Having recently had an opportunity to teach an ITIL© class on Continual Service Improvement (CSI), I thought writing this post might serve me well on the long train ride back home for the holiday....
Of course CSI is the savage journey, and so this rant is likely to take a few hairpin turns. So I decided to start by thinking about an outline of topics before I had to board the train:
• People, cultural hurdles and the wicked nature of the CSI journey
• What is the Vision, What should we Measure and Where the Hell is the Business?
• ITIL© Road Maps; Still searching for Nirvana
• Service Monitoring - the soul of CSI
Having completed my list I heard my boarding call as Ozzie Osborne screamed "all aboard! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha" into my iPod. So I climbed onto the Acela Express and cranked up the volume.
People, Cultural hurdles and the Wicked Nature of the CSI journey
I've been referring to ITSM adoption programs as A Savage Journey only partly tongue-in-cheek. These journeys can be uncivilized, primitive, hostile, cruel, and --- most importantly from a CSI perspective --- uncontrolled. Savage indeed.
If there is dysfunctional behavior in your organization to any significant degree, your guiding coalition had better have the juice to deal with it. This is frequently an issue for many ITIL© adoption programs.
So I thought it quite appropriate that the class began with a mention of Kotter's Eight Steps to Organizational Transformation. Every IT organization must deal with tribal IT mentality, some more than others.
This particular class was full of federal government employees and contractors, so I didn't have to tell them about cultural hurdles. (I kept visualizing people with sidearms enforcing process compliance, or some poor bastard getting a 'code red' for not logging an Incident.) In fact, civil service and military cultures may present very, very significant hurdles.
I've blogged before about Wicked Projects, so I won't repeat myself here. Let's just say you'd better do some serious stakeholder analysis before you establish your road map, and be realistic about where your road can take you based on who you have in your camp.
What is the Vision, What Should We Measure and Where the Hell is the Business?
The CSI Model and the 7-Step Improvement Process are fundamental to CSI, and the class spent a great deal of time on these topics. It can be hard to understand how these must occur at every level of the organization (strategic, tactical, operational) and at every stage of the Service Lifecycle (Strategy, Design, Transition and Operation).
This concept and that of creating knowledge spirals are very important to CSI, and failure to achieving this intent can result in your improvement program spiraling out of control.
There are many that used to (and some that still do) consider the CMDB (now the CMS) the 'heart' of ITIL©. More recently, some are professing that the Service Catalog is the 'heart' of ITIL©. Certainly, understanding and defining a Service is pretty fundamental to IT Service Management.
So when we ask these questions ("What is the Vision?" and "What Should We Measure?"), WHO are we asking? Everyone seems to agree it's the Business, but where the hell are they?
Business processes are owned by the business and must be defined by the business. If they want to have IT document them, fine (fund us) but failure to have at least Level 1 and 2 business processes defined (and documented) is a failure of the Business, not IT. (In fact, any failure of IT is also a failure of the Business, but let's not go there...)
While I don't suggest we in IT look for a fight with them (we'll lose) we need to recognize this reality and suggest some easy ways for the business to get this accomplished, hopefully while keeping them focused on external customers and without getting lost in the process weeds. This is why I like IPAPI's CPP class and the Customer Expectation Management Method.
Simply put, if the Business cannot provide IT with an understanding of business processes then IT should make it clear that designing CSI (or adopting ITSM for that matter) cannot happen effectively.
ITIL© Road Maps; Still Searching for Nirvana
The cold reality described above has had horrible effects on ITIL© Road Maps. (Suddenly my iPod music is Pink Floyd; "us..., us..., us..., us..., us..., and them..., them...., them... them..., them...,")
In ITIL© Version 2 it seemed like everyone ran out and tried to address the 'heart' of ITIL©, the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). The architects and tool vendors seemed to love it too, and I suppose that some actually did create something that resembled an ITIL© CMDB and provided value (but there are many who would dispute that).
Even with the new Version 3 'heart' of ITIL© (the Service Catalog), a lack of documented business processes often results in a Technical Catalog of Services and automated Request Fulfillment improvements. This mirrors IT's view of the world and continues what is a bottoms-up approach to service definition.....and the Good Book says, Design Top Down ----- Implement Bottom Up.
The search for Nirvana --- real Business/IT alignment and integration --- will not be realized through a bottom up, manufacturing mindset. Certainly the focus on the Service Catalog seems to get us much closer to the heart of the matter.... (the iPod now turns to Don Henley;
" All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again
I've been tryin' to get down
to the heart of the matter...")
Service Monitoring and the Soul of CSI
If the heart of ITIL© and IT Service Management is the CMDB/CMS or even the Service Catalog, service monitoring is its soul. You cannot measure without monitoring, and the essence of CSI is effective measurement. Of course this includes processes, but IT processes in and of themselves do not address the heart of the matter.
Knowing what to measure, and obviously defining services is a pre-requisite. So I'm not suggesting we tear out the 'heart' of ITIL©; but service monitoring intelligence can be enormously beneficial to CSI.
We talked at length in the class about end-to-end monitoring, and the same rules apply to service monitoring as to CMDB. Failure to achieve a top-down design often results in getting stuck at the technical (infrastructure) level, or (worse) letting domains specify monitoring requirements (rather than Service Level Management).
SLM can leverage IT Operations and in particular Event Management process ownership to great effect here. The opportunity to combine data gathering requirements with event correlation offers a compelling business case that has broad based benefits to the business and many IT stakeholders.
The 7-step process applies well to service monitoring also. Cycles of monitoring instrumentation are improvement cycles; if too much is attempted in the initial cycle then risk increases and benefits are delayed. Stakeholders need to be assured that improvement cycles will continue indefinitely.
Finally, with the emergence of virtualized service infrastructures, real-time information and performance management are becoming business critical. Service monitoring intelligence can be a foundation for a service-based approach to CSI adoption. This allows the improvement program to be guided by service impacts.
Greater awareness of CSI concepts would significantly help those service monitoring projects that had initial success and then seemed to stall. In customers where we've successfully targeted a service with business participation and an understanding of ITIL© concepts, the result has been a business-driven improvement program. Establishing CSI within the organization can put you on a path to real organizational transformation.
Isn't that the point?
So, ITSM On-Ramp™ Services will continue to evangelize service monitoring intelligence as a key element, use a service-oriented approach to CSI implementation and leverage the Customer Expectation Management Method to establish a business lane for ITIL© Road Maps.
I kinda like that; putting your heart into ITIL© but giving your Road Map some soul....(almost at my stop and the ipod plays the Blues Brothers', "I'm a soul man...")
Have a Happy Holiday!
