Roundtable

Can IT be a service? Can IT systems be looked at from the perspective of service delivery to customers? It’s a contentious topic: technology diehards will say that IT needs to be looked at from a technology point of view; business and process management players say that IT needs not only to be a service but should be structured as a set of services. Popular international standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and ISO 20000 provide business managers with formal ways of checking how IT should work.

Remy Zuelle, business consulting manager at IBM Tivoli, says if you subscribe to IT service management, then IT does need to be treated as a service. But he’s not 100 percent happy with the ‘IT’ part.