Published: February 04 2010, 11:43 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

Insurance, Finance, Banking, Air travel and Manufacturing all share the attribute that they are totally dependent on IT to deliver services to their customers. Essentially what this means is that the integration of Business and IT is no longer an optional extra.

This was apparent during a recent visit to a supermarket, where I was reminded of the importance of IT and business integration because the local store cannot operate without ongoing connection to technology. When I walked into the store in the early afternoon, there was an announcement that the store was closing due to a technology failure. After I investigated further with the store manager (who happens to be a neighbour) confirmed that without IT they cannot calculate totals, have inventory updated or even process non-cash transactions. 

The growing dependence on IT proves that business process is interwoven into the very fabric of the service delivered. With constrained budgets and resources, the advent of cloud and the implementation of virtualisation, it is critical that IT understands how to deploy their precious resources.

To assist IT, ITIL V3 introduced service management professionals to the Service Portfolio Management (SPM) process.  The purpose of SPM is to allow IT to manage services from inception to retirement or cradle to grave.

Key benefits of organisations who are on the SPM journey include:

• The ability to understand and manage capacity
• Leveraging financial transparency to manage costs
• Managing the limited IT resources available by mapping them to business services that are considered value to your service consumers
• Enhanced forecasting of both operational and strategic demand
• Valid data for prioritization of services

Now, SPM is like other ITIL processes--you don't simply just "get" SPM; it is a journey that requires you to understand the process and where it fits within your environment, and there are many components involved.  Processes including the Service Catalog (the vehicle used within ITIL of services available from the SPM process), IT Asset Management, Financial Management, Demand Management and Portfolio Analysis are all key elements of SPM and to assist you, CA has developed a maturity model for your edification which I would appreciate your comments on, take a look and let me know what you think.

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Published: February 02 2010, 12:02 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by Peter Doherty

How close is the Fight Club analogy to Service Management? Nobody really talks to you about it; instead, they talk at you. In most Service Management programs communications are pretty bad but note that it's not just a Service management problem--it is an organisational problem.

Quite a few companies, for compliance reasons, carry out Employee Opinion surveys. Let me tell you, without knowing a single thing about your organisation I would bet on Vegas odds that poor communications is in the top 10% of employee concerns. So why is this the case and why do we seem to do little about it? Or when we do something about it, why don't we see much movement in the survey results?

Let me suggest that perhaps the issue is that we take a guess as to what information is important to individuals in our Service Management program or to the organisation as a whole. Why do I say we guess? In my experience, most organisations rarely ask its team members what information they need or want and how they want to receive that information.

Informed people are more likely to be engaged people, and regardless of whether or not its at the micro or macro level, it still holds true. Here are some key tips that will improve communications across the program or the organisation:

MbWA – No, this is not some new University Management Degree. It's old fashioned Management by Walking Around. I honestly believe that anyone who has people reporting to them should be issued a pedometer and have incentive KPI’s set around how much walking around they do. Of course I am not serious as of course this could enforce the wrong behaviour as they could walk in circles all day long and still meet their KPI. What I mean is that a manager should be highly visible on the floor, talking to the people who work for them, not just the direct reports but indirect reports as well. They should have their lunch in the communal eating area and engage in conversation. Now granted, they may not be comfortable with this at first, so they should be coached and mentored on this. If they travel interstate they should be banned from using an office with a closed door; again, they should be visible and accessible. Most people underestimate the amount of engagement and loyalty this type of behaviour drives.

It is my responsibility alone to praise good work! -- Way too many people think that is always someone else’s responsibility to tell someone they are doing a good job. The result is that a lot of people doing a good job never get the praise that drives their self-esteem. It is one of the most basic human needs that we should be reinforcing all the time. So do not expect someone else to do it!

No surprises! -- Bad managers are often to blame when things are not going right, as they will often say nothing to an employee that needs help. It is often easier to wait until the situation gets intolerable and hope that someone else will get rid of the problem worker. I heard Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE say the same thing, and he is so right. If an employee is not performing, it the manager’s responsibility to try and help the employee perform to expectation. That will not always work but at least then the outcome is not a surprise to anyone.

Shut down email and the  intranet/Internet! Is that too radical? Perhaps in some ways, but all too often, sending emails and putting posts on the Internet/intranet are seen as effective employee communications. This is far from the truth as people get de-sensitised to the constant corporate emails of which they have no interest, or the monotonous posts on the intranet that often bear little relevance to the employee. We should be using social marketing channels that allow people to subscribe to important feeds that are of interest to them. Have discussion forums that can be used as an open exchange of ideas. Most of the traditional channels are now so irrelevant to the current generation they are often seen as getting in the way because people cannot find the information they want when they want it. What would you think if I was to suggest that an organisation's intranet should be more a combination of functions like Facebook, Google and Twitter as opposed to what we see now?

Now I can hear the CIO’s out there talking about the threats of such an approach. Well if we recognise the threats and can see the benefits why not just look to mitigate them? Traditional intranets no longer service the customer that they were set up for.

So what do other people think? Let's end the Fight Club mentality and start talking about it.

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Published: January 29 2010, 11:38 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

For me, travel is "business as usual," so I tend to view a cancelled or delayed flight as just another annoyance. Subsequently, in my mind, usually the rescheduling is simply a resolution of the incident. So imagine if you will, that I have just settled into seat 9F, head against the window, the last rays of the sun making the seat cozy and warm. Suddenly I am woken by the flight attendant and told that the flight is canceled and I must de-plane (yes I can get on a plane and be asleep before the emergency briefing)! So I de-plane (who made up that term anyway?) and in doing so I forget my overnight bag. Of course, I realized this as the plane was being towed away.  At this point, I am cranky (always am when I am abruptly woken), I have no idea of what's going on (my own fault for falling asleep) and I have to retrieve my overnight bag (given all the fees and charges airlines are coming up with, I wonder if there is a fee for that?).  I reported to the airline that my bag was on the plane and surprisingly, I ended up having a great customer service experience. The airline had me wait in the lounge and told me that my bag would be delivered within the hour and that they will rebook me (free of charge) on a flight that allows me to collect my bag first. This is an excellent example of customer interaction and this great experience makes up for many of the poor experiences that I have had. 

