I just realised that I always talk about ITSM, and not often about ITIL. This might be confusing for some people so here is a view into my thoughts around ITSM, ITIL and the business of IT in general:
Ivanka’s rules of Managing IT Services:
- You – IT department – are here for a reason: supporting the business. That is the one and only reason why the business pays you the money and want to have you around.
- In order to support the business we need to manage the IT group as a business in itself: discipline and systems gives consistency. Consistency brings predictability, which brings customer satisfaction – and happy customers want to spend money on IT… angry customers don’t! It is as simple as that.
- The IT department delivers services – the business isn’t really that interested in IT products. I mean: do you really care if you use Microsoft Word or another Word-processing tool? As long as it does what you want it to do – who really cares?!
- Services need to be managed… we need processes, people who perform activities, products (technology) to support the services and partners / suppliers who deliver part of what the IT group ultimately delivers to the business. No IT shop is an island.. we all work together to create better businesses for our customers!
OK – so if these are the simplistic rules for managing IT Services, it really comes down to this:
- Know your customer, and know what they want to achieve in their business life. What demands do they have, how is their business changing and … how can IT services make their life better / more successful / more profitable / less error prone?
Sounds like a normal way of doing business?? YES!! That is IT Service Management – Management of IT Services that your customer needs.
So how are we going to do this? How are we going to manage our group of IT professionals, maintaining all those IT products (the “boxes”: servers, networks, PCs, different environments etc.) so that we have the discipline and structure to be able to deliver our services consistently at the level that the business needs and expects. Well, this is where frameworks like ITIL come into play. ITIL is a good practice framework that gives IT groups guidance to the type of processes and functions that you need to have in place to ‘do’ ITSM properly.
Can you do it without ITIL? By applying ‘common sense’ and create your own proprietary processes? Of course you can! But why would you? Why re-invent the wheel when you can spend that time and energy on something more useful? For example, to figure out how to configure my blackberry Bold so that it receives all my emails from the Exchange Server! Because as a business owner, that is what I want! That is what I need to run my business more efficiently…! And surely that is worth a bit of money!
Ivanka
PS: yes, it is a little bit ‘tongue in cheek’ but the underlying message is very serious and I fully stand behind these ‘rules of doing IT business’!
Originally posted 2008-09-23 00:48:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
