Getting the IT Dog to Wag Its Tail (Instead of the Other Way Around) An IT Service Management Shopping List The tail has been wagging the IT dog for a long time. We ve invested more effort in dealing with the tool than in dealing with the problems the tool is meant to solve.
Foreword Executive presentation for Knowledge User Conference by Mike Taylor, head of IS service delivery for Severn Trent Water. Organization Severn Trent Water Business Water and waste Headquarters Coventry, UK Geographies UK
1 Introduction My name is Mike Taylor, and I m the head of IS service delivery for Severn Trent Water. My presentation is on service management, the needs of the IT management tool that is, my shopping list and some of my experiences. Today I manage service delivery, including end-to-end management of services for Severn Trent Water, a water and waste company serving more than eight million customers across the heart of the UK. We serve about 5500 employees around the organisation with an IT staff of 400, of whom 350 are full-time employees.
21 The tail wags the dog Service delivery has had a chequered past. With the profusion of suppliers in the 1980s came the chaos of trying to get systems to interoperate. In 1989, ITIL emerged as a way out of the chaos, and huge opportunities arose to automate ITIL, leading to systems like helpdesk, problem management, change management and asset management. Users came to find these systems inflexible, so companies tried to change them to fit their business needs, but ended up creating terribly expensive monsters poorly suited to the organisations running them. As a result, the tail has been wagging the IT dog for a long time. We ve invested more effort in dealing with the tool than in dealing with the problems the tool is meant to solve. I ve come up with an IT management shopping list for veterans and newbies alike, and I want to share it with you.
31 Incident management Surely, this is where life began for service management and IT management tools. From my experience, most organisations consider themselves highly proficient in incident management, whether they are or not. When I first joined Severn Trent Water, I assembled my new leadership team of around 25 managers and team leads and asked them to write down two areas in which they considered themselves adept and two areas in which they thought they needed improvement. All but two of them considered themselves proficient in incident management. This worried me, because not only did they say they were good at it, but they were proud of their work in it. Interestingly, none of them reported a need for improvement in reducing the volume of incidents or in doing problem management.
41 Change management I ve lived through lots of different change models in different IS organisations, and I ve been called a hostage to ITIL for trying to map my interpretation of ITIL to an organisation. I have concluded that change management is one process you should expect to vary greatly, depending on the nature and scale of your organisation. That is, you should follow basic principles like those from the Change Advisory Board (CAB), but think practically about what s right for your organisation. I would urge everyone to start with your objectives e.g., minimal administration, rapid approval and churn of changes, zero downtime for change management. Even if some of these compete with others, don t be afraid to try different things, because you can always revert.
51 Configuration management and CMDB While I don t think anybody has ever mastered configuration management in the CMDB, I do believe that it is possible and I am on a quest to master it myself. Start with a picture of what it will look like at the end, but take small, simple steps. Keep in mind also that configuration management will fail if you don t have the right sort of process discipline and strong change management in place. If you try to implement it straight out of the ITIL books, it will not likely work.
61 Configuration management and CMDB (continued) I created the graphic IT Configuration Management @ Severn Trent Water to convince my boss, the CIO at Severn Trent, that it was essential to retain internal ownership and management of the CMDB, no matter which sourcing model we adopted. I wanted to show that the CMDB was the nerve centre of the organisation, the crown jewels that you didn t want to just give away. I am happy to report that I was successful in convincing him.
71 Problem management We all know problem is a difficult area. As a process, we at Severn Trent follow a fairly well-established and practised set of activities, but somehow we are still not reducing the number or impact of incidents. So what else do we need in our tool? Clearly, we want to be able to automate as much request fulfilment as possible and front-end it to the customer.
81 Business service catalogue ITIL version 2 didn t provide much indication as to how business service catalogue should look, how to build it or what it should incorporate. I am not very well versed in ITIL version 3, but I believe it has developed a lot in this area. And I have a very clear view now on what it needs to be. At Severn Trent we are about to launch our service catalogue in Service-now.com. Of course, IT are very often accused of not being in alignment with or understanding the business. Your catalogue is a great opportunity to show them otherwise with the language you use and the way you depict services in the business. Severn Trent have recently constructed a model around several main business processes, so we have aligned all of our IS services to those processes (see Business Services ).
91 Business service catalogue (continued) Furthermore, we have incorporated subscription-based notifications to our catalogue so that our users and customers can determine what information they get. When they subscribe, they receive email whenever there is a change that we want to announce or an alert for high-priority incidents. They can unsubscribe any time they like.
10 1 Technical service catalogue Naturally, any IT management tool needs to have a knowledge base, a good front end to incorporate as many self-service facilities as possible, like incident and request fulfilment, and self-help.
111 Service cost management and cost domains I believe strongly in the need for what ITIL calls IT financial management, only I prefer to call it service cost management. Although the ITIL books give you lots of reasons why it s important, in some organisations it takes a back seat. ITIL addresses the need to associate all of your various cost elements with your services so that you can determine how much a specific service costs. ITIL version 2 didn t provide much guidance as to how to do it, and I ve come across various organisations who have gotten themselves into a mess trying to draw links directly between costs and services. So I devised a model based on the intermediate step of cost domains, which operate almost like little businesses within your supply chain (see IT Service Cost Management Model ).
12 1 Service cost management and cost domains (continued) So a cost domain might be a technology tower, for instance. I recommend this approach because it builds commercial awareness in the organisation. It is one thing to be able to identify where your costs are, but it s quite another to get the organisation to be thinking about them and to be actively driving down costs across the board.
13 1 What s next? Continuous improvement If you are not changing all the time, then you are not improving. And generally speaking, you will only get on that journey of continuous improvement if you do something to address that area specifically. One of my team approached me and said that he would like us to develop a module within Service-now.com that we could use for tracking and reporting on individual service improvement initiatives. We developed it to link to problems and services, etc. and it shows off improvements in IS to both internal and external audiences. A few years ago, Severn Trent Water devised a continuous improvement program and set about rolling out a common set of business tools called Safer, Better, Faster for use across the whole of the organisation. Now, unfortunately, IS was somewhat low down the pecking order for this, and we already had our Service-now.com module in place, but the outcome achieved that result.
14 1 Comm cells From the perspective of performance, continuous improvement and culture, the comm. cell is probably the most powerful and exciting tool we use in IS at Severn Trent Water. A comm. cell starts as a wall or space for displaying performance data, targets and other information pertaining to a specific team; in this case a service desk. Every day for 15 to 30 minutes, the whole of the team assemble it can be difficult for the service desk obviously and discuss their performance, share their experiences from the previous day and talk about what opportunities there might be for making improvements. They agree on countermeasures, track them and look for signs of improvement.
15 1 What s missing? The foregoing list includes all the functions and my processes I want covered, but there are three more important things I want in a tool: Affordability It has to have a sensible price tag and I need to be able to run it at a sensible cost. Flexibility I must be able to make it work exactly as I want and it must be a viable platform for new applications and functions. Simplicity It must be straightforward to enhance and manage using standard current technologies, and I should be able to push changes through quickly. Does this make me a demanding customer? I don t think so.
16 1 Conclusions Be realistic with your expectations; it s easy to get carried away and set yourselves very aggressive targets, so look at things from the perspective of your users. Take every opportunity to use tools like Service-now.com to reach out to your customers and users, but also make sure that you work with them running pilot groups, working with individual users on development and delivery. They will like you for it and it helps to build the trust between the organisation and IS. Once you ve fulfilled your shopping list, you ll find that the dog wags the tail, instead of the other way around.