"Managing IT Complexity"
Debbie McLaughlin and Stuart Gibson | Published in the MIS Australia magazine - July 2011 Issue
As organisations invest in next generation technologies and service boundaries shift, there is a risk of increasing complexity and driving up management costs.
While CIO’s face a myriad of day to day issues, users consistently rank ‘service performance’, the delivery of reliable high quality IT operations, as their number one priority. A significant and increasing challenge for CIO’s is how to deliver reliable IT services within the context of growing complexity. With day to day IT operational costs typically representing around 70% of the IT budget, the risk of driving up costs through increased complexity is also of concern. Implementing an enterprise service management strategy is one approach increasingly adopted by CIO’s to address these challenges.
So why are IT services becoming more complex, when most IT investments are targeted at improving productivity and efficiency? Paradoxically, both convergence and disaggregation have become the two prime drivers of increased complexity.
Technology convergence, particularly where organisations are looking to combine legacy systems with virtualised environments and IP enabled applications and technologies, complicates integration and creates new management silos. Further convergence of mobile devices, multi-media and conferencing, together with integration of business enabling applications, amplifies this complexity, particularly where global services are involved.
IT service disaggregation, which began with outsourcing and increased with multi-sourcing, also drives complexity. The current shift towards utility based services is accelerating the level of IT service disaggregation. Today’s CIO typically has a broad range of IT service suppliers, each with their own geographic presence, heritage and delivery models. The greater the IT service disaggregation, the harder it is to achieve a seamless service experience for the business.
In addressing how they deliver reliable IT services to their business, CIO’s consider a range of factors, including: How to deal with day to day issues created by a diverse range of technologies? How to get all suppliers to respond rapidly, work in synch and behave consistently? How to ensure they know what’s going on, and preferably before they’re told by the business?
To contend with these questions, CIO’s usually consider their service management approach. Traditionally, managing the day to day IT operations has been treated as a ‘back end’ function that evolves in response to changes to the IT environment or mix of suppliers, often with little consideration to the overall strategy. While many CIO’s now advocate adoption of an industry recognised service management framework such as ISO 20000 or the ‘Information Technology Infrastructure Library’ (ITIL), they struggle to convince the business to make the required investments and changes.
In the face of growing complexity and the risk of increasing management costs, some organisations are re-thinking their service management approach and are increasingly adopting an enterprise strategy. This involves taking a business focused approach based on identifying 3-5 core business outcomes, and building the enterprise service management framework to address those outcomes.
As organisations become increasingly reliant on IT, the most common business outcome is to maximise IT service availability and minimise business disruption due to IT failures. For many businesses, this means greater emphasis on reducing the volume of high impact incidents, improving the time to resolve high impact incidents, and improving the quality of root cause analysis.
For organisations that have embarked on an enterprise strategy, three critical elements have emerged:
A single service desk as the hub for all IT activity. For the business, this is the prime user interface, so needs to deliver a ‘one-stop shop’, with a variety of easy to use options ranging from self service to complex requests. For IT, the service desk is the conduit to all IT services, and needs to provide an overarching set of practices, processes and work instructions to be used by all suppliers, regardless of their geographic presence, heritage or standard delivery models.
Standardised processes, capabilities and software. For the business there will be direct impacts such as how crisis events are dealt with, or how quickly new business functions can be delivered. From an IT perspective, this will involve strategic and architectural decisions on standardising software, capabilities and design processes.
A visible, single source of information that is accurate and available when needed. For the business, this means providing the ability for business to proactively manage its clients and workforce to deal with IT outages, issues and forecasted events. From an IT perspective, this means integrating data sources and re-engineering the way in which information is used to deliver end to end services.
Does your current service management strategy appropriately support an environment of increased technology convergence and IT service disaggregation? A well designed and executed enterprise service management strategy that includes both a business and IT perspective can be a game changer in assisting you to deliver reliable IT services to your business. But tread with caution. An enterprise strategy is likely to have wide reaching impact, and may involve changing a significant portion of your existing IT workforce to deliver new capabilities, skills and behaviours.
