In the last decade or so, we all have witnessed the business
enterprise evolutions caused by the emergence of the Internet and IT.
Immediately following the .com bubble burst, business enterprises have,
justifiably, gone through the state of denial (IT is necessary evil, IT is not
important, IT is back-office, and so on) by attempting to outsource as much of
IT as possible. When companies like ebay.com, amazon.com, and many others
demonstrated how IT and the Internet have enabled these business enterprises to
emerge as leaders in their respective verticals, others, that were previously
in denial, have started realizing that IT could truly enable these business
enterprises to capture new markets, to enter new regions, to offer value-add
services / products to their end customers, to be more profitable, to generate
greater wealth for their shareholders, and so on. Proctor and Gamble reported
savings of over $500MM through an innovative use of IT and implementation of
service management, amazon.com, in these slow time, have shown all the
potential to be profitable and to be able to pass through these tough times,
and so on. There is an increasing degree of dependencies between the core
business processes of business enterprises and capabilities provided by the Internet
and IT. As a result of these dependencies, most recently, IT organizations have
found themselves under increasing pressures, from the businesses / customers
they support, to evolve their respective organizations and to ensure tighter
business-IT integration.
ITILv3 most definitely provides a unique set of guidelines
that creates a view of how mature IT organizations should be able to provide
effective business service management. ITILv3 is unique in a sense that it
spans across a wide range of IT industry practices, standards and disciplines
to bring all into a larger perspective i.e., business-IT integration. ITILv3
will enable IT organizations to plan and implement their transformations /
improvements to achieve business service management. We also understand that
business enterprises do evolve and business process evolution is always one of
the key components of such evolutions. In order for these evolutions to be
efficient and successful, business enterprises continue to depend on and look
towards IT to support and enable these evolutions. In such situations, IT
organizations are expected to be agile and be able to respond to ever changing
business environments and competitive drivers. However, the challenge for lower
maturity level (organizational maturity level 2 and lower) IT organizations is
that they always find themselves reacting to such business demands and they do
so in a way that is not efficient and causes a lot of disruptions e.g., service
outages, slow response capability, expensive changes, lack of alignment between
the needs and the solution, and so on. In addition, since these IT
organizations are largely disconnected from their businesses / customers, they
are unable to appreciate and proactively plan to build the right IT capabilities
to support and enable business evolutions in a timely manner.
Depending upon the role that IT plays in enabling the core
business processes, the rate of IT evolution may be critical to the overall
business success and profitability. For some business enterprises, implementing
service management may be transformational and embarking upon such a journey
may sometimes be more about cultural transformations than any other single
factor. It may need major shift in how people think about and manage IT. These
shifts may include:
- IT is
for the business and IT is not for IT
- Targeted
technology capabilities investments to maximize business profitability
- Fire-fighting
is not rewarded, pro-active fire-prevention is rewarded
- We
will thrive not just survive, and so on.
Cultural transformation, an aggregate of small behavioral
transformations over time, is achieved through:
·
Well-aligned business and IT vision &
strategies
·
Clear definition of enterprise architecture
standards and governance policies
·
Thoughtful management of changes in people’s
attitudes and ways of thinking
·
Careful planning, management and incremental
implementations of a range of continual service and service management process
improvements
·
Business-IT organizational re-alignments.
Business enterprises have been struggling to leverage IT Infrastructure
Library (ITIL) guidelines and to achieve such transformations to realize the
highly anticipated effectiveness and efficiency and business-IT integration
benefits.
It is important to note that such ‘transformation’ – normally a higher degree of change with
greater impact – does not happen overnight and requires consistent, steady,
incremental, and ongoing improvements. Business service management
implementation is no exception. What makes such transformations even riskier is
the lack of organizational knowledge about all that is necessary to make these
efforts successful. It is absolutely critical to realize that ITILv3 is more
than just about the IT infrastructure and IT operations management and that
business service management sometime means a major shift in the way IT has been
managed and operated and the manner in which it has been delivering its
services to the customers. ITILv3 and business service management are about
integrating IT with the business and ensuring traceability right from business
processes, business services to technical services and all the way down to
individual technology (infrastructure, application, software, hardware,
databases, middleware and others) components. Implementing business service
management will very likely impact each and every aspect of the business
enterprise organization. In fact, depending upon organizational baseline
maturity level, implementing service management may even be revolutionary and
may take longer before the undertaking organizations starts realizing the
benefits. To make the matters worse, organizational tolerances to sit tight and
wait for these transformational benefits to come through have been declining.
In efforts to see the returns sooner, some organizations have considered options
to outsource business service management without even completely realizing what
it really means to outsource business service management.
Implementing business service management is expensive,
risky, and difficult and requires consistent and well-planned approach. Some of
the questions that IT managers have asked me over the years mostly pertain to
keeping the momentum going in the midst of ever changing organizational and
business environments. One of the most common questions is:
How do we implement business service
management and demonstrate the value-add before our next management ‘shuffle’?
What do we do when this shuffle happens and
we lose all the support?
Answer to these questions is simple. In order to keep the
senior management sponsorship alive, the one that survives all frequent
management shuffles and in order to ‘excite’ the larger organization to embrace
this transformational change,
We must demonstrate the business value created as early as
possible and help the senior management and the larger organization see a small
‘slice’ of our business service management vision at a time.
Under such business / organizational pressures, faster
turn-around coupled with effective and efficient management of continual
improvement efforts may be the answer.
How can IT organizations go about delivering incremental and
iterative value to the business customers through steady and ongoing
improvements in an agile fashion? My future blogs will be dedicated to answering
this question in great deal of details.
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