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ESM

Can good ESM lead to better EX?

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What is employee experience (EX)?

A recent Forbes magazine article described EX as “the sum of all interactions that an employee has with her employer during the duration of her employment relationship. It includes any way the employee “touches” or interacts with the company and vice versa in the course of doing her job. And, importantly, it includes her feelings, emotions and perceptions of those interactions.”

What companies are learning is that EX is a really big deal and is becoming a critical factor in the success of the modern organization.

Why all the fuss?

There are a number of reasons why EX is getting so much attention across businesses today.  First, happy employees make for happy customers.  This Harvard Business Review article discussed the strong statistical link between employee well-being and customer satisfaction.  A study conducted by Glassdoor showed that a happier workforce is clearly associated with an organization’s ability to deliver better customer satisfaction.

It is easier and less expensive to recruit, retain, and grow employees when there is consistently positive EX.  When companies create outstanding experiences for their employees, people want to work for and stay with these companies.[1]

Another Forbes article discussed the correlation between good EX and profitability and value.  For example, the stock prices of companies appearing on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies rose 14% per year from 1998-2005; stock prices only rose 6% for companies not on this list.  A Globoforce-IBM study found that organizations that scored in the 25% on EX saw 3x return on assets and 2x return on sales.

Indicators of good EX

But here’s the thing.  EX cannot be directly measured.  Think about it – how can you measure how someone feels?  Sure, you can conduct surveys or interviews and get a general impression of how employees feel about their employers and work environment, but this approach has some level of subjectivity.

Secondly, many organizations are under a mistaken perception that EX is just something to check off a list.  But EX is not just about employee appreciation lunches or passing out gift cards, nor is it something that is just the responsibility of an HR organization.  Rather, it’s the entire organization that influences and promotes EX.

Good EX is largely the result of an organizational culture that values employee contribution, collaboration, well-being, purpose, and other factors within the workplace.  It truly does come down to how employees feel about their organization, their management, and their job.

Good EX might be indicated by high net promoter scores, high employee retention rates, or smaller time-to-hire measures.  As mentioned above, good EX may even show up on the bottom line in the form of increased profits or market value.  But none of these indicators are scientific measures good EX.

One thing for sure however – just as with a positive organizational culture, people know good EX when they experience it.    Can good enterprise service management help enable that positive employee experience?

What is enterprise service management?

During his recent Cherwell Software CLEAR 2020 keynote address, Sam Gilliland, CEO of Cherwell, discussed how taking an enterprise service management (ESM) approach has helped many organizations weather the service support and delivery challenges caused by the pandemic.  By having an organization’s service providers, such as IT, Facilities, HR, and others utilizing a common platform, those organizations were not only to respond to the operational challenges presented by the pandemic, but they are also able to thrive despite those challenges.

But what is ‘ESM’?  Is it just dropping the “IT” from ITSM and replacing it with an “E”?

ESM is about taking an enterprise, not departmental, approach to managing, enabling, supporting, and delivering an organization’s products and services in a way that co-creates value and delivers measurable business outcomes.

In a nutshell, I believe that good service management can enable a better EX.  Good service management brings transparency and measurability into organizational operations.  Employee can see for themselves how the organization is performing, and how their contributions result in organizational success.

ESM encourages collaboration and teamwork by enabling and supporting holistic workflows.  Each part of any organization must work well for all other parts of the organization in order to achieve success.   Conversely, organizations whose departments work in isolation from others cannot react to or respond as quickly to changes in marketspaces and business as organizations that think and work holistically.

By having these holistic workflows in place, employees can be confident that they are doing the right things right.  Holistic workflows also help employees avoid having to make multiple individual requests with individual departments within the organization just to achieve needed outcomes.

