This week I was in Korea for the joint Korean itSMF and ISACA conference. Understanding the issues surrounding the business climate and the demands on their members' time and finances, these two organizations worked together for a single event instead of their usual independent events. The event was a huge success based on the attendance, attendee comments, press comments and the smiles on the organizers' faces. 

I spoke about Governance for your ITSM environment--more on that next week--and I wanted to share with you my prepared comments to the excellent questions raised by the facilitator of the closing panel session.

Questions: As you may know, we are facing a world economic crisis and many leading firms demand to sustain their businesses. What's your perspective on the role of ITSM and IT governance to sustain our business (in terms of efficiency) in this crisis? What can you suggest based on your global experiences, providing recent case examples? Will ITIL-based ITSM solutions or VAL IT enable us to sustain our businesses during this particular period?

• At the moment, the global focus is clearly on cost reduction. Unfortunately much of this is based on simply cutting people, deferring investments, wholesale removal of a service or introduction of service delays. Instead, focus needs to be on real immediate savings and this needs to be linked to business demands. 
• Frameworks, including ITIL or COBIT, give us the opportunity to deliver efficiencies but only where they are delivered through automation of process with a focus on the reduction in complexity - these must be linked to the demand side and the organization's strategy.
• We must balance supply and demand. 
• One of the real opportunities here is to expose the business to the operational services that are being delivered and the costs associated with their delivery, proactively providing information on how to reduce these costs. 
•  The Service Catalog is an good example of this - where the business consumes services expressed in business terms with business based service levels. IT has to opportunity to associate costs with the various service levels. 
• These services must be reviewed on a regular basis with efficiencies reviewed with the business - not just evaluated by IT.
• One example of this is a power company in the U.S. that is using COBIT for Governance and setting controls for risks and exposures. It also is linking IT strategy to the business strategy.  This organization uses ITIL for Service Management, uses PMBOK for project management and currently is implementing the Investment Management domain within VALIT. 
  
  The company has implemented a Service Catalog that defines business services. It has implemented self help for issue resolution, and the service catalog allows users to consume services acknowledging cost and all investments are linked to business strategy.
• This organization has been dictated a 10% overall cost reduction
• Immediately the investments could be prioritized for relevance to the new strategy of cost reduction. Projects were all reviewed and by slowing down several and completely removing two, a 15% saving was made.
• Operations wrote to all users of services that leveraged consumption-based third parties and advised them of the opportunity to cut costs.
• IT identified that by accelerating the VOIP initiative they could save 3% from the total IT budget in the first partial year of operation after all costs. Because of the near-term cost-savings, this project was accelerated.
• Self-service Catalog automation increased and provided another 2% saving.
• Overall the 11% of real savings were delivered.

What do you think?