The Path to IT Transformation: Walk, Then Run, Then Soar

[MichaelDortch]

In a previous post, I offered some observations intended to help you to decide if your enterprise is ready for IT transformation. To follow up, some observations concerning the path that will get you there.

Yes, there is only one path. It's the same one I've heard of or seen taken by every successful ServiceNow client I've encountered to date. It has infinite variations, but there are three key inflection points that are required for success, and consistently successful. Those are what I will focus on here.

Walk: Consolidate, Consumerize, Automate, and Standardize

The first set of steps toward IT transformation start with putting out the fires and putting and end to all of those fire drills. Which requires replacing the fragmentation, inconsistency, and opacity of current IT management tools and processes with consolidation, consistency, and transparency. You can't transform what you can't manage effectively and consistently.

Next, it's essential to consumerize IT — make it look and feel to users more like the friendly, mobile, social, smart applications they use every day outside of IT. IT must maximize the abilities IT users and IT management team members to serve themselves, support themselves, and collaborate. This not only gets people inside and outside of IT to think more highly of IT's services, support, and people. It also lets IT deliver better services and support at lower costs. And it also frees up scarce, expensive IT resources being consumed by repetitive, reactive tasks users can handle themselves.

Hand in hand with consumerization is automation. Once effective processes for IT service delivery and management are identified, they must be automated as completely and consistently as possible. This enables higher levels of consumerization. It also reduces costs and increases efficiency, responsiveness, performance, and user satisfaction by eliminating human-borne errors.

All of these have to happen, preferably at one or a handful of enterprise locations at first. But as initial successes in these areas are achieved and sustained, they must be extended across the entire enterprise IT infrastructure, around the world. Processes and tools must be delivered in locally adapted ways, but must be consistent "under the covers," where management and transformation happen.

Run: Extend IT's Success to Other Shared Services

Once IT is walking in unison around the world, the people who run IT are the most experienced in the enterprise in delivering and managing business-critical shared services. The next step, then, is to extend the results of that experience to as many other shared business-critical services as possible.

The good news here is that often, the providers of those services, from HR to Facilities to Finance to Legal already recognize the need for better, more consistently effective processes and tools. So finding or creating opportunities to extend IT's successes to other shared services doesn't have to be a daunting challenge. And with the right tools and processes, building and deploying better tools and processes for shared services beyond IT can improve IT's perception, increase its value to the business, and make the business run better.

Soar: Manage Service Relationships to Drive Continuous Improvement

Once multiple critical business services are being run and managed based on effective combinations of tools and processes forged in and by IT, it's time to soar. What means expanding the focus of those automating and managing business and IT processes and services, to include the relationships interconnecting those processes and services. Those relationships are the connections that link business goals and needs with the services that power the business, and the processes and tools that power those services. And keeping ahead of, or even pace with, those relationships as they, the business, and its markets evolve becomes the new full-time job for everyone on the IT transformation team.

Easy to lay out — fewer than 650 words. A bit more challenging to make happen — but absolutely possible, and absolutely essential to success with IT transformation.

As I wrote a few paragraphs ago, every successful ServiceNow customer I've met, seen, or heard about, is on a path that includes these three milestones, wherever they happen to be on their particular path. On Thursday, Oct. 10, I'll have the honor of moderating a panel of three such customers, in a session at the Premier CIO Forum in Minneapolis.

My panelists? Eric Presteen, Change Management Analyst/ServiceNow Developer at Medica Health Plans. Hunter Wolf, Programmer Analyst at C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. Shawn Delaney, Manager at Old Republic Title Company. The title of our little session? "Stop Talking About IT Transformation. Do It."

If you can make it, come join us, and hear from some people turning this admittedly aggressively idealistic and simplified strategy into reality. If you can't, check out some of the links throughout this post, and stay tuned. I'm pretty sure there will be at least one other, inspired by that upcoming Premier CIO Summit panel. Your thoughts welcome anytime, of course.