Challenges Associated With Implementing Business Service Management / IT Service Management - Part II

This is continuation of my earlier blog i.e., “Challenges Associated With Implementing Business Service Management / IT Service Management (ITSM) - Part I”.

As we continue to explore the challenges associated with implementing IT service management, these are some additional ones that should be considered as we embark on this journey. Let’s discuss these further.

Balancing resources between “fighting fires” and “new developments”

The chances are that if you are a lower maturity level organization that majority of your resources are engaged in fighting fires most of the time. When initiatives like business service management implementation are undertaken, special attention should be given to the number of additional resources that may be necessary to successfully deliver on new initiatives. In most cases, consultants may be an appropriate option. Higher maturity levels will enable organizations to dedicate more resources to new developments and to have fewer resources needed to keeping the lights on.

 

Lack of in-house business service management and ITIL expertise

Whenever transformational efforts are undertaken, it is critical to have subject matter experts advise and assist in implementing related components. For effective and efficient implementation of business service management, it is critical that ITIL experts are appropriately identified, acquired (if necessary) and engaged.

Multiple Independent Silos & Varying Maturity Levels

In most medium-to-large size organizations, there may be multiple independent business-aligned IT organizations and each may be at a different maturity level. How should IT Service Management implementation be planned and executed to ensure that associated complexities and risks are appropriately managed and that focused business service improvements are implemented?

Efforts required to improve service management processes

Mature service management processes provide the necessary foundation required to ensure that business services are managed effectively. Improving service management processes may mean major impacts on the way people and teams within an IT organization perform their day-to-day jobs in managing technologies. 

Longer turn-around times

In ITILv3, there are over 25 service management processes. Traditional service management implementation practices offer process-centric approaches. Service management process improvement focus may take longer times to mature thereby pushing the anticipated business service management driven business benefits further down; business benefits require that service chains for business processes are managed end-to-end. My experience in working with a variety of clients across industries has taught me that if it takes longer turn-around to demonstrate the business value of making any significant investments in improving IT, the sponsorship will likely to dry out and between management shuffles, the entire transformation will be at risk. We need a more innovative approach to deal with these challenges. 

Challenges Associated With Implementing Business Service Management / IT Service Management - Part I

Having briefly talked about making wise IT investments in my previous blog, we will now discuss some of the challenges that organizations face with implementing IT Service Management. Note that the extent of difficulties associated with implementing IT Service Management depends upon the current state (baseline) maturity of the business enterprise and IT organizations. For those that are at lower maturity levels, this may mean a fundamental shift in the ways in which business enterprises and IT organizations operate. Major difficulties may include:

Cultural Shift and Organizational Change: For organizations that may have lower maturity levels, IT Service Management implementation may actually lead to a fundamental shift in the way in which IT delivers its services to the customers and how customer engage IT in providing specific services. Fundamental shifts leading to transformations do not happen overnight and need a consistent and steady approach to incrementally and iteratively improving the services provided by IT organizations. 

Technology Management vs. IT Service Management: In many established organizations (not necessarily mature ones), IT is still viewed and managed as a back-office cost center. In most cases, such technology management cultures encourage teams and departments within an IT organization to operate in silos (silo-ed engineering and development, silo-ed technology management, silo-ed request management, silo-ed reporting and communication, silo-ed visions and leadership, and silo-ed supplier management).  Mature service organizations manage their respective technologies in order to integrate with the business needs. Such a shift from being a technology management organization to a service-oriented organization usually is a major one and requires transformations in the way that IT thinks, plans, and delivers its services to its customers. IT components (software, hardware, applications, network, servers, etc) need to be managed to ensure that the respective services that these components support are appropriately managed to meet the business needs. You need one weak link to break the value-chain. One weak component is all you need to cause an outage to a business critical service. End-to-end service management is the only effective and efficient way to guarantee that all components that implement a given business service are managed consistently to ensure that business services are managed such that related business process needs are met. When teams and departments within an IT organization do technology management, they do so in silos and that may lead to a creation of a potential weak link. For IT organizations to migrate from being a technology management organization to one that manages services may sometimes be a challenging task.

In my next blog, I will discuss remaining set of issues that most organizations planning to implement service management should plan to deal with.  

Making wise IT investments

In most silo-ed organizations, most technology-focused teams tend to manage technology for technology. The reality is that lack of appreciation for the business value created by the individual silo-ed technology components prevents silo-ed enterprises to manage technology for the business. Each silo may have silo-ed, technology-focused partnerships and may provide technology solutions with limited cross technology view of how these various technology components actually create value for our customers and shareholders. The result is that, in most cases, investment decisions are made based on silo-ed views of the enterprise with business value, in most cases, as one of the last considerations.

Statements like, “… we offer 99.999% availability of our infrastructure for all”, just makes me believe that these organizations actually do not have visibility into what actually matters. Of course, not everything in their infrastructures is equally important but this is how they view their world. The reality, however, is that business expectations from all IT investments can be summarized in one sentence – all and any IT investment made ‘must’ translate into value delivered to our customers.  This may sound like an ‘extreme’ statement but if you think about it for a moment, you may be able to appreciate that it makes perfect sense. Some would argue that this may not apply to all potential situations. One example would be the case in a regulated environment. If you think about it, even regulations imposed by regulatory bodies are there to protect the interests of our customers. Other arguments may be that we spend money to keep the engine going and these are really maintenance type of expenses. Well, you are doing these maintenance activities in order to ensure that services continue to deliver business value and meet customer expectations. IT does not and should not exist for IT.

According to ITILv3, “Business is IT. And IT is the business.” This integration must exist for IT to become a value-add business partner. Service is the means of delivering value to our customers and service improvement is the key service management implementation component that enables the businesses and customers to benefit from the investments made in implementing service management. Service improvement or business service improvement is one of the most critical components of business service management implementation. It really brings all improvement investments together and enables customer to actually realize tangible service improvement benefits. If managed and organized appropriately, business service improvement actually becomes at the core of keeping the sponsorships and necessary support alive and thereby enables the organization to keep its momentum going. This is the component that will iteratively and incrementally create business value. If planned appropriately, business service improvement component will ensure that all service management process improvements are planned and implemented in a targeted fashion and are optimally leveraged to deliver the expected value.