IT Service Management 3.0
IT Service Management in the age of Cloud Computing
The concept of Service Management Integration is not new as a one, but it will likely become the primary focus of the IT Team of the future. Nicolas Carr, in his book “The Big Switch – Rewiring the World from Edison to Google” predicts “the death of IT” and parallels the inventions and development of technology that allowed for the centralized production and distribution of electricity, to the inventions and development of technology that are driving the current movement toward the centralized production of IT as a Service (Cloud Computing). He postulates that the economies associated with Cloud Computing will ultimately “kill” in-house IT organizations. His logic is very hard to argue with. IT organization as we know them will ultimately die off and be swallowed up by new and disruptive IT service and support delivery models.
The “death of IT” however is certainly a few years off... IT organizations still have a very big job to do. In addition to managing their legacy assets, they must move their respective organizations to higher ground and leverage these new delivery platforms and technologies in order to reduce cost. They themselves are transforming before our eyes from IT Shops, into IT Service Management Organizations. They are converting from organizations that purchase and manage all components of their information systems, to organizations that manage multiple providers of utility based IT services.
The goal throughout this change and into the new world of commodity IT services must be not only to gain TCO efficiencies… IT organizations may also aspire to leverage the DR/BC advantages offered by these services, dramatically increase scalability, simplify deployment, enhance functionality, integrate user and customer portal functions… the list goes on.
This process is not without its challenges. Consider a company that has decided to use Rackspace to host its Great Plains accounting application, and has outsourced his desktop support to a help-desk support to a nationally recognized help desk organization, and kept its Network Infrastructure management in-house (a very common scenario). An end user who contacts his IT support team complaining that he gets an error code when he tries to print to a network printer must rely on up to five organizations to solve this problem; Rackspace, who manages the virtual servers; the Great Plains consultant who is responsible for application updates; the in-house network team who is responsible for connectivity; the desktop support provider who may have taken the original request; and the print fleet management provider who manages the print servers and printers.
The trouble shooting steps involved with identifying the problem and correcting it doesn’t change in this environment. The communication and work-flow assignments however become much more difficult to achieve. Since the vendors involved have separate and distinct ticket management platforms that don’t integrate with each other, each partner in this organization is forced to work on his respective component without the full benefit of the information provided by the previous vendor. The IT manager is also forced complete each step in the process through the respective vendor, assimilate the information, and then provide relevant details to the next vendor.
Perhaps an even greater problem is that the IT manager doesn’t have a “Single pane of Glass” that shows the status of all activities and service levels. Usually, he has a trail of emails that can be, well, unwieldy to say the least. The resolution of this simple problem will be delayed due to the inefficiencies of managing the process. Service Management Integration platforms may be the key to solving this problem.
Service Management in the age of Cloud Computing:
The strategy for managing this environment starts with a commitment by the IT organization to own and manage the IT service deliver process… this cannot be outsourced. While it is possible to outsource virtually any single component of the model, the overall Service Management Integration process should be kept in-house. The IT organization must develop an outsourcing strategy and invest in tools that allow it to accomplish this.
The key to solving this problem lies in the integration of the internal, and all outsourced work-flow and functions into a single platform. IT service organizations must commit to owning their own data and service management process
Here are a few keys to providing world class service in a multi-vendor model:
First, understand the support impact of your outsourcing strategy. With each new partner added to your IT service delivery and support model, full consideration to must be given to the added complexity of integration this new partner into the mix. Careful attention must be given to impact on the overall service delivery model.
Pick a Service Management Integration partner early in the migration process. There are many partners and platforms emerging that specialize in bringing building and implementing the tools necessary to manage this process. This is a very unique skill-set based on knowledge of software applications, work-flow models, industry best-practices, service management system API’s, and RMM platforms.
Insist on owning your own Ticketing data and Metrics. Your service management data is your IP… It is the key to continuous improvement and it is a fundamental building block toward IT Maturity. This can be very easily and inexpensively accomplished by partnering with organizations like Autotask or Connectwise to implement you own ticketing platform. The ability to create you own dashboards, manage you own SLA information, access user and asset histories will prove to be invaluable. It is also much easier to replace a vendor that is under performing and replace them with a new vendor because your team can provide the new vendor with all of the history.
Find partners who are already in your ecosystem. Once you have a platform selected and implemented, additional selection criteria should be added to your partner selection matrix. Specifically, consideration should be given to the vendors willingness and ability to accept outsourced ticket requests on, or through your platform. This is very easy to accomplish if you have chose the right partner for a ticketing platform. The “outsource” function in Autotask for example will allow you to outsource a ticket to an ecosystem partner while retaining real time ticket updating capabilities, SLA management metrics and so on… API’s and other integrations will also help you workflow to larger organizations ease while still maintaining this information for your team.
Create your own work-flows. Through owning this effort, the IT organization can develop and refine processes that support strategic alignment with the Corporate Mission and Governance policies. Notifications, escalations, and priority handling for mission critical applications can be easily managed.
Write contracts that support your end goals. Remember, outsourced IT services must fit your organization. There is a tendency developing in the industry toward conforming the organization the IT service offering, rather that forcing the vendor to conform the service offering to the business. Write contracts that clearly define the Service Management Integration function. Set the expectation that the new vendor participate as a member of the overall service management team. You will be much more likely to meet you end user support goals.
In the end, the biggest challenge will be convincing our peers that we as IT organizations are NOT going into that quiet good night, but rather we are managing a process that will allow us to leverage all that is good in the emerging commoditized IT services marketplace.