When Everything Becomes a Service – Does ITIL Help or Hurt?


services-13For many years I’ve had an interest in the disciplines of Product Management and Service Management. These disciplines have been generally lacking in IT shops, though that is changing. Frameworks such as ITIL and standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 are helping sensitize IT professionals to Service Management, and methods such as Agile Development and Scrum are sensitizing IT professionals to the role of Product Owner, if not to the disciplines of Product Management.

However, my interest has been strengthened since reading the remarkable book, The Connected Company by Dave Gray with Thomas Vander Wal. Dave and Thomas have awakened me to a fact that I was subliminally aware of, but have reinforced for me why this is happening now. They have also drawn out for me some implications and subtleties I had not considered when thinking about the Service Revolution.

Everything is Becoming a Service

As the authors suggest:

Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, like products. They are co-created with customers and are interdependent with wider service networks and clusters.”

They point out that most companies today have been finely tuned to “produce high volumes of consistent, standard outputs, with great efficiency and low cost.” Even some so-called ‘services’ are in reality “factory-style processes that treat people as if they were products moving through a production line.”

The Customer’s Experience of a Service is Key!

A product is largely experienced as it was manufactured. We may have subjective reactions to the product, but it does not change, other than through built in features. Services, however, change as they are experienced. This means that services cannot be delivered simply through efficient and operationally excellent processes. Services demand a ‘customer intimate’ delivery model that adapts to the ways the service is co-created by the customer and optimizes the customer experience.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Standards and Frameworks Such as ITIL

My esteemed colleague at BRM Institute, Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk, just posted a wonderful short post titled “BRM Role and Service: ITIL Dyad Revisited.” As an officially certified ITIL Expert, ‘he knows what of he speaks’, as they say. Please check out his post – and tell us both what you think, and how these observations resonate with your own experiences.

 

Graphic courtesy of Augustedge

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IT Organization Circa 2017 – 5 Year Countdown (Part 1)


countdown5When I launched this blog on September 21, 2007, my opening post declared:

I’ve named this blog “IT Organization Circa 2017″ in an attempt to position the domain of interest – what will the IT Organization inside businesses, governments and other organized entities look like in 10 years (2017) and how did they get there?”

I went on to explain that I’d picked 2017 as it was 10 years from my first post – a time-frame that seemed to allow a high degree of change, but that I would (statistically, and hopefully) be around to see.

So, with 5 years to go, here are some musings on IT Organization Circa 2017, with thanks to my co-founders at Business Relationship Management Institute, Aaron Barnes and Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk with whom I’ve been noodling on the subject.

To set this up, we need to consider the major disruptive forces acting on the IT organization today:

Let’s take each of these disruptive forces and delve into them.

IT Organizational Disappointment

There’s a general (though not universal) sense of disappointment with IT! We used to hear, “It costs too much and delivers too little value!” Nowadays, we are more likely to hear, “It takes too long!” When the competitive landscape can change almost overnight and when technology creates opportunities to reinvent products, services and business models just as quickly, it usually seems to be the IT organization that’s the bottleneck. Typically,

  1. It takes the IT organization time to examine a need or opportunity.
  2. It often feels to the business executive that the examination of a given need or opportunity is an exercise in bureaucracy – too many hoops and hurdles to go through with few of them, if any, adding value.
  3. If the request does make it through the hurdles before the need has gone away, there’s often a lengthy ‘waiting period’ while resources are freed up – the dreaded so-called ‘backlog’.
  4. Sometimes the original simple request somehow morphs into a major deal, as other business needs are piled on, and legacy issues rear their ugly heads.

To get beyond these clichéd perceptions, some IT organizations are now on their 3rd or 4th ‘transformation’ comprising activities such as retooling, re-skilling, reorganizing, leaning out processes, and adopting standards frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT. While these efforts may well be necessary, many are not cleanly executed, taking 2-3 years to bring benefits, and in the meantime creating more disruption for the business customer.

So, it hurts me to say it, and many of my readers may resent it, but the truth is that more often than not, IT organizations are seen as barriers to business progress with information and IT, rather than the enablers they would like to see.

Cloud Computing

Despite some well-publicized snafus, Cloud Computing is making significant inroads just about everywhere. Sometimes, the shift to the cloud is around very small services – document sharing, or storage of large files such as videos, and so on. Other times, the shift is broad based and significant – moving supply chain or customer relationship management processes to the cloud, for example. Either way, the cloud offers an easy way to try something without a significant capital investment or running through the corporate maze of product and vendor certifications and contracting. And, at least in theory, if not in practice, cloud solutions feel to non-IT people as something they understand and can procure and deploy without IT assistance. In fact, it’s often something they are already using at home with great success. This represents a huge ‘bypass’ to the traditional IT organization.

