At this year's joint itSMF USA and HDI conference — FUSION13 — independent management consultant Barclay Rae brought his own brand of IT service management (ITSM) improvement to Nashville. That's ITSM Goodness.
Or, more specifically, "The 7 Steps to ITSM Goodness" is a way of quickly cutting through the "wealth of information" and advice on ITSM improvement to identify the seven things that will make a big difference to IT operations, service delivery, and customer experience and satisfaction. Recognizing that sometimes that wealth of ITSM information actually makes us poorer.
I'll let a selection of Barclay's slides do the heavy lifting with the odd comment from me.
Steps 1 & 2 — Importantly it's not all about process improvement!
Steps 1 and 2 require a mindset change — thinking of end users and consumers or customers; and going beyond the status quo to think of IT delivery not only in terms of IT services but also in terms of business outcomes.
Step 3 — The IT service desk is important, it's the business' window into IT
The IT service desk is also a big influencer of end user/consumer/customer perceptions of IT performance — a large global analyst firm once had a great stat that looked something like: at least 50% of the business' perceptions of IT's performance come from service desk interactions (the reason I am being vague here is because it is now probably time-barred from being officially quoted). So investing in your service desk is investing in your IT organization and its ability to meet customer expectations.
Step 4 — Stop mopping up the water and start turn off the taps
Not enough IT organizations do problem management. I'm talking about the proactive problem management activity that looks to prevent recurring issues and potential issues rather than the more common post-major-incident drains-up exercises.
Step 5 — Make reporting count
Metrics — they are a common area of concern for nigh on everyone in IT and why ServiceNow brought Mirror42 into the fold for ServiceNow Performance Analytics. IT organizations really do need to get beyond having metrics for metrics sake and start to measure things that allow them to improve IT services and customer experience.
Steps 6 & 7 — It might feel like a management buzzword but demonstrating business "value" is important
Thankfully the oft-repeated term of "IT-business alignment" is losing traction in IT organizations looking to do a better job at IT service delivery. It has however been replaced by a number of new terms: customer-centricity, customer experience, business value, and business outcomes. And yes I am as guilty, if not more guilty, than most in their use. The important thing for me is understanding that whatever we are gauging it needs to be gauged from a business not an IT POV. That measurements of success need to be at the point of IT service consumption not the point of IT service creation. It's about where the proverbial rubber hits the road.
And then … the service management "call to action"
Finally, Barclay was not the only one aiming for global ITSM and IT improvement in Nashville. As I reported in The itSMF USA IT Service Management Think Tank AKA "The Revolutionary Network", a number of IT industry notables, pundits, prognosticators, and futurists spent eight hours across two days considering the future of ITSM and IT. I'll be blogging on this soon but in the meantime you can look at the initial outputs here.
