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.....