3 things to do to help service management enable better EX

Is your organization’s approach to enterprise service management enabling a better EX?  If not, here are three things you can do:

  • Automate the obvious – not just within IT, but across the organization. Those simple, but repetitive and tedious tasks currently requiring human intervention can be better served by automation.  Automation in turn enables employees to work at their own pace on their own schedule, which is a satisfier when it comes to EX.
  • Identify and map enterprise value streams. Most value streams within an organization cross departmental boundaries.  For example, take onboarding a new employee.  Not only is HR involved, but also IT and Facilities. Where are the handoffs?  What work can be done in parallel?   Mapping and understanding how work and value flows through the organization is critical for enabling positive EX. Are there any gaps or delays in how work and value flows through the organization?  How does technology and process enable those value streams – and are there opportunities to optimize those value streams?
  • Develop employee journey maps. Employee Journey Maps (EJM) are similar to customer journey maps but are focused on the employee’s journey with an organization. Where does an employee encounter friction? Can the use of technology or automating processes eliminate that friction?

While good EX is largely the result of nurturing the desired culture within an organization, ESM can augment that experience through proactive management of work streams, well defined and streamlined processes, and delivering valuable products and services. Yes, good ESM can make for better EX!

[1] https://www.socialchorus.com/blog/future-of-work/the-employee-experience-in-2019/

 

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ESM, ITSM

Nine signs that it’s time to expand ITSM into the Enterprise

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I read a lot about how organizations have stood up a centralized service desk, a self-service portal, and called that “enterprise service management”.

While these two deliverables may be good things to do, I don’t think that these two deliverables in and of themselves represent “enterprise service management”.  Such an approach only perpetuates what many organizations have done with ITSM – just address the (relatively easy) operational aspects of service management, without doing any of the needed work to identify and underpin the end-to-end flow of value within IT.

What expanding ITSM could do for the enterprise

Having said that, I do think that expanding ITSM into the enterprise could have a significant and positive impact on the organization.

Expanding good ITSM into the organization would standardize how work gets done.  Standardized work improves both the productivity and the throughput of work through the organization.

ITSM would bring clarity and transparency into how value flows through the organization.  Good ITSM would result in the identification and definition of services and processes that underpin the organizational value streams of a business.

Good ITSM across the enterprise would bring repeatability, reliability, and measurability to all aspects of the organization.

All of the above are good things that expanding ITSM could do for the enterprise.

But how do you know its time to expand ITSM into the enterprise?

Nine signs that it may be time to expand ITSM beyond IT

Here are my top nine signs (in no particular order) that it may be time to expand ITSM beyond IT.

  1. Published IT performance reports depict business measures or results, not IT or technology metrics. Published reports reflect success measures that are outcome-based and relevant and meaningful to the business.
  2. Business colleagues outside of IT take an active, engaged role in service management activities. Business colleagues actively participate in CAB meetings; the ITSM steering committee has significant participation from business colleagues, and some (most) services have a service owner that does not work within IT.
  3. IT is a valued contributor and partner in business strategy development. The IT service portfolio is regularly reviewed by key business decision-makers and is a critical input to technology investment decisions, work prioritization, and managing demand.    IT personnel – at all levels of the organization – participate in business strategy and planning meetings.
  4. The IT-Business relationship is one of being “colleagues”, not “service provider and customer”.  With IT and business colleagues working as an integrated entity, efforts are focused on the true customer – the person or business that ultimately buys a company’s products and services.
  5. Business colleagues have a consistently good experience in their interactions with the IT organization. Performance is predictable and consistent. Communications are appropriate, relevant, and timely.  Issues are addressed and managed in a professional manner.  There are active, positive business – IT relationships.
  6. The IT organization is working as an integrated team. There are no “Dev vs. Ops vs. QA vs. Security” attitudes within IT, but rather a culture of collaboration. The IT organization has recognized that there is no “one size fits all approach” and has learned how to effectively incorporate and leverage the strengths of different methodologies to deliver business value.
  7. ITSM processes are lean, effective, and provide “just enough” control. Processes are as simple as possible, friction-free, and have little, if any, waste.  Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, understood, and embraced.  Processes facilitate getting work done, rather than act as a barrier to getting work done.
  8. The IT organization acts and communicates in business terms. The service catalog articulates what IT does in terms of business value and outcomes. IT consistently demonstrates good business acumen. The business relationship management function is established and proactively ensures that the business realizes value from its investments in IT.
  9. IT promotes and communicates how ITSM is benefitting the organization. ITSM successes (and learnings) are regularly publicized – and the business is feeling the positive impact from ITSM implementation and use.