Customer delight is the mantra of this particular airline and the reason why they choose to extend beyond their boundaries of process. The key aspect is although they are all experts in their field the organization is instilling a value system that understands that although they deliver service, the services are for the paying customer who are the lifeblood of the revenue stream and the survival of the business. 

Unfortunately, for many of us involved in ITIL implementations are focused on the process, it's efficiency and metrics and not the value to the business and the consumer.

This was not the case when I was in banking. Before I worked in an IT organization I spent time working in a large branch where I was asked to perform many activities of the branch worker. This included serving customers in the roles of customer service, teller, assisting with loan applications and so on. All of this gave me with an excellent understanding of branch processes, a skill set that was regularly updated with opportunities to spend time in the business. This led to a excellent knowledge of the business processes and how it allowed the bank to develop solutions that met business requirements, especially when we established Service Levels that were business based.  For instance, when we established a Business Service Catalog (yes we had one over 15 years ago) we knew primary service for retail banking would be the application name service name would be "ONLINE." ONLINE had a service level which we all knew was measured each month in terms of total availability for the service. The beauty of this top-down approach was that we could identify the hardware, software, network, contract and people resources and the batch requirements; it also allowed us to identify the security and backup requirements and more importantly, the cost to deliver the service. 

Benefits to both IT and the Business wer facilitated with a real-time reporting structure to both Senior Business and IT Management who can see immediately how ONLINE wer being delivered. Metrics wer the service delivered versus the SLA metric, the cost of the service (which we measured on the cost per transaction) and we also supplied 6-month trending averages of the incidents, problems, changes and project status. This summary of these metrics also formed the basis of the monthly review meeting, which was a critical communication vehicle for the business, enabling a relationship with IT that has been improving and the organization has rolled this out to multiple lines of business.

ITIL and process is about supporting and ensuring the delivery of service but if you lose sight of the top of the value pyramid--the consumer--it will all end in grief!

Now back to the airport for another flight.....

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Published: January 29 2010, 09:44 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by Peter Doherty

So how do you measure your ITIL Service Management Program?

The first trouble with measuring ITIL is that you need a certain level of maturity to gather baseline metrics and a good deal of organisations are not in a position to capture those metrics. The second trouble is that most of the metrics they capture are worthless as they are simply marks on a chart.
Where the true value is from metrics that:

• Inform
• Support Decisions
• Prompt Action

Sadly we are lucky to see ones that mainly fit into the top category. After all, metrics are just the dashboard of the car, they are neither the car nor the destination. So how do you measure Service Management? Well we really do need to take a balanced score card approach.

There is no doubt that you need to run your process metrics with a high level ofgovernance as without this your processes could lose their effectiveness. For example; failed Changes which end up causing Incidents, etc. These will often only have a quantitative component to them and should roll up to an overall process conformance score.

You also need to monitor the efficiency of the process by comparing the effort or elapsed time it took to perform core functions prior to the Service Management Program and comparing to what they take after the program. This should be rolled up as an efficiency score but you can also start doing cost comparisons based on this. These will have a qualitative component to them.

Thirdly you need to monitor effectiveness which will be the outputs of the processes and generally defined in terms of cost savings and service availability improvements. This effectiveness metric is absolutely crucial for measuring the results of a Service Management Program. Why? Just about nearly all other metrics will give you soft savings, but you can finally put dollar figures around these metrics. These are the metrics that should be measured against the projected outcomes that were put forward in the business case. For example, if you are an ITIL V3 shop doing Service Portfolio Management these metrics will contribute to show the value to the business of the Service.

I often blog and write about how most organisations forget about the people side of Service Management and I have a number of ideas on how we can address this. A balanced scorecard must include customer satisfaction - is it the be all and end all? Of course not but as technologists we often get caught up with delivering technically oriented Service Levels which reflect ‘reality' - at least in our minds. But guess what, most of our customers perceive value in the expectation of the service experience so you need to track their perceptions. A happy customer is more engaged and able to be more productive!

In ITIL we sometimes misuse metrics for our own benefit and one of my pet hates is ‘Closed on First Call'. It really tells us nothing, unless it is really high in which case it is rarely true. This is a typical example of a metric that has a quantitative but no qualitative component. So what if you close 70% of Calls on First Contact? Have they been within SLA? Is the customer happy? What about the other 30% that's probably harder and more important to the organisation? That metric simply informs you that something is happening but with no insight into how well it is being done. What decisions or actions could that possibly prompt?

If you are asked how would you measure an ITIL Service Management Program you need to ask yourself a much more fundamental question; what are the business drivers for this Program? Have you defined those business drivers? Once you know the business drivers it is a simple matter of translating them to the business initiatives and collecting metrics to support this. And guess what? These are the metrics that I'd want to see on my Service Management balanced Score Card.

Do you agree? Comment below and let me know.

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Published: January 28 2010, 04:21 PM | no comments
by Crystal King

We’re excited to announce that our board has unanimously elected Bill McCracken as CA’s chief executive officer. Bill has been CA’s interim CEO since John A. Swainson’s retirement was announced in September 2009.

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