IT Management Reference Guide

When the 39 industry experts from business, government and academia began developing the first version of ITIL in Great Britain during the mid 1980s, they quickly realized that IT service management was the common link on which the numerous best practices of IT infrastructure management was based. Service management in general focuses the quality of products and services on the reasonable expectations of customers. When applied to an IT environment, service management focuses the quality of its IT services on the reasonable business expectations of its customers and end-users. In ITIL terminology, end-users are defined as the day-to-day users of IT services while customers are defined as the managers of these end users.

IT Service Management (ITSM) bridges the gap between the business goals of a company and the technology used to accomplish those goals. It sets up formalized and regular communications channels to allow requirements, requests and difficulties to be expressed and dealt with. This serves the very important function of ensuring IT aims are correctly aligned to the business.

This notion of IT service management was not always prevalent within IT. In fact, as the IT industry passed through its infancy and adolescent stages, there was little or no emphasis on service management. How, then, did IT environments evolve from being totally technical entities into world-class service-oriented organizations? The next section answers that question.

How IT Evolved into Service-Oriented Organizations

Most IT organizations began as offshoots of their company's accounting departments. As companies grew and their accounting systems became more complex, their dependency on the technology of computers also grew. The emphasis of IT in the 1970s was mostly on continually providing machines and systems that were bigger, faster, and cheaper. During this era, technological advances in IT flourished. Two factors led to very little emphasis on customer service.

First, in the 1970s the IT industry was still in its infancy. Organizations were struggling just to stay abreast of all the rapidly changing technologies, let alone focus on good customer service. Second, within most companies the IT department was the only game in town, so to speak. Departments that were becoming more and more dependent on computers—finance, engineering, and administration, for example— were pretty much at the mercy of their internal IT suppliers, regardless of how much or how little customer service was provided.

By the 1980s, the role of IT and customer service began changing. IT was becoming a strategic competitive advantage for many corporations. A few industries such as banking and airlines had long before discovered how the quality of IT services could affect revenue, profits, and public image. As online applications started replacing many of the manual legacy systems, more and more workers became exposed to the power and the frustration of computers. Demand for high availability, quick response, and clear and simple answers to operational questions gave rise to user groups, help desks, service level agreements, and eventually customer service representatives, all within the confines of a corporate structure.

Good customer service was now becoming an integral part of any well-managed IT department. By the time the decade of the 1990s rolled around, most users were reasonably computer literate; PCs and the Internet were common fixtures in the office and at home; the concept of customer service transitioned from being hoped for to being expected. Demands for excellent customer service grew to such a degree in the 1990s that the lack of it often led to demotions, terminations, and outsourcing.

Whether IT professionals were prepared for it or not, IT had evolved from a purely accounting and technical environment into a totally service-oriented one. Companies hiring IT professionals now often use traits such as empathy, helpfulness, patience, resourcefulness, and being team-oriented as requirements for the job. The extent to which these traits are in evidence frequently determines an individual's, or an organization's, success in IT today.

Other Factors Driving IT Service Management

Several other factors help drive the IT industry to become more service-oriented, and the truly successful organizations understand and respond to these factors.

Competition: We see IT everywhere these days and it affects all our lives. If your IT service delivery lets you down, you will lose customers. In high volume, real-time industries such as online travel or banking, you may lose them immediately. Providing a framework for successful Customer retention is one of the prime deliverables of ITSM.

Increased dependency on IT: Most organizations could not function as a business without acceptable levels of IT service availability and reliability.

Higher visibility of service failures: If things do go wrong, the impact on the business is more likely to be noticed quickly.

More exacting customer demands: A general increase in computer literacy, particularly amongst customers, has led to a higher expectation of what is required from IT services, and a reduction in their level of tolerance of faults and failures in the IT services.

Increased complexity of the IT infrastructure: IT services are delivered by a complex mix of hardware, software, networks and people. It is essential that all these components are managed effectively and efficiently as poor performance of any one component can seriously affect the quality of the overall IT service.

Services and Service Management

ITIL is a service management framework, so let's talk about what services are. A service is what is perceived by the customer as a service. The important point here is that if you have defined your services without including your customers in the process you have no assurance you are providing what is really needed. It is important that the services are defined in conjunction with customers.

Service management is a total organizational approach that makes quality of service, as perceived by the customer, the number one driving force of the operation of the business. In the context of IT, service management is ensuring the provision of the highest quality of IT services required by the customer to accomplish business goals.

IT service management is driven by the following three objectives:

• To ensure that the organization's business needs are underpinned by high quality, cost effective, value-adding IT Services
• To improve the quality of IT service provision
• To reduce the long term cost of service provision

IT operations exist to develop, deliver, support and maintain services which support one or more business operations. They are not 'in business' for IT reasons alone. Wherever applicable these services should enhance as well as underpin business operations. Service management is also a philosophy or mindset that encompasses: enacting a service culture, recasting individuals, teams, and organizations as IT service providers, and enacting processes that underpin the creation and delivery of services that meet changing business needs and expectations, conceptualizing and running IT as a business, as opposed to an overhead function.

Service management is about managing the client service experience and infrastructure, where a service is set of related functions IT provides that are seen by the Customer as a coherent, self-contained entity, and infrastructure is everything that underpins service delivery, including people, processes, and technology. This means Service management requires a focus on the relationships with customers that include sometimes difficult conversations about what is needed to consistently deliver on service commitments

Summary

Service management is 'service-centric' as opposed to 'client-centric' or 'technology centric'. Being service-centric means systematically managing both client expectations and perceptions, and the technology infrastructure required to consistently deliver on those expectations. As the ITIL framework started taking shape, the overriding emphasis on service management became very evident. As we explore the different ITIL processes in upcoming sections, we will see how being 'service centric' manifests itself, and why it is so valuable.