Is your ITSM implementation like a house of cards, prone to fail with the slightest disturbance? Here’s some examples:
- A request for change that isn’t appropriately vetted yet is implemented within the live environment. Subsequently, that implemented change results in an extended outage of a critical business system.
- Service interruptions are characterized by frantic efforts to restore service, cause analysis exercises that produce more theater than substance, and lost opportunities for improvement.
- A seemingly simple service request that requires extraordinary effort and time to fulfill.
- An IT organization that is surprised when the failure of a third party’s product or service cripples the business.
ITSM, done well, delivers effective and efficient services and practices based on the use of technology. Done well, ITSM connects IT efforts and technology investments to business results and strategy.
Instead, what many ITSM implementations produce (or reinforce) is siloed behavior, disjointed delivery efforts, lack of transparency, and poor end-user satisfaction. Further exasperating the situation is that in many cases, IT doesn’t even understand how what it does enables business results and value realization.
Why does bad ITSM happen within good IT organizations?
Every IT organization has talented people who are knowledgeable, smart, and have outstanding technical skills. These people are motivated to be the absolute best that they can be and are driven to succeed. Good ITSM should augment the efforts of these talented people and enhance the overall performance of the IT organization. ITSM should help the IT organization become a valued, respected, and competitive differentiator for a business.
Sadly, this is not the case with many IT organizations. Many implementations have fallen short of achieving the benefits of good ITSM and wasted the talents and efforts of people within IT because the foundational elements needed for success are missing. What are some attributes of a “house of cards” ITSM implementation?
- Taking only a “technology-first” approach – While having the appropriate tools are important, good ITSM doesn’t result only from the implementation of technology. With a technology-first approach, ITSM thinking becomes limited to the capabilities of the technology, and not how ITSM should meet the needs of the business.
- No alignment to organizational strategy – ITSM implementation is about IT, not about how IT efforts and provided technologies enable the achievement of business goals and objectives. Other than justifying the organization’s investment in the selected technology, there is no business case that was developed to help executives recognize the value of the investments in ITSM.
- No shared and agreed understanding of ITSM benefits – Some organizations believe that ITSM is just something “that the service desk does” for processing a user request or managing an incident. Making a bad situation worse is that many within IT think that ITSM has nothing to do with the work that they are doing.
How did this happen?
There are several reasons why ITSM is no more than a house of cards for many organizations.
Many ITSM implementations suffer from short-term thinking, prioritizing technology implementation over business value and employee experience, or even worse, prioritizing internal IT concerns over business results.
A house of cards ITSM implementation is often the result of inconsistent processes and a lack of governance, exasperated by poorly designed, implemented, and unenforced policies. As a result, different parts of the IT organization manage its work differently, making transparency into IT difficult.
In most fragile implementations, ITSM was treated as an IT initiative, not a business initiative. Had business stakeholders been involved from the beginning, ITSM would be business-oriented, with reports and measures that matter. Instead, ITSM became a layer of bureaucracy for interacting with IT.
Regardless of how it happened, there’s been no reason for senior business management to care about ITSM – until now.
Why business executives need to care
Historically, many senior business executives have paid little attention to service management – and understandably so. Reports contained data that had no meaning to executives. Performance metrics produced by IT said one thing, but end-users told a vastly different story regarding their experiences with technology and processes. ITSM was viewed simply as something being done at the service desk. With so many foundational elements missing, many ITSM implementations gave executives little reason to care.
But times are changing – and changing fast.
Businesses are rapidly and increasingly relying on technology to drive the business – and the customer experience – to new horizons. With ever increasing frequency, customers are interacting with technology, such as intelligent automation, chatbots, natural language processing, and generative AI, and not with humans.
But without good ITSM, how can an organization ensure that technology is delivering the desired value and outcomes needed by both the business and its customers? There are many known cases (including the UK’s NHS IT program[i], Canada’s Phoenix Pay System[ii], and Knight Capital Group software deployment[iii]) where businesses that ignored good service management practices and have experienced significant and embarrassing failures.
The fact is that today’s digitally driven businesses require good ITSM for business success. The question that was usually never answered remains – how will your ITSM implementation support your business’ strategy?
Today is a good day to prepare for the ITSM of tomorrow
Good ITSM is more relevant today than ever for modern, digital businesses. Here are three steps for moving ITSM from a house of cards to a reliable and solid business capability.
- Develop a business capability map. A business capabilities map is a visual tool used to depict what a business does, not how it does it. A business capability describes the capacity, materials, and expertise an organization has or needs to complete its work.[iv] One of the things that makes a business capability so interesting from an ITSM perspective is that capabilities have outcomes.
- Conduct an ITSM capability assessment. Not to be confused with a maturity assessment, a capability assessment evaluates the organization’s service management abilities, capacity, and skills. Do not limit this assessment to IT operations – look at ITSM capabilities holistically, from strategy through design, development, transition, and continual improvement.
- Do a gap analysis between the business capability map and the ITSM capability assessment. What areas of business capability are well-supported by good ITSM practices? Where are the gaps between business capabilities and ITSM capabilities? What are the impacts of those gaps? What needs to be done differently from an ITSM perspective to meet the demands and requirements of those business capabilities?
Stop relying on an ITSM approach that is built as a house of cards. Completing the above steps will start your ITSM implementation on an incredible transformation to strategic capability, both for the organization and for IT.
[i] Asgarkhani, M. (2022). Failed tech deployment initiatives: Is poor IT governance to blame? European Conference on Management Leadership and Governance, 18(1), 524–528. https://doi.org/10.34190/ecmlg.18.1.728
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
[iv] https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/a-quick-guide-to-business-capability-maps , Retrieved February 2024.
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