Many companies today are catching on to “big data” and the power of analytics applied to vast sources of data, such as sentiment analysis of social media or identification of consumer purchasing patterns based upon correlations that had not been previously recognized. Big data often requires massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers – something that is beyond the limits of most corporate data centers, but achievable through Cloud Computing – creating yet another entry point that can bypass the IT organization.

Add the attractiveness of the Cloud Computing value proposition and perceived ease of doing business to the sense of IT organizational disappointment mentioned about, and you have an interesting recipe for a revolution!

Consumerization of IT

This, with its sister movement towards mobile everything is a powerful disruptive force! People are increasingly able to chose their own devices – smart phones, laptop computers, tablet computers, and so on. These devices come with a vast available library of ‘Apps’ to do just about anything you might need. And if you need something for your business that does not yet exist, there’s a universe of willing, inexpensive developers out there who’d be delighted to develop the App for you and your business!

This trend is not going away – to the contrary is is the beginning of a new sense of empowerment – everyone is their own IT department. It’s probably wrong to call this a “slippery slope” which implies a falling down at some point, but it certainly marks a shift in the relationship between business people and their technology – a shift in which the IT professional may have moved from a faceless body in the corporate IT department to a slick, service-oriented professional in the local phone store. (Reality note here – my daughter’s phone stopped working last week and she revealed to me her loathing of having to visit the phone store! She said, “The phone store has become the modern day equivalent of the automobile dealership!”)

Global Sourcing

While not a panacea, and while many companies experience a painful transition to various flavors of outsourcing, most companies have tried it at some level, and plan to do more of it! For all its challenges, a well-executed global sourcing arrangement (or set of arrangements) can help an IT organization flex with changing business demand – both in terms of capacity (the ability to handle more or fewer projects as demand dictates) and capability – the ability to take on work for which the inhouse resources may not have the necessary skills or experience.

Who Is Engaging these Alternate Sources?

Increasingly, these alternate sources (namely, Cloud Computing, Global Sourcing, Consumer IT, Apps) are being engaged directly by the business with minimal to no reference to the IT organization.

So, What’s Does the IT Organization Look Like Circa 2017

I’ll leave you all to ponder on these disruptive forces for a week or so, and then I’ll provide my take on the future of the IT organization. Meanwhile, comments appreciated and encouraged!

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Expanding Our BRM Webinar Series


universe_expanding_astronomer_230405

Since Business Relationship Management Institute membership and webinar enrollment began last week, many of our new Founding Members signed up for our BRM Training Webinar Series of events.

Always eager to learn and improve their Business Relationship Management skills, several BRMI members reached out to us requesting that we expand our once-a-month series of three identical webinars, which was originally designed to provide a periodic introduction to the BRM role, to cover three different topics. We listened. Now, it is BRMI’s pleasure to introduce the updated and expanded BRM Training Webinar Series, which now covers three different topics:

  1. “Introduction to the BRM Role”—April 26, 2013, 12:00PM-1:00PM, EST
  2. “Challenges and Implications of the BRM Role”—May 17, 2013, 12:00PM-1:00PM EST
  3. “The BRM Role and Organizational Clarity”—June 14, 2013, 9:00AM-10:00AM EST

Outlines of these webinars are available on the BRMI Events page.

All BRMI webinars are free for BRMI members or $95 for non-members.

Shortly after each webinar, a recording of the event will be available for download. BRMI members will be able to download the recordings at no charge from Webinar Recordings Archive accessible from their members-only myBRMI page. Non-members will be able to purchase the recording for $65 each. Please feel free to contact BRMI with any questions.

I am looking forward to meeting you at the webinar! Thank you very much for your support!

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Business Relationship Managers Now Have a Place to Call Home!


Place to call homeOn March 15, we announced the formation of the Business Relationship Management Institute, a not-for-profit association for Business Relationship Management Professionals or Business Analysts who are on a career path to the BRM role. BRMI will be providing professional training and certification and facilitating exchange of knowledge and leading practices.

I’m very pleased to say that as of today our doors are fully open for business! We actually had a ‘soft opening’ earlier in the week and were astounded with the response—people from all over the world began signing up either for memberships or for the first in a series of webinars that we kick-off on April 26.

The BRMI Mission

To define, inspire, value, and promote the key traits of effective Business Relationship Management.”

