The Meaning of Achieving ITSM Excellence
Often, senior IT professionals who are strategic partners with business executives make the mistake of ignoring crucial elements of IT Service Management (ITSM).
For example, they often reason that ITSM is outside the scope of their concern, as their priority and mission is to help business functions achieve their strategic goals.
The outcomes of this partial and distorted view include unsatisfied business partners and poor user experience, which, in turn, leads to a loss of credibility in IT in the eyes of the business.
In this context, the question you need to ask yourself is:
“How long will the lack of basic ITSM competencies be allowed to persist under the excuse of being strategic?”
Or, using business relationship management terminology:
”Why is the lack of fluency in the language of IT tolerated for someone whose job it is to be bilingual——fluent in the language of business partners as well as IT?”
If you ask senior IT executives what the components of proper IT Service Management are, you will hear many of them reference internal IT elements, such as service desks, ITSM (“ticketing”) tools, operational processes, CMDB, user-oriented SLA, and service catalogues.
When assessing the quality of the Service Management offered, one might check whether the users appear to be satisfied, which is measured through service desk surveys that cover basic needs. As fair as this might appear, the reality is that business functions are not clear about service levels beyond the end-user experience and they are fighting for their turn in the backlog of business-IT requests.
Moreover, professionals outside of the IT sphere feel like they do not receive the support they need from their IT departments.
The Critical Elements That Define the Business-IT Relationship
To gain the trust of their business colleagues, ITSM specialists need to expand their horizons beyond the traditional service desk and operational processes and consistently take initiative. Precisely, what IT Service Providers need to acknowledge and accept is that they have to add Service Portfolio Management and Continual Service Improvement to their Service Level Management and ongoing IT service delivery.
Service Portfolio
Upon the implementation of basic ITSM processes and tools, organizations get blinded by the first positive results (“quick wins”) and lose their drive to invest resources in implementing strategic aspects of ITSM—namely, Service Portfolio. Although operational efficiency is enhanced, relationships between the IT and business departments are not improved.
The solution is to create a comprehensive business partner registry, identify different levels of business functions, and run pilot service management episodes with the most advanced of them to demonstrate the benefits of the strategic Service Portfolio Management process.
To gain the trust of their business colleagues, ITSM specialists need to expand their horizons beyond the traditional service desk and operational processes and consistently take initiative.
Service Level Management
Service Level Management should cover technical, business, end-user services, and the so-called professional services, such as project management. Here, success means ensuring that the business partner knows exactly what to expect. Still, many organizations are reluctant to building comprehensive Service Levels, because they have a fear of failing to meet their business partner’s expectations.
To solve this, one should start setting measurement criteria for Service Levels without establishing targets, so as to involve the business partner in drawing joint conclusions and ultimately set up reasonable and achievable Service Level targets.
Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is the element that supports service-reporting mechanisms by ensuring that business partners have clear information regarding the progress their organizations are making, along with its challenges and processes. This requires regular service reports—which use relevant business language—to meet the communication and transparency needs of business functions.
The best way to do this is to set metrics with customers and jointly work out suitable reporting templates that enable all stakeholders to follow the IT Service performance indicators.
What You Can Take From This
Both IT professionals and business executives should be aware of ITSM elements, so that together, they can take the necessary measures to build strong, efficient, and strategic relationships that deliver results for their respective organizations.
Svetlana Sidenko is the president of IT Chapter with 25 years spent in management, including 18 years in IT. She has led teams toward full process, IT governance, and ITSM implementation. Svetlana is an expert at building strategic IT solution models and their supporting organizational structures. She holds a Master’s in Administration and she is a Certified IT Governance Professional (CGEIT®), as well as PMP®, PRINCE®2 Practitioner, ITIL® Expert, ISO 20000 Practitioner, TIPA Lead Assessor, CPDE®, Change Management Registered Practitioner, and COBIT® 5 certified.
