IMPLEMENTING IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Tan, Cater-Steel, & Toleman say that circumstances have made IT functions more service oriented (2009). Budget overruns and under-performing IT departments have probably forced this change. ITSM these days focuses on the end to end service provision rather than just the IT assets.

Every part of the IT service lifestyle is aligned to some part of the core business functions. Service Level agreements are made between IT service managers and business manages. Those agreement align to the strategy of the enterprise. Business Strategy: The future hopeful state of a busineess. IT services align to strategy at every step and will be at the end destination providing value and support too.

Reference

Tan, W, Cater-Steel, A, Toleman, M. (2009). Implementing IT Service Management. Journal of Computer Information Systems

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management was initially applied to the Japanese manufacturing sector now IT service managers are using it improve the service provided throughout its lifecycle.

First we must define quality before we can measure and manage it. With Conformance Quality we have an established standard which must be met. It's like comparing an IT service to another that is known to be good. Gap Quality is a standard where a services are measured to determine whether they meet or exceed expectations. It's hard to measure those expectation and the level to which they are met because people perceive quality of service in different ways. Excellence Quality is a mutually agreed standard of the highest excellence for the service provided.

Value Quality is in my opinion,  is the most useful measure of how well a service is performing. Business Managers look at every part of their spending within  business in a simple way: ROI (Return on Investment). I have said in previous blog posts that I believe IT projects are like any other project and should be measured using the same rules. If a Project is not adding value to the enterprise, something has gone wrong in the conception, implementation, or monitoring of the project. Sometime issues are not identified in the project until much later. Those reviews could be used to identify the root cause of a problem. Steps can then be taken to remedy the root cause.

Re: An Overview of ITSM

The service sector in the industrialised world is responsible for the lion's share in the domestic product of those nations. Because all service industries use IT, those that provide it have had to focus on quality more and more.

Enterprises that have adopted ITSM have experienced improvements in their productivity because downtimes for service are much less than they used to be. They have implemented full or partial MOF or ITIL-like practices to benefit the businesses they are serving.

Introduction of uniformity and quality standards is probably a good thing. If a service user experience a interruption to their normal service, that interruption is always is handled by the same person - the Incident Manager. There is no ambiguity in clearly defined roles such as these and a RACI chart will confirm who is responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed. When everyone knows what is expected of them and what to expect, efficiency of the IT service is the result.

RE: Taming the Help Desk by Geoffrey Sperl

If you find yourself being promoted to manager of a Help Desk as competent Help Desk workers often are, you should keep in mind this. You probably were promoted because you were good at your job, not becuse you have any management skill. Read on for some management tips.

You need to brush up your appearance, your written and oral communication, and some of your unprofessional behaviour. What makes your new role different is you will have more contact with people on all levels of communication. 

You will have staff to lead and select. For that you should interview them properly, train them in industry approved methods (like MOF & ITIL). Once you have the good technicians with work ethics that match you own, you should retain them.

ITSM should be run like a business

RE: Service Management in Operations by Sue Conger, MaryAnne Winniford, and Lisa Erickson-Harris

Service Management in IT is now like any other service mangement in other business functions. It has not always been this way. ITSM now talks of things like SLAs where actual service levels are agreed not measuring details like dropped packets. SLM focuses now on the processes and services defined in the SLA. That is: what the services are and how they are used.

However, not all enterprise managers are aware of the benefits frameworks like ITIL can give them. Even if ITIL or MOF was partially implemented, greater efficiencies would result from it. Those efficiencies could result in less downtime from outages and increased productivity from those using the services. The result: a better business.

 ITSM textbook is a good height for trainer

Change is coming

RE: Mastering IT Change Management Step Two: Moving from Ignorant Anarchy to Informed Anarchy by Ken Dietal

In the past changes to IT services were made, and the only indication that a change had been made was at the coalface. These changes sometimes are disruptive to workers, so a call to helpdesk is understandable. Sometimes the helpdesk were not aware of the change either, so an incident report was logged and sent to the developers who said "yeah I know".

Modern change management has gone a long way to fuse these "islands of knowledge". We now have procedures to keep everyone in the loop. From submission to implementation, every stakeholder informed, even the reluctant ones. The process can be a little cumbersome, however, when emergency changes are needed. In these cases the two review steps are bypassed to expedite changes.