To fulfill this mission, BRMI will:

  1. Gather and disseminate information on leading BRM practices–the BRM Interactive Body of Knowledge™.
  2. Provide a framework for active and aspiring BRMs to share experiences and exchange ideas.
  3. Establish and facilitate BRM education, professional training and certification programs.
  4. Facilitate networking among BRMs to support their professional growth and enhance their career opportunities.
  5. Provide opportunities for members to participate in the promotion of the BRM profession.

About BRMI Membership

BRMI members participate in the development and promotion of the Business Relationship Management role and profession and have access to a Wiki and collaboration platform featuring the BRM Interactive Body of Knowledge™. Members can volunteer their time and expertise for the good of the BRM professional community while expanding their knowledge and influence among peers.  Members are also able to attend all BRMI webinars at no additional cost and receive 10% discount on all training and certification products BRMI offers.

Please review this link for membership benefits and to sign-up.

Additionally, we’ll be hosting a series of monthly 1-hour Webinars about the BRM role and how to be successful in connecting provider organizations with their business partners. For information about the Webinars, or to register, please click here.

A Rapidly Growing Profession

As co-founders of BRMI who had formerly been co-moderators of the Professional Business Relationship Managers group on LinkedIn, we were keenly aware of the rapid emergence of this role and profession and the need for a professional body with a trusted source of information and training. Based upon our first few days of activity, we were correct in recognizing the need!

Let’s Hear Your ‘Voice of the Customer’

We are embarking on a series of interviews with BRMs to hear the “voice of the customer.” If you like to talk to us, please let us know. Or leave a comment below.

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Strong Business-IT Relationships Begin with Strong Communications


communication

(This post first appeared on the Business Relationship Management Institute blog.  Please visit the BRMI website for more information about this new resource.)

We learn a great deal about managing business-IT relationships  from our work and the people we work with. If our eyes and ears are open, we can also learn a lot from our personal lives. I’ve just returned from a short scuba diving vacation where one of the fundamental disciplines of Business Relationship Management was reinforced for me.

Looking for a New Service Provider – The Power of First Impressions

Every year around this time my wife and I head for Cozumel, Mexico. For me, this is all about 1 week’s scuba diving – a hobby (passion?) I’ve had for many years, and one of my favorite ways to relax and refresh. This was the 10th year of diving on the Cozumel reef system — the second largest reef system in the world.

I never tire of Cozumel, but last year, a diver I met told me about the amazing cenotes — large underwater caverns linked by tunnels that travel for miles inland. These are found on the Yucatán Peninsula, a 30-minute ferry ride from the island of Cozumel to the mainland. A unique characteristic of some cenotes is that although they are filled with fresh water, they are above sea level. This means that if you enter them and are able to access depths below sea level, the fresh water changes to sea water. Where the fresh and salt water meet is a phenomenon known as a halocline. A halocline creates some very strange phenomena for a diver — a sudden change in temperature and buoyancy, and stunning visual effects.  (For a great little YouTube video of the effects, see here.)

Anyway, I needed to find a highly qualified and licensed guide to take me to a cenote. Although I’m an experienced diver, I am not cave certified, so I did not want to go with just any bozo with a wetsuit and an ad in the yellow pages. Thanks to the wonderful world we live in, it did not take long to find a cenote guide who was highly recommended on sites such as TripAdvisor. I was pretty confident I’d found a suitable guide based on this research, but when I emailed him, my confidence factor began to increase.

The Greatest Danger With Communication is the Illusion That It’s Taken Place!

I credit Dan Appleton, a data modeling guru I had the pleasure to share a speaking platform many years ago with the wonderful quote in the headline above. One reason why my confidence in the dive guide increased was the quality of his initial communication. He laid out the options clearly. He explained everything by raising, then answering some key questions. For example, “Mr. Merlyn, if you are new to the cenotes, I recommend we go to Taj Mahaal or Chac Mool. Why do I recommend those? Because…”  He went on, “I recommend you take the 7am ferry. I know that’s very early to be getting up while on vacation, so why do I recommend such an early start? Because…”  And so it went. My follow-up questions were always responded to within 8 hours, and always with great clarity. I booked him.

As the trip approached, he communicated again, going back over the logistics, arrangements, and what I should expect. He even told me about the other diver that would be joining us. Every arrangement was validated and all opportunities for misunderstanding were reduced or eliminated. He said he’d meet me off the ferry — and not only did he do so on time, but he also recognized and approached me from among the several hundred other ferry passengers. (He’d seen an old photo of me from my scuba dive certification which he’d insisted on seeing before he’d confirm the reservation.)

