ITSM Technology Selection Best Practices
When it comes to implementing ITSM technologies “Narrow & Deep” is the winning formula
ITSM Technology Provider Market Overview
The ITIL/ITSM technology provider landscape is made up of the traditional Network and Systems Management tool providers, IT Help Desk vendors, as well as a series of specialty small and medium sized players who entered the market in the last 10-15 years to develop specialized technology to help with the industry’s overall move toward the implementation of ITIL and IT Service Management best practices.
One can observe these technology vendors in a number of Technology Management, Service Management and Customer Support software industry sub-segments based on how they entered the market (i.e. Service Desk, Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management, IT Asset Management, Process Management, Service/Application Dependency Mapping, Business Service Management, Service Level Agreement Management, Technology Monitoring and Management (Network, Server, Workstation), Application Performance Management, Security Management, etc.).
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Nouri Associates is an EXIN accredited, full service provider of V2, V3 ITIL / IT Service Management (ITSM) training and certification. ITIL v3, ITIL v3 Training, ITIL Training, ITIL v3 Foundations, ITIL v2 to v3 Update, ITIL v3 Service Capability, ITIL v3 Service Management, IT Service Management, ITIL Managers, ITIL Practitioner, Nouri Associates - EXIN Accredited - NAI was founded in 2001, NAI is a leading provider of Consulting, Training and On-Demand solutions in the area of IT management and control best practices using globally accepted best practices standards and frameworks such as ISO 20000, ITIL, eSCM, PMBOK, CMMI and COBIT
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The Big Four IT Management players (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM/Tivoli) have been busy acquiring and integrating a number of the smaller players in the last few years in order to round out their portfolios. The good news for the technology users is that there is finally a consensus among vendors on the best practices for running IT operations as documented by OGC’s IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.
The bad news is that it is very easy for any vendor to claim full support for ITIL, as ITIL is a framework of IT good practices and does not necessarily mandate support for a specific set of processes and/or particular technology features or functionality. By the same token, the rapid global adoption of ITIL has revived the whole IT Management tools industry, and vendors anticipate and expect robust sales growth despite the fact that many of their clients have more tools than they know what to do with.
How to Focus Your ITSM Technology Related Efforts
The top ITSM technology initiative for many organizations in the last few years has been the deployment of a CMDB. This has been the Holy Grail for implementing ITIL. Of course this is because most have already invested and deployed an IT Help Desk software application in the last 20 years; otherwise the Service Desk would be a bigger priority for many. The idea is that in order to improve end user support and responsiveness and do a better job of assessing the risk of any changes to the IT environment, you need a definitive source of truth about any and all IT components (CIs - Configuration Items) within the company along with the relationship between them. Of course, according to ITIL v2 all of this data is magically managed by a logical repository referred to as the CMDB (Configuration Management Database).
Unfortunately, with this type of effort there are a lot more failures cited than successes. The reasons are somewhat obvious. The first is that it is very easy to do a poor job of scoping (i.e. what should be the CIs and attributes managed by the CMDB) such a project and create a boil the ocean type of an initiative. Another reason is that most organizations fail to establish a pragmatic Change Management and Configuration Management process within the organization. So even if the Project Manager is savvy enough to implement the technology project, it is rapidly out of date and cannot be trusted.
Think back to the number of times your own company has done a physical inventory of the big IT items and has populated that Asset Management database, only to find out that the database is at best 80% accurate within six months of deployment.
The latest trend in ITSM technology initiatives is the deployment of a Service Catalog. The idea is that in order to align better with the business Customer, IT needs to define and publish what it does from a Customer’s point of view, and establish formal performance agreements (SLAs – Service Level Agreements) to manage and deliver to Customer’s expectations. This type of an initiative is getting a lot more attention since the release of ITIL v3 in May of 2007, where the focus for ITIL has shifted towards managing the lifecycle of Services.
Related to the above trend, is the concept of Business Service Management and tools that support this top down view. BSM advocates the formal definition and proactive management of critical to operation business services that are underpinned by a number of IT components.
There is no uniform definition of BSM among technology vendors or even the industry analysts, but there are a number of common elements and capabilities among the definitions:
- Ability to support the definition, storage and visualization of IT service topology or dependency maps (i.e. map IT components to Applications to Business Services)
- Ability to gather real-time operational status data from underlying applications and IT infrastructure components and process against the business service model to communicate real-time IT service status and quickly pinpoint the root cause of service outages or potential disruptions
- Ability to track and report against the committed SLA for a given number of Services
- Robust dashboarding and reporting capabilities to turn data into actionable information for process and service improvements for a diverse set of roles and stakeholders
Depending on vendor’s capabilities and offerings, on occasion the ability to keep track of the IT infrastructure components and their relationships (i.e. CMDB) and Application Configuration and Impact management is also thrown into the mix.
The early adopters of the BSM principles and relevant technologies report benefits such as:
- Service quality improvements
- Improved IT and Business alignment
- Compliance with regulatory requirements
- More business oriented IT staff
- Higher respect for CIO from business executives
- More predictable results
CONCLUSION
Experience shows that a common pitfall for many is the scope of these ITSM automation projects. By including all IT Components and Services as a part of the scope of the project, most run the risk of scope creep and not ever delivering against the project’s anticipated benefits. The following is a set of best practices to keep in mind as you continue your quest for the right technology projects for your BSM and ITSM initiatives:
- Find the Pain – Focus on areas where there is a clear business or IT pain point to be addressed (e.g. critical service outages, poor incident response, regulatory exposure, etc.)
- Investment Leverage – Leverage and integrate with existing management technologies whenever possible
- Narrow & Deep – Focus your effort and scope on a few critical services that matter to the senior business and IT Management and implement the needed processes and automation for all IT components that make up the service (Narrow & Deep rather than Wide & Shallow)
- Success Metrics – Select appropriate metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that would best demonstrate the success of your technology initiative and capture a baseline of the current performance levels (a few pragmatic KPIs are better than a long wish list)
- ROI and Payback Period – Target your ROI to exceed the minimum corporate or organizational requirements, and the payback period to be less than 12 months
- Proof of Concept – Be sure to pilot the technology in your environment to validate the expected functionality and potential benefits
NAI’s open on-demand BSM framework is built on the premise that most medium and large organizations already have a significant investment in management technologies that are underutilized and many times sitting idle.
NAI’s BSM framework defines and integrates the technology capabilities that are typically missing from a company’s ITSM technology portfolio. The framework seeks to provide a flexible and convenient vehicle for piloting and acquisition of select best of breed technologies that can be used to address specific pain points. The subscription based, SaaS (Software as a Service) acquisition model is an ideal vehicle to test and validate the technology’s value proposition on a select few business services that matter the most to company executives, and in case of a decision for wider deployment across a larger number of services, they can be converted to a traditional hardware and/or software license acquisition.
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