But even if all nine (or most) of these signs are present, it still may not make sense to expand ITSM into the enterprise.

The ultimate sign that it’s time to expand ITSM into the enterprise

What is the ultimate sign that it’s time to expand ITSM into the enterprise?

Your business colleagues ask for it.

Just because IT thinks this is a good idea isn’t sufficient justification for expanding ITSM across the enterprise.  Expanding ITSM into the enterprise must be a business initiative, not an IT initiative forced upon the business. Why?

Business colleagues may not know anything about ITSM.  They may not even be aware that the IT organization is doing service management.  But, business colleagues feel that they have consistent, good experiences in their interactions with IT.  They get real business value from services delivered from IT. They see how wider use of the concepts being used by IT can benefit the organization.  And, most importantly, they want to expand those concepts across the enterprise.

But to have success with expanding ITSM concepts into the enterprise, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is not as simple as dropping the ‘IT’ and adding an ‘E’. The business must own ESM.   The business must dedicate and invest resources to ESM.  There must be commitment to ESM being successful.  There must be a willingness to do the required “care-and-feeding” across the organization, not just within a department or two.  The enterprise must adopt an attitude of continual improvement.

Getting ready to expand ITSM into the enterprise

While there is much that can be leveraged from a good ITSM implementation to jumpstart an ESM implementation, here are six steps that will ensure that ESM will be successful.

  • Build the compelling business case – Business value consists of five factors – increased revenue, decreased cost, improved productivity, competitive differentiation, and improved customer satisfaction. The business case for ESM must address at least one of these five factors; doing so will help you get the support and funding needed for ESM.
  • Form a cross-functional team – Again, ESM has to be a business initiative. This means that a cross-functional team consisting of both business colleagues and IT staff are required for ESM success.
  • Identify enterprise-level services – An IT service only depicts the “middle part” of an enterprise-level service. There are business activities that occur both before and after the IT service is consumed. What are those activities? Who is accountable for the quality and results of those activities?  Identifying and defining enterprise-level services is critical for ESM success.
  • Identify organizational value streams – How does work get done across the enterprise? Just like an IT service often involves multiple parts of the IT organization, the same can be said for enterprise services.  Rarely (if ever) does an outcome or result delivered to the customer only involve a single department or work group within an organization. ESM must underpin an organization’s delivery of value.
  • Define good processes – IT’s expertise in defining good ITSM processes can be leveraged to help the enterprise identify and document its processes. But processes must facilitate, not control, getting work done. This may represent a mind shift change for those new to service management.
  • Take an iterative approach – As with ITSM implementation, ESM implementation must be an iterative activity. Start with a smaller enterprise value stream.  Define and apply service management concepts, learn what worked well, identify improvements, then repeat the cycle with the next enterprise value stream. There is no need to “boil the ocean” – make steady, incremental progress toward ESM goals.  Adoption and success will be much greater.

The digital consumer is demanding that businesses act as unified entities, rather than collections of parts.  This means that all parts of an organization must collaborate to deliver the value and results that the digital consumer wants.  Expanding good ITSM into the enterprise is a way to meet the demands of both the digital consumer and the digital economy.

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ESM, ITSM

Why your company isn’t so excited (but should be!) about ESM

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Enterprise Service Management (ESM) describes the use of service processes and technologies across an organization.  ESM also describes business management software which provides an integrated view into business practices. [1]

And what part of any organization doesn’t rely on the use of processes and technology for running its business?  None!

But organizations have traditionally taken a departmental or system-based approach to processes and technology.  Such an approach usually focuses on the needs of a specific department, or those directly impacted by the implementation of a system.  Rarely (if ever!) does this approach address the entirety of a value chain, or the movement of work and information from a point-of-origin through the point-of-consumption.  Value chains within an organization typically involve multiple departments.  But because of a disjointed approach to processes and technology, work efforts are usually disjointed, and the organization works as a collection of parts.

