The call of the cyber sirens

The promise of new technology can be a real siren's call to an IT department. New windows versions, new storage systems, a better process implementation can seem so incredibly good that the business case seems to write itself. Then comes the implementation project, and reality serves cold coffee for breakfast.

Jim Collins (Good to Great) once likened smooth operations and steady improvements in great organizations to a flywheel. It turns steadily, and with steady increments it can go faster and faster. Great results come from evolution.

Similarly, the most important function of an IT department is to support the central process of the company by ensuring the utility and warranty of its IT assets. In short, keep it ticking over nicely. Improvements are always welcomed, revolutions are not.

The cloud, (internal) social networks, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) support are al great phenomena with a lot of promise, but at the same time they are silly fads that have yet to prove that they can add to your company's bottom line. Yes, they add billions to Apple and facebook, but the odds are your company has a different focus altogether. Readiness for 2015 does not mean equipping all employees with telepathy chips over the next six months.

Once in a while the sales pitch is just too good and an IT department saddles up, corrals some consultants, and goes to work delivering tomorrow, today. Research says at least 30% of IT projects fail, costing businesses green stuff without ever delivering on their promise. Some estimate as many as 68% of IT projects are doomed. Most participants are even aware of this, never expecting a hyped up IT project to succeed at all. What happened there? Lack of ambition? Steady improvements? Nope. Finance forgot to tie Odysseus with a nice tight budget.

On the other hand there are a lot of businesses doing amazing things with technology, step by step bypassing their impulsive competitors to reach a level of sophistication beyond any of them. The aforementioned book contains examples of companies progressing steadily from old-skool a-technical companies to operating their own custom satellite systems, one small step at a time, never trying to go from 0.1 to 2.0 in one giant leap.

In short, IT departments might do well to instill a motto, "we live to serve" or something humble like that, and make sure that they run the smoothest IT operation rather than the most cutting edge. DevOps, anyone?

ITSM-fu, beware the acquisitions!

IT service management is all about ensuring the warranty and utility of IT assets and services. Simply put, the IT has to support the company's main process well. Incident management, change management and so on are fairly standardized processes that help companies manage their IT environment.
Some changes to the environment are wholly out of scope of these regular, 'busines-as-usual' processes, because they do not originate from within the processes themselves. IT Service Management is a bit introspective.

A favorite activity of growing companies is acquisition: gobbling up big competitors, promising start-ups and maybe something more outré for diversification. These companies are bought for their valuable people and assets, and nowadays a lot of the value of a company is its data. IP, content, patents, customer data, research databases, what have you.

A lot of this virtual gold is in formats and systems which are different from, sometimes fundamentally incompatible with, the buyers own data and systems.

The positive impact of new purchases is therefore determined in part by the ability to absorb new data, and bring it in line with ones own databases, systems and procedures for access.

IT Service Management frameworks need to expand their focus beyond running business-as-usual IT services. Robust procedures and best practices for integrating new IT systems and large, diverse data sets need to be developed as part and parcel of IT service management in general. Running a series of technical projects every time an acquisition is made is less effective for bypassing the regular IT service management organization, because that is where, ultimately, all new systems and data end up being managed anyway.

Currently, a lot of knowledge resides within large companies. Some of them have very strict policies for this sort of thing, and have absorbed a new buy in six months. Others take forever as ponderous projects with lots of external expertise are sent up to digest acquired data. The technical know-how can always be found, however, all the management and governance level experience is currently not distilled into frameworks and best practices, and companies are poorer for it.

As long as an integration process is not properly managed from the perspective of the regular IT-organization, it will have a large and detrimental impact on regular ITSM processes because they are calibrated towards preserving the business-as-usual IT organization, not towards merging IT organizations while preserving the current warranty and utility of IT services. This is a hard thing to do.

The next iteration of frameworks like ITIL need to address the needs of large companies when it comes to adopting acquisitions to maintain their status as comprehensive IT Service Management frameworks.

The current set of processes needs to be expanded. Currently, change management and release management are originators of change in the environment, presuming that IT service management instigates change, rather than reacts to it. New processes have to be defined and integrated with the rest, which deal with imposed change and seek to absorb and integrate new data and systems. The knowledge is definitely out there, and it is up to platforms like the IT Service Management Forum to distill it into the current frameworks. I mentioned ITIL a lot, but certainly BiSL and ASL are up for the same improvement.

The bottom line is that the biggest changes in an IT environment often come from the outside, and the success of the company can hinge on how well these changes are dealt with. IT service management frameworks need to adjust from introspection to adaptivity: ITSM-fu.

