I've decided to use the upcoming holiday season to launch an ITIL initiative in my home. With all the time I spend evangelizing on ITIL, it is only natural that it has crossed over from my business life to my personal life.
My idea was prompted by a conversation I had with an energy sector executive. Our discussion covered the increasing reliance of business on technology. This was exemplified by the exec's energy company, which is in the middle of replacing their out-dated meter reading process. The current process necessitates bi-monthly visits to clients' backyards, and in-between estimates of power usage, which I can tell you from experience are never close. The new system is made up of smart meters that automatically send actual usage information back to the company. The system also allows customers to view their power consumption online. This got me thinking.
With winter in the northeast of the US fast approaching, steps to leverage this new system to manage my power consumption would yield real value. I began to think like a business--a business that has adopted ITIL best practices of course.
I am going to set up a process to monitor and manage power consumption remotely. I'll use alerts to notify me when my threshold of acceptable power consumption is exceeded. I'll send automatic and electronic change requests to the thermostats controlling my heating to lower the setting. I'll verify the change is correctly implemented by checking the power consumption (which should immediately decrease) online.
Managing all of this in my head will be complicated, so I'll document the event management and change management processes involved.
What maturity level do I attempt? How do I know I am done? As currently planned, my total expenditure for this project is conveniently just under $1000 (I say conveniently because in my house, projects over $1,000 require a business case). I will need to consider the impact on resources: I will not be available for the annual backyard cleanup process (well documented in the annual work list) and I may have to miss a play or two of football. Still, I think it will be a weekend well spent.
Back to the energy company discussion for a moment. One of the points made by the exec was that the line between IT and business processes are increasingly blurred. The Technology Service Desk is handling more questions every day as more business is transacted via the web and customers have greater freedom to manage their own power consumption. The smart meter proactively sends data to the billing process which interfaces with clients' bill payment services. Electronic alerts notify customers that their bills have been automatically paid. The value to the energy company is a more constant cash flow, which leads to a reduction in the number of days that receipts are outstanding. With less overhead, the price of energy declines.
If the focus was on departmental silos instead of on the overall business solution, we would have lost sight of the primary business driver, which is to provide energy with less overhead, allowing delivery to be at a lower cost and ultimately playing a role in the greening of IT and the business.
So what is the business driver for my household ITIL implementation? I travel so much that I need to control the human manual override within my house--my wife and children who continue to believe that holiday lights should be on all night and 80 degrees is the optimal temperature indoors--even during a New York winter.
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