This forum provides information on how IT companies are implementing and achieving return on investment (ROI) from their IT investments. Subjects covered include:
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Framework, Best Practices, IT Operations Best Practices, ITIL Implementation, ITIL ROI, ITIL Training, ITIL Service Management, ITIL Application Management, Business Service Management, File Integrity Monitoring
As we implement ITIL/ CobIT standards and best practices we are meeting significant resistance from the “old timers” – what has worked best in terms of getting people on-side with the changes (aside from telling them this is the way it has to be done)?
Because a CEO must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (or Canada Bill 198) and the Controller/CFO must work with auditors and the VP of IT must align IT operations support the audit it is almost a necessity to implement some type of formalized management process. If you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it. If you cannot manage it, you cannot improve it. Not having a process and tool to measure your IT department’s performance, is like an athlete not having a stopwatch to measure how fast he goes around the track. The athlete will not be able to know his weak points where he needs improvement, if he does not measure his performance. He will also not be able to know if his performance improves or degrades over time, without using a stopwatch and recording the times. One of the major benefits, if not THE benefit of process orientated approaches to managing your IT services and infrastructure is that it enables continuous improvement. This means that you are never totally satisfied with thee current state of affairs and that you always want to improve your services.
The reason why ITIL enables continuous improvement is that it allows you to start measuring everything you do. That is why it is so important to record everything. Technical people normally hate it to do documentation and even worse, they hate it to document everything they do, while they have more important stuff to attend to like fixing a critical server. The benefit of having everything recorded outweighs the hassle of recording it by far. Unfortunately it usually takes a while to realise these benefits which make it even more difficult to get the techies recording the stuff. There are of course several positive ways of getting them to do it, but I will not go into all of that right now. The key 6 discussion points are:
1. Identify Business or Mission Drivers. List your organizations drivers, not technology like SOA, but rather the reason for its existence. Include any internal/external, and positive/negative factors that affect your organization. Create a chart or table with eight columns. List drivers in column one.
2. Determine Ownership. Assign the title or role of the highest-level person responsible for each business driver in column two. Put their name in column three. These are your stakeholders!
3. Identify Audit and Control Requirements. Each industry has audit and control requirements like HIPPA, GLBA, FFIEC, and auditing like SAS-70 or Sarbanes-Oxley. List yours in column eight. Now you can see what is critical (drivers), who owns responsibility for each, and how they will measure achievement.
4. Identify Stakeholder Relationships. Group stakeholders into “camps” of related interests. Identify relationships between stakeholders so you can locate key roles and persons: Change Advocate (AD), Change Sponsor (S), Initiating Sponsor (S), Recipient (T). Label columns 4, 5, 6 and 7 as AD, S, A, and T respectively. Update the matrix for every entry. Imagine those people or groups that can advocate a change; but remember that advocates do not always support your position!
5. Create a Stakeholder Map. Once you know what motivates your company, organization, or business, who is responsible, and how they measure their success, you are prepared to begin selling the value of ITIL to them. Draw an “organizational” chart of the stakeholders with their actual relationships, disregarding physical reporting roles and hierarchy. Use AD, S, A and T to show stakeholder relationships. Focus on capturing the dynamics of your stakeholders. For example, a director may have several reporting managers on a traditional organizational chart; however, the views of his or her executive assistant (a key influencer) may carry more weight.
6. Translate your ITIL objectives into business terms. For example, say you want to convince the CFO of the need for Incident Management software. You know that the CFO holds responsibility for Sarbanes-Oxley audits with the CEO. You know from your stakeholder map that auditors using SAS-70 will perform parts of the audit. Therefore, you position the Incident Management software as an important investment required to comply with SAS-70 audit requirements for Sarbanes-Oxley and others.
Always align your goals and plans around meeting stakeholder needs, using terms they understand. Eliminate “techno-babble” and focus on what stakeholders consider important. Use terms and phrases that tie your needs to those of your stakeholders. You are helping your stakeholders achieve their non-IT goals through your IT goals.
One last cliché: “No one ever bought a drill because they wanted a drill; they wanted a hole in the wall.”
This may sound like common sense, but doing is not the same as knowing, and having a plan is required. IT competes with all the other business processes for mindshare and budget. In a competition, teams and players all have a plan, they understand their roles, they work their plans, individually and together as a team. Do this to show how IT supports any non-IT endeavor, and to justify activity. Ultimately, every single person, project, process, activity, and role in IT must map back to a driver — otherwise, why are you doing it? There is another real benefit to this process — the next time you find yourself in the presence of a stakeholder, you will be able to communicate about things they care about, in their terms. Once you start this process, be aware that it will change both how you perceive your organization, and how your stakeholders perceive you. Keep your maps updated. You will find these maps invaluable as you manage and grow!
Please explane what ITIL Capability Management is?
We are planning on implementing IT Service Management. Can anyone provide any insight on the benefits verses the difficulty.
We’ll discuss the difficulty first. From a technology adoption point of view ITIL described requirements;
1. Technology should satisfy current business requirements and it should have sufficient scalability for future growth
2. ITSM tools must interface with critical business processes
3. The functional and mandatory requirements should be based on defined ITIL processes and should be carefully evaluated before being selected.
Determining business requirements is very challenging.
1. Staying one step ahead of the constant change that organizations experience
2. Tracking, controlling and making cost-effective use of the complex use of IT assets
3. Streamlining daily work processes
4. Centralized management and control of the IT environment
5. Managing business users expectations of IT Service Delivery
6. Improving service quality within budget
Let’s briefly discuss the benefits that can be achieved:
Some of the key benefits are listed below:
By properly deploying ITSM the following benefits are realized (because of the many beneficial tangents that business can realize we will list the major bullets. We will respond to any requests for a more detailed analysis of the tangents and the positive realization of financial, governance and operational benefits.
1. Aligns IT with the business needs
2. Moves from a technology to service based culture
3. More ability to absorb rapid change
4. Improves quality of IT services
5. IT perceived as offering value to the organisation
6. Ensures everyone speaks the same language
7. Facilitate realization of following Business-IT objectives
8. Optimize IT resource Utilization
9. Reduce Costs
10. Improve Availability
11. Tune Capacity
12. Increase Throughput
13. Improve Scalability
14. Create environment to shift from a technology to service based culture
15. Improves ability to absorb rapid change
16. IT perceived as offering value to the organization
17. Ensures everyone speaks the same language
18. Better information on current IT services
19. Clearer view of current IT capability
20. Enhances customer satisfaction
21. Improves IT staff motivation
22. Greater flexibility for the business through improved understanding of IT support
23. Enhanced image of IT as business partner
24. Improved cycle time for changes and greater success rate
The ITIL process follows 2 process diagrams, the Jigsaw and BS15000. The Jigsaw diagram is made up of 5 major elements that can be linked together, like a jigsaw puzzle. The 5 puzzle pieces are the business perspective, service delivery, service support, infrastructure management and applications management.
Capability Management revolves around IT Service Management (ITSM) and ITIL. Organisations need to specify the strategy of IT within the organization and alignment with business processes and outcomes. For consultative sessions with IT managers and executives, it is important to understand: know where their ITIL capability and maturity stands today in terms of overall scores, and in particular what risks and opportunities they face in delivering optimal quality of service, identify opportunities for improvement and develop a roadmap / plan for addressing the highest priority issues with potential solutions and the return on investment in terms the business organization will understand. It is also important to position their IT capabilities against Industry Best Practice and their peer competitors to portray their competitive advantage from IT.