ESM could fix that, as a good ESM implementation would facilitate and integrate the flow of information and activities within an organization.

Why your company needs ESM

The idea of ESM is not new, but there is now a renewed focus on the need for ESM.  Why is ESM suddenly so important?  I would argue that the most compelling reason why ESM is so important is the customer – especially in the context of today’s digital world.

A challenge often encountered by customers today is that one part of the company is unaware of what the other parts are doing, much less how their activities impact or depend on those other parts.  As a result, departments within companies often tend to work in isolation without regard for any upstream or downstream processes.  Things simply fall through the cracks.

And in the digital age, customers simply will not deal with organizations that act in this manner.  They will quickly (and quietly) move along.

An effective ESM implementation can result in an organization acting and working as an integrated enterprise.   Done well, ESM enables a frictionless and differentiated customer experience, as it reinforces an enterprise-wide, process-oriented approach for providing value to a customer.  By underpinning an organization’s value streams, ESM:

  • Can help identify and ensure that proper interfaces between individual systems are in place.
  • Brings clarity to the organization and breaks down internal barriers and silos.
  • Results in clearly defined and integrated value streams across the organization, not just within a department.
  • Brings transparency, consistency, and measurability into the movement of work and information across the organization.
  • Reflects the true picture of end-to-end service delivery.

Sounds great, right?  So why isn’t your company excited about ESM?

What is in the way of ESM?

ESM adoption has its own set of unique challenges.

  • Success with ESM will require a change in organizational behaviors. The internal service provider/customer model utilized in many organizations must end.  The “customer” is outside of the organization, and all parts of the organization must collaborate to deliver products and services to that customer.
  • Most organizational structures are hierarchical – which is a barrier to collaboration. A hierarchical organizational structure is typically pre-disposed to not collaborate with other parts of the organization.  This is because most organizational compensation and recognition schemes are focused inwardly on departmental goals and objectives and not enterprise goals.
  • Organizations lack defined, enterprise-wide business processes. Business processes are typically defined only at the departmental or team level and tend to focus only on a particular domain or area.  How business processes interface is at best poorly defined, if defined at all.
  • Technology has been used as a band-aid. Because organizations took a departmental approach to process and technology use, additional technology was often deployed to close the gaps between disparate systems within the enterprise.
  • Lack of clarity regarding organizational value streams. No single part of an organization is independent of the rest of the organization; It takes all parts of an organization to deliver value to its customers.  But often, there is no clarity or ownership regarding value streams within an organization.

Don’t repeat the ITSM sins of the past with ESM

Some organizations have approached ESM as just an extension of their current IT Service Management (ITSM) implementations.  I would agree that many ITSM concepts, such as having a centralized service desk and taking a coordinated response to service requests and interruptions, are applicable across the enterprise.  But I would also argue that for many organizations, if the ESM implementation mimics the approach taken for ITSM implementation, ESM will fail.  Why?  Because many ITSM implementations just aren’t delivering on their potential.

  • Many ITSM implementations only addressed operational issues and not the entire IT value stream. As a result, ITSM became a barrier, rather than an enabler, for working within IT.
  • ITSM was driven as an IT initiative, not as a business initiative. Rather than identifying, promoting, and delivering business value, ITSM became an obstacle for getting IT to do any work for the business.
  • IT services were defined as “things that IT does” and not in terms of business value and outcomes. As a result, there is no clear definition or shared understanding of how IT provides business value. To the rest of the organization, IT appears to be a cost center, not a value enabler.

