According to interviews with 300 technology managers by consultancy Ovum, effective technology departments use consolidation and virtualization technologies to become more flexible, invest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications to promote software reuse, adopt recommendations from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as best practices in corporate technology, align business and IT in terms of governance and monitoring service levels, and take on new challenges ranging from development end-of-life and recycling strategies for old hardware to experimentation with emerging social software tools to improve productivity. The survey also noted that larger companies are adopting virtualization and SOA in greater numbers than ever before. About half of companies say that they are using ITIL, while 75 percent are consolidating application or storage servers in their data centers. The survey also found that corporate technology  groups are becoming more like outsourcers in that they increasingly use best practices and consistent metrics to measure how well they deliver services to the company.

Read more about effective IT departments:
- read the article at Baseline