Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) MICHAEL INDENCE

What is ITSM?

IT Service Management is the management of quality IT services

Focus is on Process, People, and Technology This is a major shift from common management of IT services today

since most time is spent on the technology aspect of the business versus people and processes

Consists of Methodologies for process improvement and business service management

Issues with moving towards ITSM:

Current operations are in a fire fight mode and have no time for proactive work or ability to invest into new concepts and disciplines

Managers lack ability to drive the change required (organizational wide)

Hard to quantify the investment considering services today are not measured by metrics, quality standards, or financials

Issue #1: We don’t have time or resources

Common among the IT industry as they are operating in fire-fighter mode

We don’t have the budget to take on new hires to run a new process

We do things a certain way we are use to, changes will only make them worse or take more of an individual’s time

Issue #1: Rebuttal (Time and Resource Constraints)

A Microsoft Case Study showed for all CritSit (critical situations) opened only 20% were due to technology bugs. 80% were split between People and Process failure The time constraints are self inflicted due to people and process

failure and can be greatly improved with ITSM

Due to fire-fight mode, costs incurred and/or lost during outages are way more taxing on the budget . Following ITSM will reduce wasted expenditure and provide improved financial tracking against services managed

Institutional knowledge is not documented, sharing knowledge will improve operations and time to resolution if issues occur

Issue #2: Managers lack ability to make change

Managers try to adopt ITSM at a micro-level (shop level)

Not positioned with the correct stake holders

Sometimes driven by “career progression” versus what is important for business

Issue #2: Rebuttal (Managers lack ability to make change)

ITSM Top-down and Bottom-up approach

Requires Senior executive buy-in and support

Must follow a RACI model (Responsibility, Accountability, Consult, Inform)

Is not a one time implementation, one of the phases of ITSM is Continual Improvement

Organizational Change concepts and principles must be understood: Powers of influence, everyone has a part, gain and goal of getting on

board

Issue #3: Lack of metrics or ability to show ROI

Companies fail to understand the ROI of ITSM in the future as current services offered are not mapped to the business bottom line

CEO and CFO consider IT to be a necessary evil or sunk costs

IT departments don’t map their work to a function of the business Supporting the exchange server vs supplying messaging and

collaboration to the business which is a critical component to business X profits

In some cases, departments are measured on number of issues resolved vs number of issues avoided. This creates hostility when creating improvements will decreases the number of tickets etc…

Issue #3: Rebuttal (Lack of metrics or ability to show ROI)

Aligning Services offered to business functions will help align proper budgets for critical services. A recent study with a customer showed one for the business core services were under budgeted where a non-essential service was over budgeted

Treating work as a Service vs a Technology helps allocate cost of personnel, equipment, facilities etc… to that service and its dependencies

Establishing new Service Level agreements and focusing incentives or proactive work vs reactive will instill a more positive culture

Employees’ hours reinvested into more productive work

Research: Gartner’s focus on ITSM

Gartner posted the Hype Cycle for IT operations. In that all aspects around ITSM are on the rise: IT Analytics, Reporting, Operations etc… (Perlin, 2014)

Research: Microsoft and the MOF levels

Microsoft has filled a gap that meshes with ITIL and COBIT for ITSM called MOF. Microsoft Operations Framework. Within the framework there is levels companies can use to identify stage they are in. (Technet.Microsoft.com)

Research: Organizational Change Principles

There is much info on Organizational Change, but at the most basic level its important to know why organizational change is needed or exists. It is not just to “realign” managers etc., it is to take a business from a present state to a future state

ITIL, MOF, COBIT are quality improvement programs and without good OC they are on setup to fail “50 percent of quality improvement programs fail to meet their goals,

and 30 percent of process reengineering efforts are unsuccessful. The most common reason that change efforts fail is that they encounter resistance from employees” (Referenceforbusiness.com)

Research Conclusion:

Shifting to Quality IT service management or ITSM requires the following: Executive buy in

Driven by Organizational Change

Understanding of the various available frameworks and Guidance (ITIL,COBIT, MOF)

Understanding business goals and how they align to the technology

Time for investment

Involvement of everyone

New ways to look at performance of employees, departments etc….

Summary: ITSM is a Win!

When fully invested and IT departments manage quality services vs technology they will see vast improvements in service uptime, customer satisfaction, employee moral, and more agility as a business for technology adoption

The IT departments/services will be aligned to the business functions and help improve the business bottom line versus being a drain

Employees will normally reinvest existing time spent fire-fighting to more effective work like engineering of solutions or system optimization

References

Perlin, Martin. Windows of Change | Blog. 2013. Retrieved March 17th, 2014, from: http://www.evolven.com/blog/gartner-analysts-have-high-expectations-for-it-operations-analytics.html?sthash.B6iBXXzJ.mjjo

Managing Organizational change. 2010. Retrieved March 18th, 2014, from: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/small/Mail-Op/Managing-Organizational-Change.html

Resource Guide Overview. (2014). Retrieved March 18th, 2014, from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb821255.aspx

MOF. 2014. Retrieved March 17th, 2014, from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd320379.aspx

ITIL. 2014. Retrieved March 17th, 2014, from: http://www.itil-officialsite.com/