Factors impacting Service Management implementation

This is first of two blogs that we will have on the factors that impact business service management implementation. As discussed in my previous blogs, business service management implementation is more about cultural transformation than anything else. It is a major shift in the way IT organizations plan, produce, deliver and manage their products and / or services.

Some of the critical success factors that impact business service management implementation include:

• Senior business and IT management commitment: Cultural change is not easy and requires strong leadership. Therefore, senior management commitment is the most critical factor in achieving successful implementation of business service management.

• Return on Investment: Business service management implementation requires significant investments and successful business leaders don’t make investments in which they don’t see reasonable / justifiable returns. Big-bang is not going to work. IT improvements that don’t actually impact the value that businesses / customers receive are not at all wise investments.

• Communication, communication and communication: Marketing and communication are the most critical components of trying to implement business service management. IT has traditionally been weak in sharing the success stories. Businesses and / or customers only get communications when something breaks down. Communicating good as well as bad to the customer is critical. Most of the time, we are focusing on only bad and leave the good out. As IT organizations embark on making improvements to products and / or services that they produce, communication planning and execution is critical. Service Level Management process provides means and ways in which service target achievements should be shared. In addition, business relationship or account management functions can prove very useful in communicating with the businesses and customers, identifying / defining services, and negotiating service level agreements. Scorecards, dashboards, heat-maps, and other displays must be made available to customers all the time. This is critical to maintaining IT credibility.

• Business drivers and needs that actually require IT organization to improve the way it delivers its services to the businesses. This will require IT organizations to make major investments in improving the quality of services that they provide. 

• Objective self-assessment: Realistic IT self-assessment to establish current state service management and process maturity is critical. This will enable the leadership and service management project teams to make better estimates on the levels of investments required prior to pursuing business service management project.

• Personnel performance management: Key performance indicators and metrics should be very thoughtfully established. Such performance metrics should be introduced that encourage IT personnel to be responsible for the delivery of end-to-end services. Such metrics will encourage cross-organizational teams to collaborate and work towards common objectives. 

• Not everything is important: Not every IT component is critical. Use business impact as a guide to identify the critical components and guide the prioritization. Focus on those 20% of the components that make 80% of the revenues. Focus on those that result in the improvement of end-to-end service quality. Select the right metrics that tell you what you want to know about the service quality. Those IT organization that start a big, all-encompassing business service management initiative with the goal of defining IT service dependency relationships for all lines of business and millions of IT components, and the intention of achieving 100% monitoring coverage of all IT components in the IT infrastructure often rarely make it to the end i.e., successful achievement of business service management. This is primarily because such a large effort results in a highly complex project that takes years to implement and generally leads to disillusionment and failure. The more-successful deployments break up the project into smaller business-focused and NOT IT focused components. Focus in successful efforts is continually maintained on defining and monitoring only a few critical IT services and underpinning IT components, then expanding after achieving critical successes. These initial successes are used to keep the momentum going. If your company has a disaster recovery plan, it may be a good source of important information as you prioritize which services are more critical and the respective underpinning IT components. This will also enable effective improvement in component monitoring capabilities. Redundant monitoring is removed and gaps in monitoring are identified and appropriate remediation plans can be created.