CA (News - Alert) has announced today the results of a study of 341 global IT organizations that highlights the positive impact that best practices for ITIL change, configuration and releases processes has had on those organizations’ overall performance.

Conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI) and sponsored by CA, the study also pinpointed five specific best practices that are crucial for achieving excellence in IT service management.

“The CA-ITPI study underscores the critical importance of best practices to enable IT to cost-effectively deliver highly reliable business services despite tight resource constraints, complex development and infrastructure environments, and huge portfolios of existing services,” said Brian Bell, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Service Management business unit, in a Thursday statement.

“The study also provides IT managers with additional data points that support the acquisition of technologies that enable these IT service management best practices—including CMDB, operations security and release management tools.”

The results of the study also revealed five sets of IT service management best practices that consistently improve the effectiveness of IT organization’s change, configuration and release practices.

These improvements generally help to create higher IT resource utilization, more consistent quality of end-user experience, and/or reduced overall risk from poor change management practices.

These best practices include rigorous release management. Such practices impacted eight of the 15 of performance measures in the study, including downtime, server to sysadmin ratio, release rollback rate and unauthorized change rate.

CMDB deployment is also considered a best practice as it is used by 47 percent of top performers to enable change processes in place. The implementation of CMDB-enabled change and incident management processes is a statistically significant predictor of effective IT service management performance in measures, including configuration drift, release rollback rate, and rate of incidents fixed within SLA limits.

Another best practice includes process religion, which summarizes a process where IT organizations that actively encourage compliance with documented processes and procedures achieve higher levels of performance.

Standardized configuration is another best practice as it is a primary indicator of a stable and secure computing environment. Such standardization is typically achieved by identifying and using only approved production system configurations.

Such practices predict top levels of performance in configuration drift and security breaches automatically detected, with top performers able to automatically detect security breaches 42 percent more often than others in the study.

Tight control of access to production systems is also considered a best practice as it includes clear definition of roles and responsibilities, appropriate segregation of duties and restricted access to the production environment.

IT processes are essential to overall business processes, but certain internal restraints can limit an organization’s ability to maximize on its IT resources. This study provides critical information and guidelines for those organizations seeking to implement best practices to improve productivity and maximize on their IT assets.

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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.