Three things to do to get ready for ESM

To really make a positive impact, ESM must be more than just establishing an enterprise service desk or rolling out a self-service portal.  ESM has to reflect and support the true end-to-end delivery of products and services throughout the enterprise.  But ESM will require strong management commitment and an investment of time and resources.  It will not get done overnight.  So how do you get started?  Here’s my tips for getting ready for ESM:

  • Work on getting your ITSM house in order. IT is one of the few organizations within an enterprise that has a true enterprise view of the organization.  If current ITSM processes are ineffective, or if services are poorly defined, now is the opportunity to improve and learn.  The knowledge and skills you gain from making those improvements will be valuable as your organization begins its ESM journey.  Your business colleagues will also notice the improvements as well – this is critical, because you’re going to need their support.
  • Become an expert on the business of the business. This means learning the language of the business; what the business does to deliver value to the customer; understanding how the parts of the business interact to deliver that value to the customer.  Tools like COPIS (or “backward SIPOC”) diagrams are useful for capturing how value is delivered from the customer perspective back into the organization (in other words, from the outside-in).  This will also help you gain the support and credibility you’ll need from your business colleagues.
  • Develop a strong, compelling business case. Perhaps the most important question to answer is “Why should your company implement ESM?”. How will the gains in effectiveness and efficiency from ESM adoption translate into bottom line impact across the enterprise?  Perhaps ESM will result in improvements in the cost per sale or unit.  Maybe ESM will result in the reduction of lead times for product or service delivery.  Whatever the impacts may be, your business case must articulate the clear value proposition in terms of increased revenues, decreased costs, improved productivity, company differentiation, or improved customer satisfaction.

The digital age demands that organizations execute as frictionless, integrated enterprises. But to do so will require many companies to rethink how they are organized and how they collaborate to deliver both customer and business value.  Done well, ESM will transform organizations from “collections of parts” to an integrated, customer-focused enterprises, providing both an outstanding customer experience and improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.

Worried that your ESM efforts will fall into the “bad ITSM” trap?  Want to make sure that your leverage, not abandon,  your ITSM investments as you expand  into ESM?  Let us introduce you to VeriSM – the service management approach for the Digital Age.   Tedder Consulting can help you leverage VeriSM to achieve ESM – contact us today!

For more pragmatic advice and service management insight, click here to subscribe to my newsletter!

Picture Credit: Pixabay

[1] Wikipedia, retrieved May 30, 2018.

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ESM, ITSM

Why Service Management must move out of IT

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Is your IT service management “future ready”?

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article[1] discussed how organizations must become “future ready”.  The article stated that becoming future-ready requires change to the enterprise on two dimensions:  the customer experience and operational efficiency.

Of these two dimensions, the customer experience will drive competitive advantage for businesses.[2]  Is your service management ready to enable and drive that differentiating customer experience?

The Future’s Impact to today’s (IT) Service Management

For many organizations, service management continues to be narrowly focused on the day-to-day operations within IT and follows a “service provider/internal customer” approach. To become “future-ready”, this approach to service management must change.

The organizational mindset of an internal service provider/internal customer construct must change to an enterprise service management approach.  The business exists to serve customers, not just others within the same business.  In other words, all parts of the business must work together to drive business success.

Value streams are the threads that link the parts of the business together for producing and delivering products and services.

Every part of a business is part of one or more value streams that delivers products and services to customers.  Technology underpins those value streams; by itself, technology doesn’t provide value to a business.[3] But because technology use is so ubiquitous within businesses, the line between technology (or IT) and business functions have become blurred.  In some organizations, the line does not exist.

This has two implications for service management.

  • Service management processes must be “waste free”. Any bureaucracy or non-value-added work within processes must be eliminated. Eliminating waste, bottlenecks, and manual intervention in processes help facilitate a good customer experience – things just “work”.
  • Service management processes must reflect and support the entire value stream, not just the IT portion. IT’s contribution to enterprise value streams, while important, is only a portion of those value streams. Having good enterprise service management processes facilitates good handoffs between contributors within the value stream, enables measurability, helps drive effective workflows, and promotes viewing value and outcomes from the customer perspective, not an internal perspective.

This means that service management must move out of IT and into and across the enterprise.

What is the impact to IT?

When service management moves into and across the enterprise, what does this mean for IT?

First, having strong business acumen becomes critical for IT.  Some IT organizations are too focused on technology and lack business acumen. Business acumen must be a core competency of the IT organization.  Why?  Because the business is about the business first, not technology.  Technology only enhances or enables what the business wants to do.  Having a strong business acumen helps IT understand why, not just how, technology can help.

