One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, Jerry buys his dad an expensive personal organizer as a gift, but then told his father he bought it hot for a bargain. Presenting the gift, Jerry highlights the various capabilities and goodness to his dad, who ultimately ends up using it only as a tip calculator. "But Dad, it does other things!", reminds Jerry.

Often times it is not the model used that is the problem, it is our inability to use the model to recognize it's full potential. Today's business challenges of getting value for investment, service oriented architecture, and capacity on demand, are all service management introspective problems. The leaders that will solve these breakthrough business problems, manage a fair balance between sustaininable service management and innovation for emergent markets. While many IT organizations are well aware of the needs to deliver service, identify and mitigate risk, and optimize operational costs, most are so busy in the day to day operations that it is a struggle to manage the resources in proportion to demand, keep learning happening dynamically, and adjusting to new market trends.

If the majority of IT organizations are involved in innovation initiatives, clearly some balance of trade is dynamically occurring. A recent CIO insight article titled "Innovation Makes Emerging Technologies Pay Off" by Allan Alter suggested that 5.4% of budgets are spent on innovation and 73% of IT Departments are involved in new product or service innovation. Put in perspective, a companies ability to optimize operational costs and recognize breakthrough opportunities depends upon making the personal organizer to more than calculate the results at the end of a service transaction.

If ITIL, COBIT, Lean Sigma, and Capability Maturity Modeling all offer a means to do more with technology, why decouple it or obscure it from the ways of doing business. Best practices give us dynamic measures and indicators that if managed, can create flexibility, stability, and customer satisfaction. However if organizations are too busy month to month trying to manage their integral role with the enterprise, a myopia will continue to obscure opportunity. Not a deliberate action, but weaknesses in the systems offering are presented.

Some questions one might ask when assessing IT's agility might include:

* What indicators do you use to assess and identify optimization opportunity?
* Who participates in reviews or audits of the IT Strategy?
* What are the key elements of focus for your Service Improvement initiatives?
* How does IT balance new innovation and managed services?
* How does IT assess its capabilities in delivering predictable service?
* How does the business define IT's success in partnering for business strategy?
* What key services is IT delivering to add value for the investment?

Conclusion: Value for money, New things to be supported, legacy services to be identified, change, all are constant expectations. Innovation occurs from introspecting on what your business does to deliver value, and what you could do to improve. Oh that and remembering that the Personal Organizer and Best Practices you carry in your portfolio do a whole lot more, so why not explore their capabilities to solve problems more efficiently and proactively, embedded in your service culture?