In conclusion, I praise the new changes. It removes some of the "yeah I know" exchanges between helpdesk and change implementer.

Help Desk Support

Re: You Want us to Support WHAT?!? Negotiation, Delivery, and Cultivation: The Gateway to Excellent Service Deployment. By Ryan Tucker and Nathan Carpenter

In the past Help Desks used to be something that was added after the deployment of a new service or just before. These days support starts from the conception of a new service. That's probably a good thing. Users can be involved in the development of the new service and suggest improvements. A user is then involved in the process and can might be less critical of a service they perceive as being imposed on them

Service Catalogues

Re: Developing a Service Catalogue for Higher Education Information Technology Services by Andrew H. Lyons.

The most important step the team made in developing this system was involving the customers and end users in the devopment process. They involved users of varying technical experience, asking them what they liked and disliked about the old site. This was important because it was a "cumbersome" experience using the old site. They reviewed the types of services by the need category type, without using a long description in the title so it was easier for the user to skim through. They had make a compromise between over-simplified language . They wanted to avoid grouping services by technology, and instead focused on the type of searches a user would commonly use.

I believe they developed this in the correct way. A user who is fustrated by the service catalogue might tend to ignore it, and all the useful self-help service instruction it gives. They will then call the IT department to fix something they might have fixed themselves.

Re: What Determines IT Spending Priorities?

Thankyou Hoon S. Cha, David E. Pingry and Matt E. Thatcher for a truly riveting article.

When managers commit less money to Security, they are basically gambling. They are probably aware what the consequences are if security fail, so are playing the odds the way a gambler or someone who chooses to drive their car uninsured does. We are all aware that IT is a cost no matter how many savings you make. As long as you, as a IT professional, are aware of the risks, and take steps to inform the big decision makers in your enterprise of the risks, you can't be held accountable for security disasters.

For other IT spending areas it depends on where your priorities lie. Most firms would agree that money spent on services that the administration staff use are unavoidable. The business can't run without them. For the rest of the IT services it really depends on what your busines does and what size it is.

Re: Six Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make by J.W. Ross & Peter Weill

IT Managers make poor decisions on IT projects because they fail to realise the project is a business decision, as well as a technical challenge. This does not surprise me. IT graduates tend to be less business savvy as they should be. To be fair to IT educators, degrees are changing to include business papers in ithe curriculum, but there are significant numbers of IT graduates that have been in the workplace for years with no idea of business. These people are not to be trusted make a potentially business destroying decision. In my experience in a IT degree, I was one of two people taking a business paper and I don't expect a rush of IT students enrolling in business papers next year. IT students are generally not interested in IT.

I've made clear who I think should be making IT decisions. A few things should be considered when making a decision on IT: How much to spend, on what, and to what quality. As long as the money is set aside for it is reasonable, all that has be considered is the value it brings to the business and the appropriateness to the business strategies.

In the future, the IT professional graduating from good institutes today, will be trusted to make the big IT decisions. Until then IT professionals should work hard to earn that trust.

Re: IT Doesn't Matter by Nicholas.G. Carr

The power and influence of IT has grown considerably, in the last few decades where half of a businesses' budget is spent on it. It can be given too much strategic value in a business though, and given that all competing businesses use IT, it can be easily replicated by a competitor. When a company has a competitive advantage in their IT systems it won't be long before your rivals copy it, diminishing your advantage.

IT is nothing more than a commodity. Making it valuable in the long term is a challenge. Advantages disappear quickly, one minute you are making money from proprietary software that cost a fortune to develop, next minute the technology is available to all for buttons. A business should aware of the pitfalls of over-capitalisation and the temporary nature of IT advantage, and strategies can be made to innovate before the advantage disappears.

With the knowledge that competitive advantage is fleeting, so businesses take heed of the following advice:

• don't waste money trying to get competitive advantage over a rival. You might only have it for a short time 
• wait for technology to get cheaper, this will also  give you time to assess what flaws the product has
• do not look for opportunities, rather optimise what you have and protect from risk

Software and hardware vendors want you to continually upgrade. It is their strategy to squeeze more money out of customers. A manager should not be afeard to resist wasteful upgrades. The top performing companies in the USA were very frugal with their IT spend.