IT Management 2.0

I recently concluded my Spring 2009 US conference/event “tour” in Ottawa, Dallas, New York, Orlando and San Francisco.  During this time, I presented, talked about, and answered questions on IT management and ITIL.

ITIL's Cool - But Can It Save You Money?

As I’ve always found with these things, one of the best aspects is the chance to spend some time talking with old friends and new acquaintances about their IT challenges and issues,

Not surprisingly, one of these discussions touched on coping with the current economic realities. Along those lines, a nice dialog took place on the ways to make ITIL matter under challenging economic conditions. The discussion volleyed among many interesting aspects: IT spending trends, specific processes and functions, ways to prove results to the business (and do it quickly), maturity models, the specter of increased regulation, and tinkering vs. tuning (that is, whether to redesign services or just tweak them).

So while waiting in the airport—of course, delayed two hours by too much traffic in the New York City air corridor—and while on the plane back home to New York, I distilled the best of that discussion into a top-five list of ways to keep ITIL relevant and save money during tough economic conditions:

1. Rule by the Pareto Principle: The good-old 80-20 rule—which, in this context, means 80 percent of results will come from 20 percent of the effort—should be front of mind. In short, in a tough economy, prove relevance to the business by laser-focusing your ITIL efforts where you’ll be able to demonstrate the best return. And if that means reprioritizing—for example, de-emphasizing or deferring portfolio management in favor of paying more attention to change management—then do it! There’s no ITIL “law” prohibiting you from reallocating resources in this way so you can more easily and immediately prove to your customers that ITIL is delivering value.
2. Pick Low-Hanging Fruit: This one’s close to my first point but different and important enough that I wanted to list it separately. The proverbial low-hanging fruit is what’s easiest to pick—in short, minimal effort. That’s an extremely important variable to consider in the mix as you’re looking to demonstrate results in the immediate term—which is often the case in tough economic conditions. Important yes; paramount, no. Just because something is easy to do doesn’t mean it will save money or deliver meaningful results to the business. In general, the key process “trees” to look to easily “harvest” from, based on an implementation’s maturity, are incident management for early implementers, change management for those at mid-level process maturity, and service portfolio management for those at the high-end of the process-maturity scale.
3. Decide Once is Good Enough: Eliminate duplication. Use common tools, processes, and architectures. Share frameworks, approaches, and ideas across processes and functions. Standardize—and hold people to the standard so things get done consistently. Don’t forget there’s also a people aspect to this. Encourage and enable collaboration so you stop reinventing the wheel so many times. And make sure everyone knows they’re not in the Department of Redundancy Department.
4. Automate: You’re probably facing a reality of flat or shrinking budgets, hiring freezes, and turnover, while still needing to improve existing service levels and deliver the new services. In short, you’ve got to do more with less. Take as much of the dull, manual, error-prone chores off people’s plates, and let your IT management software handle that grunt work. Now folks have more time to focus on some of your most-critical and high-visibility initiatives—linking IT services to where business value is realized. Using automation to free up time increases efficiency and tends to decrease incident and problem rates. Some “sweet-spot” automation opportunities: change, configuration, incident, and problem management; service desk; and discovery for keeping a CMDB or CMS accurate and up-to-date.
5. Provide People with Information, Not Data: There’s too much raw data in the data center already. People can easily drown in it or spin their wheels for a long time because they don’t know where to start. Not much of this raw IT operations data is useful on its own. It may not even be accurate or up-to-date. To become an asset that improves processes and benefits the business, this data needs to be transformed into meaningful information that is accurate, up-to-date, relevant, and delivers insight. Admittedly, this is an indirect effort. Better information by itself doesn’t save money. It’s nonetheless critical for two reasons.

• First, the best-defined and best-executed process or function won’t deliver intended results if it’s executed against a bad set data.

• Second, the impact of an effort in this area could be huge: Accurate, up-to-date, meaningful and relevant information—especially as it relates to a CMDB or CMS—improves every process and function (high-percentage results from low-percentage efforts—see Pareto Rules!). Automation can go a long way toward making the transformation from having data to delivering insight a reality.

So what do you think? Is your list the same? Is there something else that you believe should be here? (For example, I considered, but rejected, metrics from my list.) Let’s hear your thoughts so I can get another awesome dialog going!

Brian Lett

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Brian Lett Change and Configuration, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Dependency Mapping, Service Management