I posted yesterday on the distinctions between IT Product Management and IT Service Management. Rich Lemieux commented and pointed us to his helpful and informative DITY Newsletter and to his article on the 5 domains of ITIL V3 suggesting that IT organizations organize themselves around these domains as the “five new silos of IT.”
A couple of push back’s – one minor and one major. The minor is Rich’s use of the term “silos.” I think this is probably a semantics problem – I doubt that he meant “silo’s.” I pick up on this nit, though, because I’ve seen organizations in their fervor to move from functional silos to end-to-end processes wind up in process silos! While this might be preferable to functional silos, any type of silo behavior is sub-optimal. In these days of rapid change, critical need for agility, and a need to create exceptional customer experiences, silos just don’t cut it. Everything we’ve learned about living systems, agility, and capability on demand tells us that free and fluid flow of information among the components of an organization is critical to the health and vitality of that organization. Silos tend to inhibit such flow.
Now the major push back. ITIL and the notion that “IT organizations are becoming Managed Service Providers” is one of those Level 2 ‘traps’ I’ve referred to in the past (See, for example, Reaching Level 3: The Ambition Factor). I agree that excellence in Managed Service Provisioning is key to reaching higher levels of Business-IT Maturity, and with it, higher business value. But, if this is that an IT organization aspires to or achieves, they will be stuck in what I call “Level 2″ hell (see my earlier posts on our 3-Level Business-IT Maturity Model) and be under constant pressure to ‘reduce costs and show us the value!’
In a maturity model, Level 2 is a critical stepping stone to Level 3, but it typically fails to stimulate, identify and deliver against the real business value opportunities. ITIL v3 is all about doing what you already do today, only better. With new capabilities such as Web 2.0, 3.0, SaaS and cloud computing, and new business aspirations to become “Next Generation Enterprises”, IT organizations will have to reach beyond Service Management and into business innovation – both process and product. ITIL is a necessary means, but does not take IT to its essential end.
Filed under: IT Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Maturity, Key Frameworks, Next Generation Enterprise, Next Generation IT, Supply Maturity | Tagged: Next Generation Enterprise, ITIL, Managed Service Provider
Vaughan – excellent blog. I’ve become a fan of late. Methinks, however, you may have missed the essence of ITIL v3.
ITILv3’s ideal of “Service Provider” does not equate to “managed services”. Rather, V3 has made a remarkable shift away from mass production principles where the organization looks inward and focuses on “the one best way”. It no longer takes an approach where IT is managed as administrative routines with internal efficiency and costs as the main criteria.
V3 instead posits that the value which IT seeks to capture resides not in its internal abilities and processes but in its marketplace, in the customer’s perception. Everything else flows backwards from that.
To accomplish this, ITIL incorporates ideas you may recognize from living systems such as systems thinking and value networks, dynamic information flows, and so on. As I read deeper into the v3 material, the lifecycle model itself appears to be a non-linear model based on system dynamics. Rather than encouraging IT to create silos based on the lifecycle capabilities, ITIL encourages the IT shop to see itself as a complex system.
Blog-on!
Thanks, Noema – I thought my post might stir up some interesting dialog, and my thanks to you for kicking htat off!
You may well be correct about my “missing the essence of ITIL v3.” My perceptions are based upon several inputs. First and foremost is what I see in my client base. Second is what I read and hear, including Rich Lemieux’s comment on my Service Management vs. Product Management post, which was actually what prompted today’s post. Third is the scope of ITIL v3 which is focused, as its name implies, on IT Infrastructure. While infastructure is a critical component for enabling higher value activities and capabilities, it is hard to claim that it delivers business value in and of itself. I think this is a sufficiently important idea that I will come back to it in more detail in tomorrow’s post. Thanks again for your enlightening and informative comment!
You’ll be interested to know that the owners of ITIL, the OGC, have repositioned “ITIL” as a brand, not an acronym. It appears they share your concern about infrastructure-only approaches and have explicitly stated that ITIL spans the IT enterprise.
Predictably, this has put the traditional ITIL community on their heels, as they are unaccustomed to ITIL in its new, more strategic role. The bottom-up approach hasn’t gone away, but the lifecycle clearly favors a top-down approach with close linkages to strategy and business outcomes. This has caused some confusion and misinformation, but long overdue, as illustratd by blogs like yours.
Thanks, Noema! Please see my post of tomorrow – I’m going to drill deeper into this. I appreciate your feedback and observations.
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Vaughan…as a follow up to my previous post, ITIL along with other best practice frameworks methods and standards like:
1. CoBit foir IT Governance Management
2. PMI or Prince 2 for Resource Managemenbt
3. Lean Six Sigma for Quality Management
4. ISO17799 for Security Management
provide the operating system for IT to work from going forward. What gets layered on top of that ( like applications on a PC) is what delivers value to the business. IT needs to spend more time getting the IT operating system stabilized (through the introduction of best practice frameworks, methods and standards) in order to prevent the IT blue screens we see so often on our desktops.
Thanks Rich – agreed! It is amazing to me that with such excellent, proven standards and frameworks such as these available, so many IT shops still “roll their own” improvement approaches, or, even worse, are complacement with the status quo. I’ve seen a “hero factor” as an ‘unwritten rule’ here (see my recent post on Unwritten Rules). Some are more motivated (and rewarded) to get called on an emergency and go and fix the blue screen or whatever catastrophe occured, rather than focus on preventative approaches. It seems that prevention behaviors are not rewarded, while heroic catastrophe fixes are!