Elephants have a history of learning to dance.
You may be familiar with the book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” by Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the former CEO of IBM. The book discusses some of the things that Gerstner did to turnaround IBM back in the early 1990s. One of the most significant decisions Gerstner made while at IBM was to stop a plan to breakup the company into several operating units. Instead, he decided that the whole of IBM was greater than the sum of the parts. His rationale was to leverage all of the pieces of IBM – hardware, services, software – to deliver top-to-bottom technology solutions.1
Top-To-Bottom Solutions
Isn’t that what good IT Service Management (ITSM) is supposed to be about? Good ITSM is a capability that results in an IT organization being able to effectively and efficiently plan, build, and deliver quality IT services in a measurable and repeatable way. Service management handles IT services from top-to-bottom; this includes everything from servers to networks to applications to data to people to processes. There are a number of “best practice” methodologies and frameworks that have been developed to help IT be successful in developing a service management capability.
Unfortunately, many ITSM implementations missed it. To those organizations, ITSM looks, moves, and feels like an elephant. So why can’t that elephant dance?
Do You Have ITSM in Shackles?
The ITSM elephant can’t dance because many IT organizations shackled it. Here are a few ways that organizations have shackled ITSM:
- Every request for change goes before a change advisory board
- Simple requests, like a password reset, are all done through a service desk
- Lack of integration and automation
- No comprehensive approach or governance for managing services end-to-end (from ideation to retirement)
Many ITSM implementations failed to realize that ITSM is not about process for process sake. Perhaps they started their effort with expectations of a silver bullet that would resolve all of their cultural, technical and process issues. Or perhaps their ITSM implementation addressed IT operational aspects…then stopped.
Why Good ITSM is Important to Digital Transformation
Technology expectations have changed dramatically in the last few years. The pace of change continues to increase. As a result, demand on IT organizations has exploded; however, IT capacity has not increased to keep up with demand. As a result, businesses are often looking outside of its IT organization, or shadow IT organizations form to respond to business needs.
Then when corporate IT organizations can’t keep up, they either get shoved out of the way or are relegated to supporting what are quickly becoming legacy systems.
Digital transformation is forcing a difference in the way organizations deploy IT infrastructure, from on-premise hardware and software to a hosted type of setup or a deployment on cloud. The more business takes advantage of the services provided in an IT catalog, the higher the value of IT. So the new business imperative of IT is to create customer value through highly efficient and effective IT service innovation.
The service portfolio must predict business demand for the underlying IT service assets that are or will be contained in the service catalog. And the new challenge for the CIO is to integrate both internal IT services and new 3rd Platform services into a fully unified architecture based upon business-oriented services using constant and competitive innovation. With this new business-oriented service management architecture in place, the CIO can better drive and lead the entire IT organization toward its goal of creating customer value.
Effective [digital platform] IT service [management] must rise above the hodgepodge of typical IT management practices that revolve around disconnected data silos and multiple portfolios associated with the service catalog, the application portfolio, the PMO, enterprise architectures, technical services, asset management, capital budgets, IT budgets, IT chargeback, time reporting, and other random files hidden deep within every IT manager’s catacombs of spreadsheets.2
The bottom line? Good ITSM is critical for digital transformation. Your ITSM elephant must learn to dance.
Teach Your ITSM Elephant to Dance
- First, expand your ITSM toolbox. Many organizations are under the false impression that ITSM is just ITIL®.3 While ITIL continues to be a leading ITSM framework, you should consider other methodologies, such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps during your ITSM implementations to help them become more responsive to rapidly-changing business needs. Take a look at your existing ITSM processes through the lenses of other frameworks and methodologies to identify waste, non-value added work and other improvements.
- Automate the obvious. In this always-on, interconnected world, there simply is no reason not to automate routine, obvious tasks. In my post “Will Automation Eliminate the Role of ITSM?” , I discuss some of the technical advancements that makes automation both more doable and obvious.
- Push changes out to the edge. This is one of the more significant shifts for many ITSM implementations. Rather than force changes to be reviewed by a central body (typically a change advisory board), define the criteria by which changes can be approved by those closer to the work being done – then provide those people with the authority to approve changes.
- Shift to “outside-in” thinking. Interestingly enough, many ITSM implementations followed an inside-out approach by looking at processes from the IT perspective out to the customer. In a recent SITS Community 360 blog post, Peter Johnson writes, “IT service [management] functions must change if they are to have a future. Digital – somewhat paradoxically – demands a focus on the user, the customer. That’s why the new IT service needs to be grounded in the [customer], rather than process or targets or best practice.”4
- Lastly, define and implement governance. In the digital era, ITSM must deal with an enterprise relying on physical, virtual, and cloud management systems. Therefore, governance must develop and enforce policies that enable seamless delivery across a wide range of device hardware and software platforms. This will require that ITSM focuses on enabling efficient access to technology and limiting the unnecessary bureaucracy and manual processes. IT systems and service management solutions must focus on enabling IT organizations to efficiently deliver well-integrated solutions that demonstrate business value quickly.5
Now watch your ITSM elephant dance.
Sources:
1 DiCarlo, Lisa. “How Lou Gerstner Got IBM To Dance.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 11 Nov. 2002. Web. 30 Sept. 2016. http://www.forbes.com/2002/11/11/cx_ld_1112gerstner.html
2 Young, Robert. “The Future of ITSM: Service Management Platforms for Digital Transformation”, IDC Technology Spotlight, August, 2015.
3 ITIL® is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.
4 http://www.sitscommunity360.com/think-digital-the-coming-disruption-of-itsm/, retrived 9/30/2016
5 Young, Robert. “The Future of ITSM: Service Management Platforms for Digital Transformation”, IDC Technology Spotlight, August, 2015.
