Tools of the trade

For a company looking to take the next step in service management maturity, there are many great software solutions for IT Service Management Tooling. Many of them are cloud-based and can be used for a monthly fee instead of a large upfront investment in licences. This post explores some of the do's and don'ts in setting up new service management tooling.

A common mistake made by both small and surprisingly large IT departments (who should know better), is to merrily start implementing a shiny new tool and expect some positive effect. This without exception leads to an infamous IT project that takes way longer than planned. When it succeeds in its primary objective, the implementation itself, it fails to achieve any positive net effect on the department. Tooling vendors tend to over-emphasize the capabilities of the tool and understate the need for a thorough preparation. Preparation for new tooling involves at least prior alignment to end user expectations, proper demand and supply management within the customer's IT department meticulous process design and a lot of training.

Many IT service providers have responded defensively to this trend of ad-hoc implementations at their customers. Providers prefer to rigidly adhere to their own well-developed processes and tooling and prevent working with a variety of bad implementations across their customer base. Especially larger IT service providers are able to enforce their approach of standardized services and service levels on customers. However, enterprises are not consumer-level mobile phone customers and often respond poorly to this take-it-or-leave it treatment, leading to a low renewal rate on contracts.

The best results are obtained when customer and service provider are well-matched and can develop an approach respecting the suppliers need for consistency while enabling the customer to make large improvements in process maturity and make use of customised solutions. Tooling is very much secondary in this approach, being implemented near the end of the transition phase after services, processes, organization and accountability have been defined and aligned between customer and service provider. Once this alignment is in place, tooling can be set up in one of two ways: a shared instance or connected instances.

A common approach is to set up a single instance of the tooling that everyone, from end users to service resolver teams can use over their respective computer networks. This works well as long as customer and service provider agrees to use a common set of processes, which may well be in the case of co-development mentioned above. Rights management tends to be an issue in this kinds of setup, as it involves authenticating users and sharing protected data on two different domains.

Because by and large the available tools are based on ITIL and provide roughly the same options it's often possible to create a coupling between two instances. This allows customer and service provider to exchange ticket information between their respective ticketing systems. This way everyone can keep their own way of working while providing the requisite connectivity at a tooling level. Care must be taken to allow for data exchange in the SLA times, and reporting on the end-to-end ticket lifecycle can be challenging. If both customer and service provider are large enterprises with mature processes and able to build and maintain such a link, it is often well worth the investment. I'm still waiting for the IT service management bus which will make transitions and links between tools a much more pleasant exercise.

In short: do not skimp on preparation and try to find a good match between customer and service provider, this will greatly benefit service quality and help to defray indirect costs due to inefficient service delivery.