A Real World Approach to Implementing ITSM

Information Management Online, September 29, 2009

Info-Tech Research Group staff

IT Service Management (ITSM) refers to the IT organization’s orientation towards delivering IT services with a customer-centric approach. However, this is a broad discipline which, left to interpretation by a wide range of IT adopters, can take various forms and meet a range of success. Info-Tech’s view on ITSM, discussed in the McLean Report research note, “Diagnostic IT Service Management for the Framework Impaired,” is that blind adherence to framework adoption is a leading cause of failure for ITSM initiatives. Lack of organizational commitment, and a lack of common-sense, IT-level operational processes, were also mentioned as hurdles to implementation. Interviews with IT professionals reveal that these are, indeed, on-going issues. As part of Info-Tech’s In-Depth research on ITSM, IT leaders and practitioners discussed successful implementation techniques. These are listed as recommendations following this research note.

Drivers for Improvement to Service Management

The following have been identified as key drivers for ITSM efforts or projects. Initiatives for improving service management, most typically, came from the IT side, and not the business. As a result, IT leaders who drive process change exclusively from the IT department with little external interest find it difficult to gain support from the business for ITSM initiatives.

Table 1. Drivers for ITSM Improvement

ITSM Driver	Scenario	Driven by
A major outage.	A single event such as an outage or security problem prompted either IT leadership or business leadership to formalize IT policy, process, and procedure.	Driven by the business or, possibly, IT executive leadership.
IT resource exhaustion.	IT leaders may actively pursue operational process improvement for the sake of IT sanity. This “death by a thousand cuts” stems from ongoing reaction to minor IT outages and incidents which require an unsustainable, heroic effort to control.	IT Director, Data Center Manager, Help Desk Manager.
Growth, acquisition or restructuring.	The merger or acquisition of two IT departments, or the adoption of an enterprise wide application leads to a need for consolidating IT departments. Subsequent restructuring is seen as an opportunity to streamline IT or to build an IT shared services model.	Driven by the business with some CIO’s participating in decision making.
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