Destination Integration

Many organizations continue to wrestle with the challenge of aligning IT and the business. Maybe that’s the first issue – surely we should be striving for integration, not alignment?
I‘m not sure that there are truly ‘IT services’ any more; rather there are business services, many of which are wholly or partly enabled by technology. This means that those responsible for managing the technology components need to understand exactly what end-to-end business processes they underpin, and the scale and importance of those processes to the overall business. Only then can the appropriate management approach be decided – and this is where service management comes in.

Service management is about having the right mindset and a focus on delivering value to the enterprise. Truly effective service management requires a holistic solution that embraces process, people, tools and partners. At the heart of it all, though, is the need for a service culture. A recent survey of over 600 companies carried out by Forrester on behalf of itSMF showed that nearly 50 percent had been engaged in service improvement programs for over two years, with 17 percent in excess of five years. So why haven’t organizations reached the Promised Land?

Of course, part of it is simply that service improvement is a continuous goal – we must always strive to improve quality of service. However, for those respondents to the survey, this wasn’t the prime reason for their timescales. Many programs simply take a long time, stall or are abandoned.

Most service improvement programs involve a major culture change. People are asked to perform tasks differently or perform entirely new tasks. And the truth is many people are fearful of or resistant to change. As the adjacent diagram indicates, it is people issues that are the challenge. People can be taught information and skills, and given the opportunity to apply them. But they need to bring the right attitude to the job. Management must demonstrate that they believe in the approach and encourage their staff to develop the right attitudes towards providing service. It is too easy for individuals, particular those in positions of authority, to inhibit or block change by inaction or apathy as well as by overt opposition. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that many service improvement programs stutter or fail.

However, enterprises that have successfully introduced quality service management solutions have seen real benefits in terms of improved quality, greater customer satisfaction and/or reduced support costs – all of which translate into hard business value and a real return on IT investments.

ITIL is globally recognized as the definitive ‘best practice’ for service management. It has been around for a long time, originally being published in 1990. It has now been adopted by enterprises from all market sectors and across the globe as the basis for their service management solutions. But it is important to remember that ITIL is only an enabler, not a solution in its own right. Enterprises need to adapt and adopt the guidance for their own requirements.

In order for an approach to be recognized as ‘best practice’, it needs to be kept fresh and relevant. ITIL has undergone one refresh during its lifetime, and is currently undergoing another. We recently embarked upon an exercise to find out exactly what the global community felt about ITIL and how it could be improved. Various stakeholder groups were identified and via a series of workshops and surveys a large amount of invaluable data was gathered. One of the clearest messages was “it isn’t very broken, so please don’t fix it too much”. So nothing is being changed simply for the sake of it, despite clamorous cries from passionate ‘experts’ about arcane points of detail.

In essence, the core volumes will reduce in number from the current seven to five. These five volumes will be organized in more of a lifecycle approach, with working titles as follows: service strategies, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. Information about individual processes, which was previously contained within a specific volume, will now be found across several volumes, reflecting the relevant aspects at the particular stage of the lifecycle. The authors, who were selected via an open tender process, are nearing completion of the initial drafts.

In addition to these core volumes, there will be supporting books, brochures, documents and other information. This complementary information will be aimed principally at specific target audiences, e.g. business managers or CIOs, providing the appropriate messages about value propositions. Much of it will be quite dynamic in nature, requiring regular updating. Hence it is planned that a lot of this material will be web-based and freely available.

As well as the updating and realigning of the central material, a sub-project is reviewing the associated examination scheme, to see how that too can be improved to make it truly meet the needs of the marketplace.

For enterprises that have invested, or are investing, in ITIL-based improvement programs, the refresh should have minimal impact. Most of the core process definitions will not change at all. And remember that you can’t ‘implement’ ITIL, so any current solution is bound to have been tailored to suit the enterprise. The refreshed library will have a much more consistent and coherent set of material, with much more focused messages and information for people at specific levels and in different roles. The intention is that enterprises will find it easier to use the approach in order to implement their solution.

However, as has been shown repeatedly in the past, no set of books can solve an enterprise’s service management challenge. True sustainable business advantage can only be achieved through hard work. Merely putting some new processes in place, buying a new support tool or outsourcing elements of the support function are highly unlikely to deliver real value by themselves. Enterprises must recognize that service management isn’t just an IT issue – it’s a business one. That means having a vision, planning properly, recognizing and making the necessary investment, demonstrating genuine management commitment and persevering with the program are essential if success is going to be achieved.