IT operations
* The relationship between application development and hosting (infrastructure) organizations
* Business intelligence, performance management, and metrics for the IT capability itself
* Detailed, actionable clarification of the vague concept of "IT Service" and all its permutations and implications
* IT portfolio degradation through complexity
* Detailed models of IT information
* The various classes of systems used internally by large scale IT organizations
* The concept of "repository" and its relationship to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
* Process roles and responsibilities. Closed-loop, self-reinforcing processes for IT data management.
* Application as critical control point and portfolio entry. Clarifying relationship between "application" and "IT service." Application portfolio management: process, data structures, and systems.