ITSLM Challenges

ITSLM is primarily aimed at maintaining order in IT systems and IT system development.

Common characteristics of modern IT system development and operation

 * Aggressive schedules demand rapid response and short delivery time.
 * New services and features are demanded on short timescales to be competitive.
 * Incident resolution is often measured in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks.
 * Defect resolution, particularly for defects perceived as damaging to core business, are often addressed within hours of their identification.
 * Demand for high quality.
 * Resource challenges.
 * Demand to provide and support multiple services (sometimes conflicting requirements).
 * Demand to support multiple platforms.
 * Compounded by the constant introduction of new technology (think how businesses are now increasing accommodating technology purchased by their employees—tablet computers, for example).
 * Distributed development.
 * Geographical distribution (it is increasingly common for projects to use resources from around the world).
 * Temporal distribution (hand-in-hand with geographical distribution, development can proceed around the clock, placing demands on ITSLM systems that must be available around the clock too).
 * Concurrent processes
 * It is common for QA and testing to be processing one release concurrent with the development of the next release of a service or application.
 * Accountability and traceability, without overhead
 * Although many demands are place on ITSLM systems to provide accountability and traceability (legislative requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley or the Basel Accord), these demands must be met with minimal overhead.
 * Not 'getting in the way'
 * Any ITSLM service must be easier to follow than to subvert.
 * ITSLM services must provide more benefit to both individuals (developers, testers, operators, users, etc.) and the organisation, than they cost to implement otherwise they will be subverted.
 * ITSLM services must be integrated. There has been a tendency in the past to present the ITSLM services in silos (organisationally, for example separating operation configuration management from development configuration management).