Economic Crisis and Service Management - Part II
Published:
July 01 2009, 11:12 AM
by
Robert Stroud
Part I can be viewed here.
As I mentioned previously, I spoke last week at a joint Korean itSMF and ISACA conference. This post continues with additional answers I prepared, answering excellent questions raised by the facilitator of the closing panel session.
The second question asked at the panel was an interesting one about inhibitors and accelerators for service management. As many of you know I spend a good amount of time with large IT organizations globally so this allowed me to share some practical advice from a large Bank.
Question 2: How do we drive IT governance through ITSM or IT governance frameworks such as COBIT, VALIT? What are key accelerators and critical inhibitors? How these frameworks fit with IT organization of the future?
- When I met recently with the CIO and CTO of a large global Bank, she mentioned that one thing happening today is the rate of change and the fact that more change is being generated by the business rather than IT. She quoted the example of interest rate changes that are controlled by the business and executed automatically by IT as a good example of IT automating Business As Usual (BAU) and collecting the relevant audit check points and approvals. She also mentioned that social media and collaboration is transitioning business - staff are dynamically communicating and searching for resolutions to problems or knowledge for "how to scenarios" using technologies like Twitter and Facebook. Sales is using LinkedIn connections to drive business relationships. Web 2.0 is changing again, accelerating the rate of change and the way that functionality is delivered to our working environment.This is the perfect catalyst for changing the manner that we deliver technology to support the business.
- The best accelerator is for IT to acknowledge it is part of the business and for the business to acknowledge that it is dependent on IT. There are few industries or even business processes today where IT is not on the critical path to service delivery. This mandates a phase in enterprise change and that the processes that IT employs are NOT onerous but appropriate based on business risk.
- The risk here is that we become so focused on the process and not the risk to the business that we unnecessarily add delays to delivery of service. Thus like the little boy who cried wolf, when the real risk is exposed IT, it will not be believed and we will again fail, further increasing the divide between IT and the business.