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White Paper

What’s in your portfolio? – ITSM in focus itSMF Sweden, Malmö, 5 March 2013

This paper summarizes some observations made during a one day

interactive event in which the author gave a presentation on ‘The Flipside of IT – Introducing BiSL’.

Photo: John Wallhoff, Robert Falkowitz, Christian Nissen, Mark Smalley

Mark Smalley, 11 March 2013

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Introduction Approximately 60% of the 25 attendees worked in IT departments of (mostly) public and private organisations – the rest of the attendees worked as trainers/consultants.

The agenda:

• Mark Smalley (NL) - The Flip Side of IT - Introducing BiSL • Robert Falkowitz (CH) – A Portfolio of Portfolios • Round table discussions (photo) • Christian F Nissen (DK) - Why ITIL implementations (sometimes ) fail

in real life • Malin Nordström (SE) - PM3 and ITIL in interaction, management

objects versus IT services Unfortunately Marlin had to pull out so the chairman John Wallhoff improvised a discussion around PM3.

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Author’s observations Liaison officer

The attendees agreed with general industry consensus that there’s a problem with the relationship between business and IT, with lack of knowledge and understanding on both sides. A role was foreseen for an intermediary to get both sides to improve the way they engage with each other. A Portfolio of Portfolios

Robert Falkowitz provided a case study of an organization showing how it has evolved from project portfolio management, to application portfolio management, setting the stage for service portfolio management. He emphasized the importance of service portfolio management as a function that interacts with the various project managers, whose projects deliver new products and services, and with product managers whose products (typically applications but also infrastructural components – service could be email and a product Outlook) are used to fulfil the service. At a higher level, service portfolio management manages an ‘portfolio of portfolios’ (of products). He distinguished between managing services and managing delivery of services. Orchestration role A coffee break discussion focus on the kind of roles that are needed for future-proof ITSM. There was consensus that an orchestration role is needed to coordinate various external an internal parties. There also seems to be need for a more content-based role that is tasked with determining the informational needs of the business. This might be comparable to the business analyst role but often business analysts are only triggered by ‘projects’. Knowledge management versus information management

There used to be plenty of interest in knowledge management but this seems to have faded away. The question was posed how much of ‘business information management’, as defined by BiSL, is addressed by knowledge management.

Demand-supply versus pull-push

When discussing the validity of the demand-supply paradigm, Robert Falkowitz made the point that it might be more relevant to thing about push and pull. Organizational anorexia

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A lunchtime discussion touched on extreme cost-cutting and somebody coined the term ‘organizational anorexia’ as a metaphor for emaciated organizations. Benefits and risks

In one of the formal discussions the question was posed why business cases aren’t taken seriously after the investment has been authorized. This triggered the opinion that only costs are of interest. While this is often the only lever that the business has to control IT, the author suggested that IT should give the business choices in benefits and risks. Complex Responsive Processes

In a very insightful talk, Christian Nissen discussed three approaches for ITIL initiatives, which can be summarized as mechanistic Business Process Redesign, rational-social Continuous Service Improvement, and social-constructive Complex Responsive Processes. The kind of organization determines which approach will be the most effective.

Photo: Christian Nissen

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PM3 A relatively unknown quantity outside Sweden, the Maintenance Management Model that the consulting firm På AB has developed, seems to fit a gap that is not addressed by other frameworks – at least not when the model was introduced. It is often used in decentralized (in the business line) application service departments that fulfil an intermediary position between the business users and the centralized IT department that deals with the infrastructure and keeping applications lights on. One of the central concepts is ‘object’, which could be an application or a (business) service. There seems to be some similarity with ASL and possibly BiSL and it is worthwhile investigating.

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Author Mark Smalley is Ambassador-in-chief at the not-for-profit, vendor-independent ASL BiSL Foundation and is a self-employed IT Management Consultant at Smalley.IT. He is specialized in Application Lifecycle Management and IT Governance. Mark is a regular speaker at international conferences, where he has reached out to thousands of IT professionals. Follow & engage with Mark on Twitter @marksmalley Email: mark.smalley@aslbislfoundation.org Further details, publications & speaking engagements at Smalley.IT