IT Service Management in the Digital Era

ITIL defines three levels of SLA’s, Service based, Customer based and Multi-level SLA’s; and encourages ICT and customer collaboration. In leading, planning, and adapting strategy, I’ve found it critical to understand what is important to the business, its goals and objectives, the organisations business plan and strategy in an ongoing way. This drives the development of ITSM. Ensure ITSM is aligned to the business, its objectives and strategy, saving scarce resources, which can be better utilised elsewhere in the process.

I reconciled the demands of the changing digital landscape and morphed traditional ITSM to keep it valuable and relevant by taking advantage of Cloud technologies such as containerisation, then using Application Synthetics to understand and record the end user experience as a means to find suitable targets for automation and orchestration to eliminate manual, repeatable tasks to release human capacity for more meaningful work, simultaneously enhancing end user experience. In this case, containerisation was deployed to allow high availability and cost efficiency. Automation of workloads would allow agility, enabling unprecedented scale to be achieved without exponential loss of human capacity at the same time by combining automation and orchestration within cloud workloads to deploy new containers, corresponding to increased application load you end up with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. For example, when a new employee is onboard, orchestration and automation can be utilised to create the domain user account, the workflow can automate the delivery of the end user device and provide all the applications needed to perform the role from day one.

In the Digital Transformation era where a large portion of IT Services are partially or fully outsourced, as a pre-requisite to developing creative and valuable ICT Strategy, it becomes critically important for agreements and contracts to be written in plain English making them easy to read and understand.

The agreements should encourage and drive a true partnership between the IT service provider and IT. Instead of focussing on service levels, key metrics and other lag measures, which while important, fail to allow evolution with a changing landscape. You may concentrate on how you will evolve Problem Management over the life of the agreement as this will drive innovation and value creation as things change. The main goal of Problem Management is to effectively respond to and eliminate recurring problems and resulting incidents. Good problem management, with continuous ITSM improvement results in an increase in customer satisfaction and a decrease in costs.

I can’t stress enough the benefit of ongoing contract management and evolution to keeping ICT Strategy business aligned, and ITSM valuable. This is where the contract manager and the ICT Service provider must have a mature relationship, recognising and founded upon mutual benefit.

I believe in the continuing value of ITSM in the Digital Transformation era and it’s the creative and bold CIO who can combine Business / ICT strategy, best practices, frameworks and standards, with strong and mutually beneficial business-to-business partnerships which will be able to derive value from ITSM as the landscape changes.