IT can then become the trusted advisor for exploiting technology for business advantage.  IT must help its business find the right balance between “leading edge” and “tried and true” technologies; again, dependent on business goals and objectives.  To do this, IT must internalize business goals and objectives to understand and develop competencies and awareness of current and emerging technologies.

Lastly, “order taker” IT organizations will be outsourced.  If an IT organization cannot demonstrate or promote how it delivers true business value, IT will appear to be a commodity.  And commodities can be obtained from anywhere.

But if your IT organization is practicing good service management, IT can take a leadership role in expanding service management across the enterprise.

Get Service Management “future ready”

To get service management “future ready”, here are four things you must do:

  • Service management must be (re) envisioned from the customer perspective – the true customer. The true customer is found outside of the organization, not inside the organization.  This means that you have to understand how value is created and flows through the organization (or value streams).  Service Management must underpin the entire value stream – from the customer through the business and back to the customer.  Service Management must take an “outside in” approach so you can understand how work is getting done – and where obstacles and bottlenecks may exist.
  • Shift the service management focus to the entire organization. – The objective is to ‘float all boats’ in the service management ‘harbor’, not just the ‘IT boat’.  Why? The customer does business with the business, not with an individual component within the business.  Siloed business operational models must end.  If one part of the value stream fails, the entire value stream fails. This means that service management must expand to include all parts of the enterprise so you can work transparently and deliver an outstanding, consistent, and repeatable customer experience – as an aligned, integrated organization.
  • Automate. Humans have better things to do than call a service desk to reset a password or request products to which they are already entitled and eligible to receive. Now take this idea one step further – do you really want to irritate your customers with such tediousness?   Drive toward automating those day-to-day operational activities so you can free up people to do what they do best – innovate, imagine, and problem-solve.
  • Invest in knowledge management. Knowledge management must become an enterprise-wide capability.   In the “always connected, always on” digital economy, organizations can ill afford to spend time rediscovering what is already known within an organization.  Neither can there be siloes of knowledge within an organization.  Effective knowledge management is a key enabler of a “future ready” service management approach.

Service management can no longer be about just IT.  Service management has never been about this or than methodology – frankly, there is no “one-size-fits-all” methodology – it is about delivering business value and results.  The future-state service management approach is a blend of several methodologies and practices from all parts of the business (including IT) that enable the whole business to deliver value and results.  Get “future ready” now by moving service management beyond IT and into the enterprise.

Need to expand  service management into the enterprise, while still leveraging your existing investments?  With our Next Generation ITSM consulting service, Tedder Consulting can help you get the best of both worlds – contact us today!

For more pragmatic advice and service management insight, click here to subscribe to my newsletter!

 

Picture credit:  Shutterstock

[1] Weill, Peter and Stephanie L. Woerner., “Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future?”. MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Westerman, George. “Your Company Doesn’t Need a Digital Strategy”. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 2018.

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Business Relationship Management, ITSM

Let’s Stop Playing “Service Provider” and “Customer”

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The concept – at a high level –  wasn’t all bad.

The concept was that IT organizations should adopt a service-oriented mindset when it comes to working within the business.  The attitude of the IT organization must shift from “technology is cool” to “what’s best for our business”.

So best practice advised IT to become a “service provider” to the “customers” found within the business.

But in practice, IT taking on the role of “service provider” and treating business colleagues as “customers” sends the wrong message to the business – and within IT.

It’s the wrong message

When IT treats colleagues as “customers”, and colleagues view IT as a “service provider”, it puts up barriers with an organization.  Not only does it artificially separate the IT organization from the rest of the business, it makes working with the IT organization needlessly more difficult.  Under the mantra of “the customer is always right”, IT often jumps through unnecessary hoops to make the “customer” happy.  Being referred to as a “customer” gives some colleagues a sense of entitlement in their interactions with IT.  Some within the business make and have unrealistic expectations of the IT organization.

Perhaps even worse, the service provider / customer definition divides the IT organization.  The development team makes demands of the operation team.  The security team makes demands of the development and operations teams.  Demands all issued under the guise of “I am your customer – serve me”.

