IAITAM Preview: IT Services that focus on business and not on IT

ITAM News & Analysis

IAITAM Preview: IT Services that focus on business and not on IT

Ahead of the IAITAM Spring Conference, and his presentation on “ITIL – where is the strategy?”, Brian Johnson, Vice President at CA Technologies talks about the requirement for an IT service management strategy.

To maintain market competitiveness, a business needs to understand its customers and their expectations, their needs, to provide quality services (and value for money in some circumstances) and to strive to continually improve the quality of its products and services while maintaining cost effectiveness.

Not much to worry about then…

Services, comprised of applications (or development programs in some parlance) are the result of systems development efforts that support the business. Information services are provided when infrastructure and operations ‘receive’ applications and run those applications (often in a structured set of dependent relationships) using computational power.

Generally speaking, problems arise because how the applications will run is not a question that springs to mind when applications are being developed. The resulting issues around high maintenance and change costs largely impact operations , and thus IT service management ‘experts’ have arisen to preach taking over the role of designing services.

How they will perform this without knowledge of the business they serve (rather than of service operations) might to most sane observers seem to be something of a challenge. The reality is that developers and operations staff need to liaise more closely not to argue over turf wars that will not benefit the people paying for and reliant upon IT – the business.

A flexible information structure that serves all system needs and all levels of management requires vertical and horizontal integration of data. Different operational areas will use the same data in different ways but all requiring a common understanding of what the data means and how it should be defined. It is important, therefore, to build in the correct information structure during the business and information systems analysis activities of strategic information systems planning.

The coordination of these activities becomes manageable and sustainable to the extent that it is conducted following an overall plan .Or rather, it should be part of a plan. In many instances it seems that the need-for-speed has caused many disciplines around planning to be discarded. The rise (and abuse) of agile methods for example, or the ITILv3 world of ‘service design’ are examples of good practices that are not always properly understood or practiced.

For example there are widely held misinterpretations or worse complete misunderstandings, that have led to belief that business systems can be built tested and delivered much more efficiently without project planning (certainly not the view of those who actually built the agile methods) or that business services can be built from service catalogs and related technologies (the lack of understanding of what a business actually thinks of as a service).

Appropriate plans can address prioritized renovations of current practice as well as more effective progression of future practice. As a result, service designs and delivery become more appropriate to business requirements and to the existing capacity for continual management.

A strategic direction

The definition of the future state of the IT services organisation must be formulated by producing a strategic vision of the future, setting goals and objectives, and developing an IT service management strategy to achieve the objectives. The goals and objectives are (or should be…) defined in measurable terms.

The ITSM strategy should cover:

• the overall organisation, its culture and business units or functions
• the customers served by the organisation
• its products and services
• key roles and responsibilities
• key business processes
• business metrics – these may be based on performance management frameworks, e.g. the Balanced Scorecard.

An IT service portfolio is possible only when all components of the service can be identified and managed. At the strategic level therefore, the first activity must be to involve the business(es) and developers. Before a portfolio can be created the business needs to define (with the help of development and data professionals), what is often described as a Business Entity Model.

• The model must unambiguously describe business operations.
•  From this a glossary can be derived that can properly describe the business functions and allows information requirements and data handling needs to be described.
• The degree of interaction between applications and IT services can also be established and documented. At this stage it is relatively cheap and certainly easy to carry out design changes that would be expensive (and time consuming) to fix later.
• At the architectural layer, the design discussions become more complex. The data needed in respect of each required business entity must be described and at this point the attributes of the data are described, effectively providing transactional data information.

When the Business Entity Model has been described to an extent that sufficient detail is present to allow decision making on (for example) data ownership or how databases should be designed, then the model can be placed under version control.

And at this point a wider understanding of configuration management (not simply a technical focus on a CMDB) enables change to be controlled and managed more appropriately.

In conclusion…

In essence, understanding that IT exists to support business and business operations is the key to providing better customer services; IT is not there to implement ITIL or agile or COBIT or any other ‘good practice’ unless it is going to demonstrably and measurably improve support to the business — after all who pays our salaries?

---

About IAITAM:

The International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. (“IAITAM”) is the professional association for individuals and organizations involved in any aspect of IT Asset Management, Software Asset Management, Hardware Asset Management, and the lifecycle processes supporting IT Asset Management in organizations of every size and industry across the globe.

Their next conference Spring 2014 ACE will take place in Las Vegas 29th April – 1st May. As the Official Media Sponsor of this event, ITAM Review has secured a special discount for all our readers, please CONTACT US to find out more about our negotiated rates and how to book your place.

Can’t find what you’re looking for?