IT organizations are being asked to do more every day, playing increasingly vital roles in business operations without corresponding increases in budget. Niel Nickolaisen, IT process management expert and co-author of the new book Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, has created a proven model for strategic and tactical alignment of IT with business objectives - enabling IT to do more for the business with less.

By implementing just one component of Niel's model, change management best practices, IT departments can reduce downtime at least 70% - without any additional budget for resources or technology. And by implementing all four components of Niel's model, IT can dramatically reduce system downtime and closely align their efforts and investments with business priorities.

The four components of Niel's model that reduce downtime include:

1. Defining and using change management processes
2. Simplifying IT processes
3. Automating availability processes
4. Prioritizing your systems

This paper outlines these four steps in more detail. It then describes how Marathon's everRun® software supports the execution of steps 3 and 4 by providing automated high availability and tiered availability levels for Windows Server applications.