Yes I know I've been away and not kept this blog up much - well that's so over, particularly now that I have my website also up and running. Anyway in the last month or so I've got set up with my portfolio business and am back again in the independent world - and enjoying it greatly...!
Recent client and industry research work has given me a lot of good new exposure to some of the emerging areas of ITSM, notably Social Media, Cloud and of course the ever developing Service Catalogue/service definition area. Interesting to see a lot of new activity and approaches in this area, particularly with concepts like OBASHI and other new ways of consulting and matching business demands with IT ones.
I've recently done some Service Definition and Service Catalogue work with both a small IT department in a college, and a global multinational corporation - IT operations budgets varying from £500K to $2Bn...!
It would of course be nice to say that both projects had the same issues and basic principles/requirements, but that of course is stretching a point and really not true. One organisation was just starting out in the area of Service (not system) definition, whilst the other had an internal industry in place to manage this on an annual cycle - where the SC was in effect a cost recovery mechanism.
However neither really had a good grasp of the opportunity and potential real value that they could get from applying the 'supply chain' concept to their organisation and IT provision. This could help them to focus and prioritise their services, deliver and demonstrate value, and also operate and run services with differentiated sourcing models...
It was obviously easier in the smaller organisation to reach the key people and sell them the concepts - which was done in the College who are now building their service catalogue and also using that to build their own internal service improvement plan.
So how can we get the message across better about the need to think about services? particularly as there is more evidence that IT departments are being by-passed and businesses are simply buying IT services direct? For some IT departments and businesses it may already be too late but there's still plenty of opportunity to 'embrace the Cloud' and use this as an opportunity rather than the threat that I still hear many IT-istas murmuring about. true, Cloud in itself is not really a new idea but either is voice recognition , although that only recently seems to have been more widely used.
Cloud requires Service Catalogue at its centre and we should all waken up to that and the potential threats and outcomes of not adapting and developing new ideas. At very least we must be clear and start thinking about what services we actually provide.
I do also think that as an industry we do need to continue to develop sector-based and sector-friendly solutions and models - its really not enough any more to say that ITIL/ITSM can be easily applied to any industry and demographic - of course it can but not always easily and the more we can build-in local knowledge and language that is understood by IT and business alike in each sector - the more value we will deliver.
Look forward to speaking on this and other related SLA/ITSM stuff at the BCS meeting in London on 6th December - see you there..
Also good to catch up with a whole pile of old and new friends at the recent UK itSMF conference - first in many years for me when I wasn't glued to a stand for 2 days...
No comments:
Post a Comment