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The rising importance of IT in virtually every aspect of business has engendered a matching rise in the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure. This has both made IT an easy target for cost-cutting exercises and put pressure on times-to-market for new services delivered to the business.
The business function expects IT to tighten its belt and to streamline IT service provision, for improved responsiveness to changing business requirements. Simultaneously, the expectation is for higher resilience, control, availability and quality of service. The challenge for the IT organisation is to balance these potentially conflicting demands: high speed-to-market and flexibility versus auditable control and low costs. As the business looks to build new composite services at high speed – in particular through the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model – the IT organisation must align itself more closely with business goals and change the way it manages IT service provision.
Now that IT plays such an important role in the overall success or failure of any organisation, the business rightly expects the IT department to broaden its focus and to take a more mature and holistic attitude to IT service provision. Fundamentally, the IT function needs to step out of the shadows and start taking responsibility for understanding and meeting the business requirements.
The first phase of IT service management as a discipline was based on the core IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes, and focused largely on tactical service support processes such as incident management and change management. ITIL Version 3 has introduced new processes and concepts to broaden the scope of IT service management, enabling it to cover business processes, organisation, governance, technology and data. In combination with the Val IT and COBIT best practices from the IT Governance Institute, ITIL Version 3 provides a powerful set of tools for extending the service management capabilities.
While these tools certainly provide a solid grounding for the next phase of IT service management, there is also a need for deeper strategic thinking about how the whole IT organisation should function and evolve. In particular, the IT function will need a far greater awareness of how IT service provision relates to the overall goals of the business. Businesses of all kinds are under increasing pressure to build smarter, more reliable, more responsive infrastructures. Customer expectations for “always-on” service are growing, as is the complexity of the regulatory framework. Commoditisation and globalisation in the market are eroding margins, and innovation in products and services is key to maintaining competitive advantage. All of these factors drive the need for an IT organisation and infrastructure that can respond rapidly, flexibly and at low cost to new requirements from the business.
The challenge that faces the typical IT organisation is how to gain speedto- market across an infrastructure that is fragmented, opaque, inflexible and hard to manage. The infrastructure will most likely have grown in a relatively unplanned and unstructured manner, with numerous tactical implementations to meet pressing new business and regulatory requirements. Corporate acquisitions will contribute to the fragmentation of the infrastructure, imposing disorder on even the bestorganised IT departments. The resulting hotchpotch of systems will inevitably eat up most of the department’s resources in fire-fighting and trouble-shooting – leaving little time or focus for strategic development.
Beneath the technological challenge is a more significant organisational one – most IT organisations are simply too disconnected from the business to even know precisely what it wants, let alone be able to deliver it as rapidly as required. Before the IT organisation can really address the issue of the disconnect with the business, it needs first to put its own house in order. In most cases, there is likely to be a significant internal division between the development and operational sides of the IT organisation. The first step is to bridge this division and build a coherent, integrated IT organisation that seeks to serve the business rather than focusing on internal silos of responsibility.
Part of the maturation process that characterises the second wave of IT service management is a willingness to take a step back and see how business processes map to the IT infrastructure and IT management processes. The IT organisation needs to emerge from its silo and understand the challenges the business faces, then adopt new tools and methodologies to benchmark its service against these challenges. Adopting these new, second-wave IT service management techniques will transform the IT organisation from a fragmented, reactive, tactical cost centre into a holistic, proactive, strategic centre of innovation.
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