It is estimated that 80% of IT Service Management (ITSM) and ITIL projects fail to meet their objectives. This is a tragic as the essence of ITSM is that it provides a critical prescriptive framework to assist IT teams to manage service delivery to the business.
ITIL is a process guideline and assists IT teams to measure their service delivery between levels one and five. A Level Five standard denotes a high level of predictability, resilience and stability within the organisation’s IT service delivery infrastructure.
The more mature the ITSM process, the easier it is to manage change and transitions in the IT infrastructure.
Yet despite the huge upside of ITSM, in my experience most South African IT shops barely attain a level two, and that only after several years of its introduction into the business. This severely impacts the business’s ability to innovate and embrace the advantages of digitisation.
When digitalisation is introduced to the organisation, various events or processes that were manually executed or involved physical infrastructure become automated or digitised. So for example, a physical banking experience is duplicated online, visits to clients are replaced by chatbots etc. and automated channels are created to provide a quicker or more efficient user experience.
If the ITSM foundation within the organisation is robust and resilient, these changes should not affect the service delivery to the business. With proper governance, repeatable processes in place, digitalisation can only enhance IT service delivery. However if the ITSM framework is not fully embedded within the business operation, and is thus immature, the IT function as service provider will be hampered in its ability to deliver disruptive technologies and digitalisation.
IT service providers are thus doing themselves a disservice by not fully embracing ITSM in a holistic way. By diligently chasing continual improvement, investments in IT and their impact on the organisation can be measured and thus potentially fully realised.
The beauty of embedding ITSM within the organisation is that it introduces predictability and standards, which create an environment of certainty in terms of IT deliverables. This is particularly advantageous when introducing new technologies or innovations to the businesses.
In my experience too, too many IT departments are focused on the next new thing, rather than rendering fully their investment into their existing IT infrastructures.
For effective implementation of ITSM within your organisation, these are my top do’s and don’ts:
- Don’t try and alter the framework to suit your business. Change the business to suit the framework and align your processes within the ITL guidelines. The danger of altering the framework is that everything then becomes open to interpretation.
- Don’t stop at adoption. Keep focusing on maturity and continual service improvement within the ITSM lifecycle and adoption.
- Don’t sit on your laurels. Build ITSM competence within your team, which is dedicated to on going improvement.
- Don’t try and boil the ocean. Decide which principles are most important to the business and focus on these.
- Don’t compromise
- Do follow the guidelines
- Do promote internal training on ITSM and ITil so everyone in your team speaks the same language and is committed to its effectiveness within the business.
- Do be determined. ITSM’s maturity path demands strong leadership with strong focus to deliver standards.
By Nick Truran, CEO of AgileIT
