The Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM) and the Certified Process Professional (CPP) class is an ideal way to help establish a business lane for your ITSM Road Map.
Two of the dependencies that IT organizations must try and define when building Configuration Management Data Bases (CMDBs) are
End-to-end dependencies - These often represent logical topologies of a service target
Bottom-to-top dependencies - These are the dependencies within a particular component which map roughly to the ISO 7 layer stack; each layer is dependent on the layer underneath it (i.e, network depends on hardware, etc.)
It is extremely common for many IT organizations to take a bottoms-up approach to identifying these relationships. I often refer to this quote from Pink Elephant's Defining IT Success through the Service Catalog:
"The logical place to start this [ITSM] journey is first to understand the business processes that IT services support. Without this core understanding IT tends to try and define services from the bottom up instead of the top down. This technique is doomed to frustration and must be reversed."
Much of the discussion in ITIL's Service Strategy publication about minding the gap, marketing mindsets, and value point to a need for customer-centric enterprise architecture. IT talks about the Business as its customer, but it is the external customer that really matters, for if the Business is not properly aligned with their customers IT is moot.
In fact, it is interesting that the dependencies we seek in IT are ultimately dependent on the Business. The bottoms-up approach often taken by many IT organizations is simply a reflection of the Business not being part of the ITSM program.
While many of the technical dependencies are 'bottoms-up' -- à la the ISO 7-layer stack -- business process dependencies are essentially top-down:
Level/Layer 1 processes - Those processes that include all (external) customer interactions; what we call Moments of Truth. These processes are defined from the external customer's perspective.
Level/Layer 2 processes - These are one degree removed from Layer 1, and have at least one Moment of Truth, but they never encapsulate the entire external customer experience.
Level/Layer 3 processes - Two degrees removed form Layer 1, these processes never have a Moment of Truth, and always have a direct connection to at least one Level 2 process.
Level/Layer 4 processes - These processes have no direct connection to Level 1, 2 or 3 processes.
For Level/Layer 2 and 3 processes, they are dependent on the Level/Layer above it. All the work in the world won't fix Level/Layer 2 or 3 processes if the Level/Layer 1 process is fundamentally broken.
The Business has a very fundamental responsibility to ensure that the upper Level/Layer processes are well defined and aligned with the goals of the organization (and hopefully the external customer!)
If you are being asked to perform process analysis at lower levels/layers of a business process, it is worth asking to see the higher level/layer process models. In fact, it may be difficult to establish the end-to-end dependency data without this understanding since the end-to-end dependencies we really seek are transactions (particularly externally customer focused transactions).
Minding the Gap is about establishing two lanes for your ITSM Road Map, and one had better be a Business lane. The Customer Expectation Management Method CEMM and the Certified Process Professional (CPP) training offer an easy, effective way to document business processes in a way that avoids 'process reengineering' and stays focused on what really matters.
The customer.