Fundamentals

It's commonly said by my IT Service Management compatriots that there are too few management benefits to be fully compliant to frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT. They're held to be much like the pirate code in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean tetralogy, more like guidelines than actual rules, yarr.

The truth is, these frameworks are not enough, or rather, they are only a small part of what the IT department needs to deliver excellent results. The frameworks and good practices have been over-emphasized as a way to 'professionally' manage an IT department at the expense of general management practices which are much more urgently needed from a business perspective.

Running an IT department is like running any other business, or part thereof. The secret sauce of a great company or a great IT department is all in having good people and managing them well. That the good people in the IT department happen to be of the geek persuasion and tend to focus more on technology than process is no reason to throw management science out of the window and solely rely on IT industry inventions like ITIL.

Many IT departments and managers tend to fall on the spectrum between total ad-hoc troubleshooters and fairly compliant best practice fanatics, but the thoroughbred business manager is a rare find. A team of cherry-picked staff  in the IT part of the business is even scarcer, and that is a crying shame.
The worst cases have an under-qualified team of admins report to the facilities manager. This is the IT management equivalent of stuffing your servers in a damp broom cupboard. No disrespect to the facilities guys who may be doing an excellent job managing the facilities, but IT services are rather dissimilar to their field of excellence.

The time when IT merely supported the business is long gone. IT is the business, in the the sense that there is no business to speak of when the IT is not perfectly in order. Gartner is very clear about it, business who don't get that they cannot afford incompetence in this area are playing a loser's game. If you give CEO's the choice between going without their headquarters, their car park or their IT infrastructure for a week, I guarantee they will not choose to be without the IT. The services delivered by the IT department or outsourcing partner fall squarely within the must-have category. This means that the management of these services can be left to Petered-out sysadmins as much as the corporate finance department can be left in the hands of anyone once certified in Excel 2003.

What the IT department needs is a good manager (a great manager if you can find one), a good team and an equal status to your finance and HR clubs, preferably in a tightly run shared service center with direct access to the executive team. That is no more or less than what your business needs these days. Only when those conditions are met the IT service management frameworks become useful good practices. There's always room on the wall for one more ISO certificate, but without good general management practices it won't do much good.

When advising my customers on IT strategy I draw upon some accessible management classics such as Jim Collin's Good to Great, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish and Daniel Pink's Drive to underpin my holistic IT management proposals in line with the views presented here. Have a gander.