IT Service Management Governance

Current State

Governance is coming up more and more as one of the critical success factors within an overall service management capability. It has long been recognized that service management requires a change in behavior within IT. Until now, most of the efforts within IT have been in what is called "enterprise systems management". This discipline is concerned with how you manage the systems within IT. The efforts included implementing people, process and technology based management capabilities within the various management domains within IT. The network group implements network management tools to monitor, automate and manage information. They implement some processes with names like "Incident Management, Change Management and Availability management. They define roles with names like Change Manager, Incident Analyst or some variant. Then the storage management group or some other technology management domain initiates a similar effort. Meanwhile the applications development group is on a different track with a different set of initiatives. The result is various islands of fragmented efforts. While each group independently starts to do a better job with improved management reporting, the overall service quality and cost is not being impacted as much as everyone originally hoped for. After all, "we adopted ITIL and we should see a reduction in cost, improvement in quality and alignment of IT with business objectives!"

What’s the Problem?

So what’s the problem? The Processes are there – you can find the process guide out on the network. The roles are defined – they can be looked up in the HR system. The tools are there. But how come things don’t "feel" different"? How come the director still gets the painful calls from the customers of IT regarding the costs or quality of IT services? How come we still have this nervous feeling that we are not in control of the direction, control or execution of our service management capability?

Enterprise Systems Management is not IT Service Management

One of the first things to recognize is that enterprise systems management is not service management. Enterprise systems management uses many of the same concepts, but they are applied inside various technology management domains. The result is better management of the systems within IT. It is inherently an IT focused effort. Service management is inherently a customer focused effort. Service Management is fundamentally not focused inward on internal IT operations, but on what needs to happen to get all the parts of IT working together to serve the customer. Organization charts do not serve the customer; they get people focused inward towards their IT leaders on the chart. Processes get people focused on the tasks at hand and how effective and efficiently they are being done. Technologies don’t service customers, they reduce human error and labor spend. So where is the "service" part of the management capability? Service Management requires an enterprise view of information. Systems Management provides information in way that is unique to each technology management domain. Service Management requires a standard enterprise view of information from a service point of view. It’s not enough to know very detailed monitoring information for your network and servers, but overlook middleware. This can result in a painful "green lights on – service down" condition. In this environment the CIO is the Chief Infrastructure Officer, rather than the Chief Information Officer. Where is the enterprise view of information?

Collaboration is the basis for Service Management

Service Management fundamentally requires collaboration between the IT management domains to be effective. IT sometimes acts like a bunch of parts flying down the road at relatively the same speed, rather than a vehicle. Service Management requires that things work together as a whole. This does require processes, tools and organizational clarity – but it also requires governance to achieve the desired behavior across management domains within IT. Some companies think that improving service management can be achieved by re-organizing. No matter what organizational structure is used, you end up with groups of people that have to work together to deliver services to the customer. Governance is required to overcome the inherent limitations of any organizational structure.

IT Service Management requires collaboration across management domains to deliver value to the customer. How well does your current management system enable the desired behavior and effective decision making required by IT Service management? How complex is your organization? – How many management domains contribute to or play a role in IT Service Management? The more complex the organizational structure, the more governance needs to mature to overcome inherent structural limitations. Governance is required to overcome the inherent limitations of any organizational structure and enable quality service management. How effective is your ability to direct, control and execute service management processes that span management domains?

Adoption Roadmap

Getting into Service Management can be bottoms up, top down or side to side effort. But which ever side you start on, you have to get to the other side. If you start with enterprise systems management you have to move up to enterprise versions of change and configuration management before you can really get into more intermediate service management capabilities like Availability Management, Problem Management, Capacity Management and Asset Management. Then those intermediate capabilities are the basis to progress further into Service Level Management and Service Catalogue Management to market and sell the services. How valid are your services, if you have no catalog? How valid are the services in that catalogue if there is no availability management to make them available? How can you perform availability management without an enterprise view of your service configuration? The typical service management adoption maturity roadmap includes increasingly governance dependant capabilities.

Katrina

Consider Hurricane Katrina: a hurricane and flooding based disaster.

Various processes and services existed from multiple management domains: Federal, State, Local, Commercial, and Non Profit.

