Take A Holistic Approach To IT Service Management And Avoid Some Of The Pain

Many organizations want to improve on the cost, quality and agility of their IT service provisions by implementing ITIL best practices, but this frequently seems like a daunting prospect. As is often the case, the burning question is – how do we start?

Tackling ten processes simultaneously is prohibitively complex and almost certainly doomed for failure, so the default roadmap to ITIL nirvana is to slice it up process-by-process, selecting the most urgent process (or a couple of processes) first and finding a tool that supports them. This strategy makes sense in principle and produces a rather smart roadmap chopped up into manageable, bite-sized chunks. However, there are two major pitfalls with this process-based approach:

• It draws organizations into a web of integrations and upgrade problems as an incremental approach to procurement is assumed by default.
• It ignores the fact that it is not 100 percent of a single process that would bring the most immediate value, but selected elements of multiple processes – to create a ‘thread' of value across ITIL.

Turn to page one of your ITIL roadmap and the focus may be on applying Service Desk automation or a solid Change Management process, but are you giving consideration to the last item in the roadmap? Vendor evaluation tends to work on a very narrow "what we need now" basis. If you need a Service Desk tool, then go out and buy a Service Desk tool that fits your needs. This definitely makes sense so far. But, turn to page two in the roadmap and Change Management is the next priority. Does your Service Desk vendor supply a Change Management tool? If the answer is "no", then you will be facing another vendor evaluation cycle.

Integrating two Incident and Change Management tools may not involve a great deal of effort, but each time an additional module is added in line with the roadmap, the cost of integration is multiplied and the pitfalls of integration become all too apparent. Each stage in the roadmap will be affected by delays, costs and risks. Implementation is delayed by vendor evaluation and integration is often complex and requires expensive consultant time, leading to a high risk of failure.

The Holistic Approach

Individual ITIL processes do not exist in a vacuum. The greatest value to be gained from the ITIL framework comes from the interconnecting nature of the processes and much of this comes from the sharing of data across processes. Implement one process in full and there is no data sharing. Implement elements of Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Configuration and you are now leveraging that data five times over.

By slicing ITIL horizontally and tackling the must-have elements, irrespective of which ITIL guidelines they are associated with, you can create a thread of value that spans across ITIL and takes advantage of this leveraging. Instead of taking a short-term view and putting 100 percent of your resources into an ‘ideal world' Incident Management strategy, there is more to be gained by distributing efforts and tackling the must-haves for quick wins, wherever they might lie.

This ‘long thin thread' forms a solid starting platform from which you can get quick results, demonstrate the value of ITIL in action, justify further investment and develop your roadmap in a safe, stable manner.

At a lower level, there are strategies for ensuring a smooth roll-out of your ITIL roadmap. For example, look at the information you will need to capture to run a process. By standardizing the information stored at an early stage you can avoid administrative issues later on. A broader view of the specific data requirements can help avoid the need to realign projects in the future. It is a lesson that organizations often learn in hindsight and one of the areas where a consultant can really help out.

Planning is, as ever, critical to enabling this holistic path to value. Work out what you need now, but also look at what you want in the long term from your ITSM strategy. Having a three to five year view may not be of great use to your organization now, but it can certainly help avoid some of the many pitfalls in the future. Factor this into your vendor selection, and you stand a better chance of supporting your long-term goals without getting stuck in a quagmire of integrations projects, upgrade paths and administration overheads.

Evaluating toolsets against how they can support your extended roadmap is the key to avoiding many of these problems in the future. How many vendors do you need to work with to enable your plan? Fewer vendors mean fewer of the issues that plague enterprise IT solutions initiatives. Selecting a vendor with comprehensive support for ITIL processes can mean that you do not get the best-fit for each one, but it is unlikely that your ITSM needs vary more than five to ten percent from any other organization in the same industry vertical. Gaining 80 percent of the value from six processes is better than 99 percent from just one.

Remember, ITIL is a means-to-an-end. Do not just focus on applying ITIL; focus on the parts of ITIL that are of value to you and prioritize them in terms of value to the business as a whole. Most importantly, in these days of economic flux, IT needs to be seen as an asset to the business.

About Axios Systems

Axios Systems is a leading provider of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions. Its customer-centric approach, combined with its award-winning software, enables customers to improve their Service Delivery and Support and deliver Continual Service Improvement (CSIP) by helping to align and realign IT services to changing business needs, supporting business processes and improving productivity.

Benefiting from more than 20 years of development and investment around Best Practice principles, Axios Systems' core solution, assyst, built around a market-leading Configuration Management Database (CMDB), intuitively steers users through the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) processes which help organizations transition toward the next generation of ITSM and Service Desks. assyst offers a unique lifecycle approach to ITSM with the integration of all ITIL processes (including Incident, Capacity, Problem, Change, Asset, Configuration and Service Level Management), twelve of which have been verified by Pink Elephant's PinkVERIFY service as compatible with industry best practices (Based on ITIL V3), in a fully integrated, out-of-the-box application. It empowers management with a dashboard-based transparent view of real-time performance against Service Level Agreements (SLA), and Operations Level Agreements (OLA) using Web 2.0 technologies.

Implementing assyst into an organization optimizes IT Infrastructure efficiency, reduces overheads and lowers the total cost of IT ownership (TCO), helping to ensure a significant return on investment (ROI) with rapid time-to-value. Axios also offers a comprehensive set of consulting and training services to support ITSM best practices in an organization.

Axios is headquartered in the UK, with offices across Europe, the Americas, Middle East and Asia Pacific. Axios' global presence is further strengthened with a worldwide network of partners. For more information, visit www.axiossystems.com.

SOURCE: Axios Systems