A practical guide to rapid IT Service Management as a foundation for overall business agility #ITServiceManagementITSM The next BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion centers on how rapidly advancing IT service management (ITSM) capabilities form a bedrock business necessity, not just an IT imperative.Businesses of all stripes rate the need to move faster as a top priority, and many times, that translates into the need for better and faster IT projects. But traditional IT processes and disjointed project management dont easily afford rapid, agile, and adaptive IT innovation.The good news is that a new wave of ITSM technologies and methods allow for a more rapid ITSM adoption -- and that means better rapid support of agile business processes.Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. To deeply explore a practical guide to fast ITSM adoption as a foundation for overall business agility the panel consists of John Stagaman, Principal Consultant at Advanced MarketPlace based in Tampa, Florida; Philipp Koch, Managing Director of InovaPrime, Denmark, and Erik Engstrom, CEO of Effectual Systems in Berkeley, California. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.Here are some excerpts:Gardner: John Stagaman, let me start with you. We hear a lot, of course, about the faster pace of business, and cloud and software as a service (SaaS) are part of that. What, in your mind, are the underlying trend or trends that are forcing ITs hand to think differently, behave differently, and to be more responsive?Stagaman: If we think back to the typical IT management project historically, what happened was that, very often, you would buy a product. You would have your requirements and you would spend a year or more tailoring and customizing that product to meet your internal vision of how it should work. At the end of that, it may not have resembled the product you bought. It may not have worked that well, but it met all the stakeholders’ requirements and roles, and it took a long time to deploy. Stagaman That level of customization and tailoring resulted in a system that was hard to maintain, hard to support, and especially hard to upgrade, if you had to move to a new version of that product down the line. So when you came to a point where you had to upgrade, because your current version was being retired or for some other reason, the cost of maintenance and upgrade was also huge. It was a lesson learned by IT organizations. Today, saying that it will take a year to upgrade, or it will take six months to upgrade, really gets a response. Why should it? Theres been a change in the way it’s approached with most of the customers we go on-site to now. Customers say we want to use out of box, it used to be, we want to use out of box, and sometimes it still happens that they say, and here’s all the things we want that are not out of box. But theyve gotten much better at saying they want to start from out of box, leverage that, and then fill in the gaps, so that they can deploy more quickly. Theyre not opening the box, throwing it away, and building something new. By working on that application foundation and extending where necessary, it makes support easier and it makes the upgrade path to future versions easier.Moving fasterGardner: It sounds like moving toward things like commodity hardware and open-source projects and using what you can get as is, is part of this ability to move faster. But is it the need to move faster that’s driving this or the ability to reduce customization? Is it a chicken and egg? How does that shape up?Unleash the power of your user base ...Learn how to use big data for proactive problem solvingwith a free white paper Engstrom: I think that the old use case of design, customize, and implement is being forced out as an acceptable approach, because SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), and the cloud are driving the ability for stakeholders. Stakeholders are retiring, and fresher sets of technologies and experiences are coming in. These two- and three-year standup projects are not acceptable. Engstrom If youre not able to do fast time-to-value, youre not going to get funding. Funding isn’t in the $8 million and $10 million tranches anymore; it’s in the $200,000 and $300,000 tranche. This is having a direct effect on on-premise tools, the way the customers are planning, and OPEX versus CAPEX.Gardner: Philipp, how do you come down on this? Is this about doing less customization or doing customization later in the process and, therefore, more quickly? Koch: I dont think its about the customization element in itself. It is actually more that, in the past, customers reacted. They said they wanted to tailor the tool, but then they said they wanted this and they took the software off the shelf and started to rebuild it.Now with the SaaS tool offerings coming into play, you can’t do that anymore. You cant build your ITSM solution from scratch. You want be able to take it according to use case and adjust it with customization or configuration. You don’t want to be able to tailor. Koch But customization happens while you deploy the project and that has to happen in a faster way. I can only concur with all the other things that have already been said. We dont have huge budgets anymore. IT, as such, never had huge budgets, but, in the past, it was accepted that a project like this took a long time to do. Nowadays, we want to have implementations of weeks. We don’t want to have implementations of months anymore. Gardner: Let’s just unpack a little bit the relationship between ITSM and IT agility. Obviously, we want things to move quickly and be more predictable, but what is it about moving to ITSM rapidly that benefits? And I know this is rather basic, but I think we need to do it just for all the types of listeners we have.Back to you, John. Explain and unpack what we mean by rapid ITSM as a means to better IT performance and rapid management of projects.Best practicesStagaman: For an organization that is new to ITSM processes, starting with a foundational approach and moving in with an out-of-box build helps them align with best practice and can be a lot faster than if they try to develop from scratch. SaaS is a model for that, because with SaaS youre essentially saying youre going to use this standard package. The standard package is strong, and theres more leverage to use that. We had a federal customer that, based on best practice, reorganized how they did all their service levels. Those service levels were aligned with services that allowed them, for the first time, to report to their consuming bureaus the service levels per application that those bureaus subscribed to. They were able to provide much more meaningful reporting. They wouldn’t have done that necessarily if the model didnt point in that direction. Previously, they hadnt organized their infrastructure along the lines to say, We provide these application services to our customer.Gardner: Erik, how do see the relationship between rapid and better ITSM and better IT overall performance? Are there many people struggle with this relationship?Engstrom: Our approach at Effectual, what we focus on, is the accountability of data and the ability for an organization to reduce waste through using good data. Were not service [process] management experts, in that we are going to define a best practice; we are strictly on here is the best piece of data everyone on your team is working [with] across all tools. In that way, what our customers are able to see is transparency. So data from one system is available on another system.Those kinds of mistakes are reduced when you share across tools. So that’s our focus and that’s where were seeing benefit.What that means is that you see a lot more reduction in types of servers that are being taken offline when theyre the wrong server. We had a customer bring down their [whole] retail zone of systems that the same team had just stood up the week before. Because of the data being good, and the fact they were using out-of-the-box features, they were able to reduce mistakes and business impact they otherwise would not have seen. Had they stayed with one tool or one silo of data, it’s only one source of opinion. Those kinds of mistakes are reduced when you share across tools. So that’s our focus and that’s where were seeing benefit.Gardner: Philipp, can you tell us why rapid ITSM has a powerful effect here in the market? But, before we get into that and how to do it, why is rapid ITSM so important now?Koch: What were seeing in our market is that customers are demanding service like theyre getting at home at the end of the day. This sounds a little bit cliché-like, but they would like to ge Read more: mytechlogy/IT-blogs/5358/a-practical-guide-to-rapid-it-service-management-as-a-foundation-for-overall-business-agility/
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 18:39:29 +0000
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