Processes existed for triage, assessment, recovery planning, requesting aide, providing services, distributing aid, short term and long term aid etc.

Some technologies existed and some were developed ad hoc.

Many roles were defined and in place. FEMA, Firefighters, Police, National Guard, Health Services, Nurses, Doctors, Volunteers etc etc

What was the result? Pretty much everyone agrees that services were not delivered in a valuable, reliable or cost effective way.

Why? A lack of clarity in governance ultimately results in service failures. Improving governance will result in increasing maturity in service management capabilities. Governance is required to enable value. Who is responsible for what – before, during and after? Who is directing, who is controlling and who is executing? What happens to services when everyone assumes someone else is responsible? What happens when there is a lack of clarity across the various management domains required to deliver service management?

IT Service Management Governance

Governance is required to achieve the desired behavior, across management domains, to improve service management. Governance is a decision rights and accountability framework for directing, controlling and executing IT services and service management processes. The key critical success factors in the ability of governance to achieve desired behaviors are clarity and transparency. There needs to be clarity in desired behavior and outcomes. There needs to be transparency in decision making. What are the decision-making mechanisms? What information is required to enable effective decision making? What is the plan to ensure clarity and transparency in decision making? Is there an exception process to quickly approve justified exceptions and reject others? What is the approach for continuous improvement (review and improve)? How are service management "antibodies" dealt with? There are different kinds of antibodies – some fight disease and some eat the immune system itself. Effectively managing exceptions (antibodies) and improving governance over time is critical to effective governance.

Governance Maturity

Companies typically go through on ongoing "awareness development" regarding IT service management Governance. While all service management problems are "felt", the approach to solving service management problems is restricted by the maturity of the management awareness of governance. Some try to achieve service management improvement through technologies changes. Newer, better, faster, smaller, fewer. Some try to "reorg" their way to service management. But everyone knows that each reorg has been limited in its value. The great mark of success for most reorgs is when the key people start "high-fiving" each other with "we didn’t kill ourselves… we survived!". Where does all the attention go – before, during and after – the re-org? Does it go to the customer or on internal matters? Organization tells you who you are, what competencies you have and how your people are grouped, but it does not tell you how to serve the customer. It’s not until people start struggling with processes for awhile that the service light bulb goes on and they start to "get it"… "We need processes to support services that provide value to the customer". That’s when governance moves to the top of the agenda.

How far into IT the customer is compelled to look, indicates the depth of the service management problem. Whenever and wherever the customer starts digging inside IT, there is a service problem. By their nature, customers don’t want to know what is gong on "in there’. However, they have learned that they have to care due to the pain caused over time from service management failures in the past.

IT Governance

IT Service Management Governance is the decision rights and accountability framework required to direct, control and execute IT Service Management as well as the decision-making mechanisms that foster the desired behavior in the use of IT.

IT Service Management is part of an overall IT Governance Framework that includes:

• Infrastructure Management and Architecture Governance
• Application Management Governance (including application frameworks, solution lifecycle, and SOA)
• Services & Service Management Process Governance
• Security, Risk & Compliance Management Governance
• Financial & Asset Management Governance
• Intangible Assets (Skills, IP, Knowledge) Governance

Governance is being raised to the top of the list for companies striving for IT Service Management excellence.

Author

Bill Powell is a managing consulting within IBM Global Services. He performs a number of ITIL and IT Service Management roles within IBM Global Services.

• Leader for the IBM Global ITIL interest group with more than a thousand participants
• IBM IT Service Management Consulting Services Offering Leader
• Serves on the itSMF USA Management Advisory Board
• Serves on the OGC ITIL Advisory Group
• IBM IT Service Management Core Team (over 4 thousand members)
• IBM PRM-IT Core Team
• Certified ITIL Service Manager

Bill has developed and taught ITIL and IT Service Management assessment, design and implementation methods and best practices across the US and Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea and Japan. Bill is a tireless promoter of ITIL and service management best practices. He also provides thought leadership in the development of critical skills, innovation and intellectual capital for ITIL and IT Service Management related efforts.

Comments

[R.M. Anil Kumar]

Hi,

Can you tell me what are the prerequisite to get certification:-

Certified ITIL Service Manager

Regards
Anil