IT service management - road maps, not short cuts
When I first kicked off our reports covering IT service management some 6 months ago, I can remember what I said at the time with alarming clarity. "That should be quite straightforward," I said, "It's just a case of writing it all down." Such remarks can come back to bite you. As it turns out I was right on one count, that it was just a case of writing it all down; straightforward, however, it most certainly was not, when I started to think about the real world service management issues of the organisations we advise.
Just as writing the reports was less evident in practice, I believe this is also the case for organisations that are actually trying to implement IT service management. Scratch the surface and the full complexity of IT reveals itself only too clearly; trying to deal with the issues at the same time as keeping on top of the ever-growing pile of service calls and change requests, can mean any efforts to move in the right direction are too quickly overtaken by events.
Nobody sets out deliberately to fire fight or create chaos, but such things can thrust themselves unannounced upon the IT organisation. Similarly, I don't believe the tools vendors deliberately set out to sell management software that ultimately turned out to be inadequate. Enterprise frameworks were supposed to be the answer, but like the people implementing them, in reality they just couldn't keep up with the pace of change or the growing complexity. It's the same today - there are no magic bullets, however there are approaches to selecting and deploying tools that help organisations maximise the chances of success.
In the three reports, we present how organisations can think about IT service management, and we offer a
maturity-based approach to meeting these challenges. We also consider the
requirements for technologies and tools, underpinned by an architectural approach, best practice advice and guidance which reflects the complex realities of the
context in which IT service management is to be implemented. While we try to address the challenges, we recognise that there are no quick fixes: we can only offer a route map to IT service management, not a short cut.
The more I think about IT, the more it appears like an eternal change programme, staffed by practitioners and overseers who trade experiences with each other and pass on what they learn. Like IT itself, these reports can only ever be a work in progress, a perspective on how things are today. Please do let us know what you think, we would welcome any feedback based on your own experiences. Onward and upward.