IT matters

The central assumption of IT service management is that IT matters, that if it's worth running your business on computers it's worth doing it properly. 
Computers become really useless, really fast without maintenance, support, life cycle management and many other processes indispensable to a modern business.
All too often, the IT department is part of the facilities department, or seen as a necessary evil, a cost center populated by informally dressed nerds.

As information and communication have become indispensable to a modern organization, proper IT service management has become a must have and a significant competitive advantage. An IT department, ideally, is a true enabler. An enabler of productivity, of change, of control and optimalisation. An equal to and partner of every other part of the organization.

Proper IT service management enables companies to run their IT department as tightly and effectively as they run their central process and their HR and finance departments. 

The field is not fully developed, academically speaking, and continues to balance precariously between demand and neglect by large enterprises. Compared to the volume of academic work on HR management and finance management it is barely developed at all. There are great developments, however.

The most thorough approach to IT service management is the ITIL framework, which is has as many detractors as fans. The ITIL framework is commonly used as a set of best practices and followed loosely by many IT organizations. True ITIL experts or masters are few and far in between, customers usually demand practitioner (mid-level) certification and working experience. 

IT governance is the top of the ITSM pyramid and the hardest part for organizations to master. Great CIO's are even harder to find than other great executives, and it will be a while before seasoned IT executives are common. Because ICT is such a rapidly changing sector, it's hard to acquire the seniority necessary for an executive position while staying on top of the field. Fresh graduates lack the experience and power, and veterans can easily get out of touch with the latest developments such as cloud services and social media.

It is a great time to be an interdisciplinary IT and business expert, however, as companies make do with the expertise offered by the market. Universities like the TU Delft are turning out experts in business informatics, and large IT service companies like Cognizant are rapidly expanding their ability to be a partner in IT service management. 

In a few short years business science and business practice will have caught up completely with computer science and IT practice, and companies will look back and wonder how they ever got by with improvised IT service management and most of all IT governance.

IT matters too much for any other development.

Managing really clever people

The IT industry is famous for its composition of generally very intelligent people. Even technological scut work is commonly done by people with relatively high intellectual capacity. Now as someone who the words nerd, geek and similar epithets generally apply to, I can tell you that the industry is rife with situations in which a focussed intellect is managed by a more general intellect.

Note that I am not speaking of relative intelligence, merely to the organisation and application of brainpower in the individual. The specialist and the manager are different in this area, because of the nature of their jobs, one who has a highly defined problem domain, and the other who has a less delineated set of problems to solve.

This often leads to situations in which, for lack of a shared problem space, specialists and managers have very different views of the same issues, and a very skewed picture of each other.

Dan Pink (author of Drive and other works) has written extensively about motivation in knowledge work, the solving of nontrivial problems creative work. He hinges motivation on three basic aspects: a purpose, self-direction and the will to make a contribution, and backs it up with a bevy of research data.

The big takeaway here is that you can better manage really clever people by getting out of their way and letting them do really clever things. The organisation is better off contributing purpose and a suitable environment, instead of monitoring and incentivizing the living daylights out of its techies, or trying to maintain a hands-on management style with them.

My own challenge as I become increasingly responsible for fellow problem assassins is to strike the balance between letting them do their tech wizard thing, which they do very well, and making sure that the business environment they operate in keeps running smoothly too. I must be the pilot in uncertain waters and navigate the currents of business interests, budgets, goals and realities. The IT department of many organisations is essentially a black box where the inputs of budget and human resources (hopefully but seldom) result in the output of smoothly running IT assets to support the business. Giving my manager full understanding of what his people are doing is often impossible, as is explaining why the best solution to a given IT problem cannot be implemented because of broader concerns which have no bearing on the problem itself.

The key to this problem is building mutual trust. Every time either the IT department or management has to deny the other what they want it is for a damn good reason. To this end a skilled intermediary who has both deep technical knowledge and insight into managerial concerns is invaluable. This maintains as much freedom on both sides as possible, freedom to act as they see fit and solve problems in the best possible way.

Being in the loop is absolutely essential for such an intermediary. In order to properly represent my people I have to know what they do and how they do it. In order to properly manage my manager I also have to know at least something of his concerns and the broader interplay of forces within and around the business. Only then can I be a functional filter for information in either direction and prevent many issues before they arise. Again the key is trust. Trust in the understanding and discretion of the intermediary which can only develop over time.

The position between technology and business is a tenuous one, and it is quite hard to be Mr. current affairs on both fronts. As I spend more time managing and less time wired this will become harder, as the tech industry moves fast. Until I become such an old fart that I wouldn't recognize a brilliant hack if it bit me, I'll consider it my solemn duty to make life easier for my people and my manager. Wombats, hands-on managers and crawling horrors be warned.