I've previously written about the impact of consumerization on the corporate IT organization and other corporate service providers such as HR. And the unfortunate fact that "the consumerization of IT" has more often than not been translated into dealing with the issues and opportunities of BYOD (bring your own device) rather dealing with the impact of "the consumerization of service."
But there is another element of modern consumer behavior that needs better replication in the enterprise. That of community-based advisory. Take your personal-life use Amazon for instance, surely you look at the customer reviews before buying something that you have no, or little, previous experience of? Post-delivery does something actually match the description, is it easy to use, was it really the best available price, was after sales service good, or similar. We leverage the experiences of others in making decisions rather than taking a leap of faith that may or may not pay off.
But how often do we do something similar in the workplace? How often do we continue to reinvent the proverbial wheel when it comes to introducing new IT, IT service management (ITSM), and business-enabling capabilities?
Are you really benefiting from peer success?
Yes there are lots of avenues to glean top tips and perils-and-pitfalls from others. You might:
- Employ an IT consultant and, depending on the quality of their experiences, get something that ranges from IT gold dust (based on real customer experiences) through to cut-and-pasted text from the ITIL books or similar.
- Use your industry analyst firm subscription — reading documents, having 121 conversations, or even paying for consultancy. Again the previous bullet point might apply.
- Read vendor customer case studies. But how often do they go beyond the art-of-the-possible to articulate, in the required level of detail, how to actually get to the point of success?
- Read industry pundit articles and blogs. But again how often do they go beyond pointing you in the right direction to give the specific information required to get you to that point of success? Take my two most recent service catalog blogs as great examples of only covering some of the required journey: 10 Tips for Service Catalog Success and Service Catalog: Look Beyond The Tip Of The Iceberg
- If you are feeling studious, read relevant books. Which might range from being highly practical to <<hits personal-politeness button>> those that are not.
- Attend local special interest groups, where real IT people are telling their success and war stories — hopefully warts and all.
- Attend industry conferences for real-world successes. But, as I wrote about in a previous blog, how often do you hear it from the proverbial horse's mouth — that is getting an unfiltered view of what worked and what didn't. And at a practical level too.
Honesty is more than just the best policy
As an example of the latter bullet point above, I spoke with a customer yesterday, as part of the planning process for a Knowledge14 customer panel session on implementation success, and one of the first things he said was that his company had made a big mistake with service catalog so they pulled it before it did more harm than good.
It's the sort of stuff that people need to know so they don't repeat the mistake. From a ServiceNow point of view, it's what our customers need to know to help them achieve what they need to achieve. And this advice is not only what's imparted in the part-presentation, part-Q&A session, say, but also the one-on-one questions that directly follow the session or later over a meal or in the bar. Or the "benchmarking"-type visit that might follow to really get under the skin of what a successful IT organization did in delivering change or IT transformation in the pursuance of better business operations.
So how is your wheel-invention factory?
Yes I jest, but how are you replicating what you do in your personal life in the workplace? How are you benefiting from the advice and support that your peers can provide?
It's a shameless plug, but are you registered to attend Knowledge14 where ServiceNow customers will deliver over 90% of the 180 sessions on topics such as:
- Supporting other corporate service providers with their service management challenges — what many are calling "Beyond IT"
- Tacking consumerization, especially through a successful service catalog or portal and mobility
- Making the implementation of technology, people, and process change or transformation work first time
- Improving governance and financial stewardship
So put that wheel-reinvention manual down for a moment and look at what our customers, your peers, want to share with you.
To paraphrase Isaac Newton and Bernard of Chartres: You can see further standing on the shoulders of giants.
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomselomsen/
