Growing up in the midwest, we had a beautiful Saint Bernard, Oscar-- great for romping in the snow, pulling us on sleds, and even playing basketball, but when he got into the house, and the living room, all kind of chaos would happen!

During my tenure in IT I have come to equate many of the dynamic skills and pressures of our IT talent to the Oscar in the living room, that is learning to be domesticated! We have come a long way, baby, but will you trust us with the fine china yet?

Some thoughts on IT coming to recognize it's grander self. Sounds like ITIL version 3 intends to look at this as well.. Strategy and Service Improvement hold alot of possibility to an introspective organization with good management intent and internal process!

The refresh, ITIL version 3, is expected in 2007 with Service Life Cycle Practices that include Service Strategies, Design, and Transition, service Operations, and Continual Service Improvement. I am eager to see what this modernized iteration brings as I have come to believe that while ITIL processes represent an ideal sort of support and service delivery scenario, few companies seem structured to be able to introspect on the strategies for the future, and the transition requirements necessary to keep all the "deliverables" humming. I have long believed that for this reason, the strategies and continual service improvement methods offer the iterative logic towards stepping into that ideal more gracefully with time, experience, and application.

ITSMF offers self assessment scoring helping IT to a self scoring system improvement assessment. As you might expect, having the full documentation and the full organic organization to be integrated, might deliver gains, but a questionnaire and a book might be insufficient to create the level of change necessary to recognize the true best practices. I would be interested in how others have applied the "do it yourself" results however, what the assessment is managing against in Service Delivery, and Service Support is very complete missing some of the more abstract inhibitors such as Management Intent, Process Capability, and Internal Integration.

Many organizations striving to see ITIL results, view the disciplines of Service Delivery and Service Management as black box processes, when in fact the success of Service Delivery, depends on the clarity of Service Support processes. One of my favorite ITIL bloggers thoughts on Change Management, Troy DuMoulin's recent blog covers ITIL Implementation Roadmap logic with "change management as a core discipline for running IT". I quite agree with this notion, and would suggest that groups introducing much change are fairly "average" to an IT shop, and the issues of staffing, financial, availability, and service level management, depends upon the maturity and process capability of each discipline to deliver sanity and control regardless of the dynamic nature or environment.

Displaying a Change Management Flow Chart, a Budget Forecast and Actual, and a metrics dashboard of services being delivered does not equate to meeting the customer needs. The pressure point seems to be refined over time. Process and Roles clarity is a continuous reinforcement, one practice to the next, where, if all players are working to their roles, and engaged in the appropriate times of a service life cycle. Service Support being the areas most IT Shops are experienced in, when asked to manage more like a business, they struggle with how to bring the discpline if they did not always have to manage financials, service levels and expected customer availability standards.

Budgeting, Service Delivery and Financial management depends upon the level of management and integration necessary to forecast business actitivity, identify and mitigate risk, and account for IT Funds delivering true value in exchange for the budget they are given. In management intent, one of the challenges is explaining with clarity the logic, strategy and intent of the practices the budget and it's supporting calculations. The rub occurs when conflicting strategies obscure the intent and slow process capability. This requires a suitable mechanism for discussing and agreeing to scope, timeline and deliverable procedures from an end to end view. Internal Integration is another key inhibitor, for as good and independently run as each organization might be, it is a fact of life that IT manages complexity, and to manage that well, they must be able to simplify and integrate end to end change and configuration management-- done well this becomes a service management strength.

One size does not fit all in trying to solve the problems ITIL can solve, but some of the problems that are of interest in todays mix seem to include integration with IT and its partners to regularly review, assess, and drill down into these key performance areas:

* Are Finances Managed by service support/service delivery efficiencies (earnbacks) and costs in summary by IT and then by business unit?
* Is there an agreed strategy for unit cost implication and pricing strategy for end to end business impact?
* Are audits of process conducted with dependent process reviewers for continuous service improvement opportunity?
* Does the organization produce service summary actuals by enterprise and business unit to report value throughout the year?
* Does the organization have a clear strategy that aligns for service delivery and service support to the budget and service allocation requirements?

What are you doing to meet your customer needs?
Have you implemented an ever green Service Improvement Process that is delivering great results for low overhead?
Love to hear others experiences and opinions!

Dawn Mular
Posted at 02:03PM Jan 19, 2007 by Dawn Mular in Sun  |  Comments[0]