After the trip, I went back to TripAdvisor to write my own review, and found myself re-reading the 60 or so reviews he already had out there — and nearly every one of them commented on his superb communications.

When your life is in someone’s hands, you need a very high level of trust and confidence. As a business executive, when your IT investment and competitive differentiation are in your Business Relationship Manager’s hands, you also need a very high level of trust and confidence. How you communicate with your business partner is key to building and sustaining that trust over time.

[For those interested, the other diver on this trip, Bruno, shot a video you can find here. Alex Mata, the dive guide is the guy with 2 air tanks, always leading the way. The diver you can see is me. Bruno was behind me, wielding the video camera and huge array of lights! We enter the halocline about 2:51 minutes into the video, though 3:57 and you can see the strange visual effects — quite disorienting! Fortunately, his superb pre-dive briefing had warned us to expect that he'd become all but invisible at the halocline, and instructed us to each swim to a different side of him so as to have some forward visibility. From 4:08 on you can see some nice shell fossils, stalactites and stalagmites.]

 

 

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Digital Business and the Fate of the IT Organization


Social-MediaInformationWeek just published an excellent article titled “Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business.” The article presents a compelling case for “Digital Business” as a lens into what the more information and IT-savvy companies are doing. It presents some good case studies from Digital Business leaders in the retail industry. It also presents some interesting statistics on emerging platforms for building customer ties, on the main opportunities for today’s CIOs and how IT teams are interacting directly with customers.

Are IT Organizations Asleep at the Digital Switch?

I found the statistics InformationWeek presented as both believable based on my consulting experience, and disturbing! The numbers reinforce the facts that:

  • The majority of IT organizational focus and energy continues to be consumed by legacy solutions, keeping the metaphorical “lights on and trains running on time.”
  • The IT organization typically does not play a major role in business innovation.
  • The IT organization is slow to enter the world of mobile computing.
  • Many IT staff don’t have the customer-facing skills and business knowledge to play in the emerging Digital Business space.

The statistics indicate a move in the right direction – no surprise there.  But the shift is slow – rewarding the early movers with the advantage of a differentiated experience for their customers and for their employees – especially for those IT staff that are involved in these frontier applications. The early movers, through business experimentation and studying success stories are building their digital capabilities.

Accelerating the Shift

Exploiting Digital Business is not just about innovation, agile channels, mobile computing and social media – it has profound implications for the IT organization and its context – the IT Operating Model. I’ve posted before about how IT Operating Models must change for what I called Enterprise 2.0 – aka, Digital Business.  (See here and here.)

Some companies are accelerating the shift through IT Transformation programs – reorganizing, rethinking IT processes and value streams, re-skilling the IT organization and, in some cases, radical outsourcing initiatives. Other are using ‘skunkworks’ approaches to learn and build credibility through early business experiments. Some have the most progressive and promising Digital Business initiatives happening in the shadows – outside the purview of their IT organizations. I find that to be a dreadful indictment of the IT leadership! If that is not a wake-up call for a new CIO, I don’t know what is!

Digital Business is Literally Business-IT Convergence

I’ve posted before on the concept of Business-IT Convergence. In many respects, Digital Business is all about the convergence of IT with the business – business products and services become digital, and IT capabilities – historically located in an IT organization – converge with business capabilities. Some IT professionals and leaders will see this as very threatening. Others will see it as the solution to many perennial problems associated with the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of the business-IT relationship.

What do you think? How is Digital Business impacting your work life?

Image source courtesy of Devicix

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Motivation and Engagement – Why It’s Often Lacking in IT Organizations and How to Increase It!


motivation

A couple of years ago, I came across a remarkable presentation by author Daniel Pink, and featured it in my blog post, “So You Think You Understand How To Motivate People!” It’s always been a popular post (and a great example of animation as a way to present ideas.)  I recently got around to reading the book that inspired the presentation – Drive, by Daniel H. Pink.  I’ve also just read the wonderful, To Sell Is Human by the same author, so I’m clearly “in the pink” as they say, and very appreciative of his research, writing skills, and his ability to constantly challenge the conventional wisdom, with insight and clarity.

Why Are Motivation and Engagement Important to IT Organizations?

Clearly, this is a trick question – motivation and engagement are important to any organization (or endeavor) but I have worked with quite a few consulting clients over the last few years where engagement was low – it both felt low as I worked with various teams and observed behaviors, and it was measured as low in annual engagement surveys, such as those by Gallup and Towers Watson.  Often, the IT organization scored lower on engagement than any other part of the business – sorry, readers – please don’t blame the messenger!

Why is IT Organizational Engagement Low?

