A Fool with a Tool is still a Fool
- old IT Service Management saying
For a brand new project, implementing a new service or solution, you should have set yourself up with a program of work or a project, performed discovery & due diligence, constructed Service Management Design & Strategy, created and reviewed financials & commercials, engaged with partners and agreed on the the partner strategy, defined your customers and created customer collateral, have a team of people in place and starting to implement the required processes - phew !
These aspects have been covered in the previous blog posts. This post is to do with IT Service Management Tools - an important component of the total mix.
The overall well-being and management of any new service, solution or construct is underpinned by the tool-sets. It is not just a detailed design for the service management tool-sets that is required, but the full attention of an architect to map out what the service management tool-set principles should be, and following on from there, the overall IT Service Management Tools strategy.
Questions:
- Does your organisation have a service management tools architectural road-map ?
- Do they form part of the overall Information Systems Strategic Plan
- Is there an architect assigned to Service Management tools, strategy & road-map
In a simple world, there would be one single tool, and everyone from customer to internal operational teams through to partners would be using that one single tool.
In the real world, multiple teams use multiple tool-sets and this presents issues around end-to-end visibility of system performance from a business perspective, and who from what team, has what level of access to which tool.
In the legacy world, organisations have a number of on-premise service management and monitoring tools. In the future and now current world, many if not all, IT service management tools are cloud based.
With this, organisations face the issue of fragmented visibility, incoherent reporting, and the inability to compare apples with apples when comparing service from different suppliers.
Add to this the lack of understanding the total and true cost of running all the disparate tools.
Tools considerations for a new service, project or construct being implemented
A simple project level checklist to do with tools when implementing a new service:
- For each process, do we understand which tool will be used (incident, service desk, problem, change, release, config, CMDB, availability, capacity, monitoring, alerts, alarms, security, access, reporting, billing, vendor management, customer management
- Do we understand the white areas that need to be addressed (no tools) and the grey areas of ambiguity
- Have we agreed with partners, and is it possible for them to access our tools and vice versa
- Do customers have access to our tools, or have we agreed to use their suite
- Technical considerations, API's, joins, trusted domains etc to enable the above
Questions
- Do you have a simple architectural diagram of all the service management tools to support the new service, solution or construct ?
- Do they include partner tools and interfaces ?
- Do you have an idea of the effort to reconcile reports from different systems and partners ?
- Do you have an idea of the total cost of all the service management tools ?
You may not have answered "yes" to all these questions. Keep these as a mental checklist and tick them off one at a time as you go through your journey. With the strategy and visibility will come control and reduction in cost. Control not just of the growing tools, but of the IT service you are charged with providing to your customers.
If you have been following this series of blog posts, the logical sequence of this blog post series is:
There are more than a few nuances as organisations undertake the journey to transformation, digital or otherwise. Service Management is a key component to success.
Sunit Prakash has had many successes in organisational transformation on a global and local scale.
More importantly he bears the battle scars from the many lessons learnt. Don’t be one of the walking wounded - or worse.
Call him and head off some of the challenges before you even get to the pass.
Note: based on the post published by IT Professionals NZ in their IITP Techblog 19th September 2016
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