We’re really not service providers.  They really aren’t customers.

If IT was really a service provider, it would find itself competing in an open market place within a business.  IT would have the ability to (really) sell its services at market rates, scale as needed, and invest in new and emerging technology as it deemed fit. But that is not the reality of enterprise IT.  IT has a budget that has been allocated and agreed within the business to which IT must adhere.  This means is that IT really cannot scale resources or significantly alter or add services without agreement and funding from the business it serves.

If “the business” was truly the customer, they could shop for IT services, both from within and external to the business.  “The business” could contract with whatever service provider it chose and not be concerned with interoperability, security, maintainability, and every other -ability with which enterprise IT must be concerned.  But in reality, “the business” is (mostly) a captive user of its organization’s IT services.

IT is not a “service provider”.

The “customer” is not an internal group or person.

So, what are we?

What we are is a business.

A business is an organization aligned by purpose, vision, and goals, with each member working for the benefit of the organization and for the success of all other members of the same organization.   It takes all parts of the business – HR, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, IT – for a business to have success.  No single part of a business can stand on its own and be successful without interactions with and cooperation from the other parts.

By working as an integrated entity, a business has unlimited potential.  But what a business does not have is unlimited resources.  And when a business loses sight of the fact that it does not have unlimited resources, it often looks like this:

  • Multiple “number 1” priorities

o   But no additional staff is allocated to help

o   And no postponement or cancellation of other initiatives

  • Lack of investment in “keeping the lights on” – not doing the “care-and-feeding” needed to maintain current operations
  • Quality is often sacrificed to meet target dates

And then, IT often becomes an obstacle for getting something done.

Then in an effort to keep up (or dig its way out), IT overcommits and takes on additional work without fully understanding the demand or impact on its (limited) resources.  And when IT can’t deliver, then IT is looked at as being too slow to respond or react to business needs or changes in the business environment.   IT becomes the “black hole” where business innovations go to disappear.

But here’s the conundrum.

Business – by definition – is an opportunistic endeavor.  Success in business means being in the right place at the right time with the right solution.

But to be in the right place and the right time with the right solution means that a business – including its IT capability- must be prepared.

Become opportunistic – holistically

To be opportunistic means that a business must be prepared.  Because when an opportunity does come along, the business has to be able to make a decision based on the best information available.  But too often, business decisions are made based on “gut feel” or seeing only part of the big picture.

And especially in the digital age, technology – managed by the IT organization – is critical for business success.  Here are four things to do to get prepared.

  • Drop the “service provider / customer” speak. All members of the business are on the same team – there can be no “us” and “them” within an organization.  And to be clear, the customer is not part of the organization.  The customer is who a business is trying to entice to do business with the business. The business is the service provider to the customer.  Stop referring to internal resources as “service provider” and “customer”.
  • Define the service portfolio. A service portfolio articulates and establishes a shared understanding about how the business is using and is planning to use technology-based solutions from IT.  But more than that, the service portfolio provides a holistic view of resource commitments, current and future value, and the total cost of ownership for providing those technology-based solutions-all in terms of business outcomes.
  • Map the value streams of the business. Mapping value streams facilitates visualization of how information and material flow throw an organization to create or deliver value to a customer.  A value stream map helps help “connect the dots” regarding how the various parts of an organization (including IT) work together to deliver that value.
  • Share knowledge – all knowledge. Being prepared to seize opportunities depends on having available, timely, accurate, and relevant knowledge from all parts of the organization, throughout the organization. Knowledge is the basis for good decision-making.

How does doing these four things help?  It’s about being prepared to make a timely and informed decision when opportunity knocks.  A business that does these four things not only understands what it is doing today, but also has the needed insight into how its capabilities could be leveraged when presented with an opportunity.

It’s time for another mindset shift

The service provider / customer concept may have been a good way to start the mindset shift that many IT organizations needed.  It’s now time for IT organizations and businesses to stop playing service provider and customer.  The business landscape is rapidly changing, and technology is becoming the cornerstone of a business in the digital economy.  Being prepared is the best way to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the digital economy.

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