I’m not certain about the reasons, but I have some hypotheses based on my observations and conversations with many IT staff:

  • In tough times (yes, like we’ve had the last few years!) IT organizations take it on the chin!  They are asked to participate in cost cutting, and they do – often again and again!  I often hear comments such as, “I’m doing the work of three people – and I never feel as though I can catch up and do a good job!” These rounds of cost cutting take their toll on morale and negatively impact engagement.
  • Often the cuts impact things that are important to IT staff – education and training, for example, or office ‘socials’ where people get to network and know each other.  Even ‘perks’ that used to be taken for granted, such as free coffee and sodas, or subsidized cafeterias have been eliminated.
  • I’ve noted before that IT professionals tend to abhor ambiguity – after all, they have to reduce business problems to zeros and ones!  And yet, in times of organizational change and transition – which have become the new normal for many IT shops – ambiguity is high, leading to frustration and low engagement.
  • The nature of IT is that it is noticed most when things go wrong – less so when they go right!  I’ve observed before that the half-life of an IT snafu is 12 years, whereas the half-life of an IT success story is 12 minutes!  It’s tough to stay motivated when you are constantly defending yourself!
  • For IT to deliver great results requires that many moving parts and processes across a complex environment work together seamlessly and harmoniously.  It’s tough in such an environment to create the kind of motivation-inducing autonomy Dan Pink writes about.
  • Finally, outsourcing has created both fear of job stability, and, for some IT professionals at least, degraded the job to that of a commodity.  I don’t personally think of outsourcing as wrong or misguided, but sometimes it is handled and introduced to the IT organization in a crude and clumsy way – for example, as a threat, “You’d better knuckle down or your job will be outsourced!”

What Does Research Tell Us About Motivating Knowledge Workers?

Knowledge workers are most motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors.  This explains phenomena such as the open source movement, and, as Pink points out, the remarkable and almost unpredictable success of Wikipedia – created by volunteers over Microsoft Encarta – a product of a gigantic company with a large budget and a massive team of experts.  Pink goes on to define three elements of what he calls “Type I” motivation – fueled by intrinsic desires:

Autonomy

One of the three basic human needs, what motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan describe this way:

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice.”

It can include autonomy over task, over time, over team and over technique.  I’ve posted before about the concepts of standardizing process, deliverables or skills, and how IT organizations tend to get these confused, or try to standardize everything though processes.  Autonomy has been all but stamped out in many IT shops!

Mastery

Which reminds me of Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I’ve posted at length about as one of the most influential books I’ve ever read.  Given sufficient engagement in an activity, rather than being forced into that activity by compliance, individuals will generally seek personal fulfillment by striving to achieve mastery.  Even though they may never get there, they find enormous personal satisfaction in the journey towards mastery – spending significant chunks of time in what some call “flow.”  My colleague at the new Business Relationship Management Institute, Dr. Aleksandr Zhuk, pointed me to this quote from Matthew E. May‘s The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change.  Shibumi is a Japanese word that better captures the concept of flow:

Moments of utter clarity. We feel wide awake and connected and balanced: everything makes sense, we know exactly who we are, what we want, and why we’re here. In that moment, be it one blink or a thousand, our effectiveness is maximal. And yet our actions seem minimal, effortless even, and the experience is consummately satisfying.”

How many IT jobs are designed to encourage Shibumi?  Many of my clients create an environment where constant context shifting takes place, as people are shuffled from design to maintenance to break-fix and so on.  Not much Shibumi takes place under such circumstances!

Purpose

Purpose provides the energy for living.  Think about the things you do outside work – and why you do them.  Coaching kids soccer.  Skiing.  Learning a musical instrument.  Volunteering for a charitable organization.  All these things have a purpose – and it’s not wealth creation.  Of course, there’s an element of wealth creation in our work, but for most of us, the need to make a living wage was satisfied early in our career.  So what is the real purpose in our work?  I remember some years back in a coaching session with a group of IT leaders from separate organizations discussing the fundamental mission of our work places.  Most of the group members were confounded by the discussion – they did not know what I was trying to uncover.  Except for one of them, who watched the others struggle with a slight grin on his face.  Eventually, this IT leader from a global pharmaceutical company said, “We save lives by inventing drugs that cure deadly diseases!  That’s why we do what we do.”

Why are you and your IT staff coming to work every day?  Is the purpose really motivating mastery?  And do you have the autonomy to engage in your work?  What could you do to improve motivation and engagement?  As a starting point, you might read some of Dan Pink’s “Drive.”

Graphic courtesy of Success Blog

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