Delivering a pro-active IT Service
Transforming IT into a pro-active service-focused organisation is not an easy process to go through. However, an understanding of the cultural processes (and clashes) in the business, does make it a whole lot easier. To transform a typical IT organisation into providing an efficient service delivery is difficult, companies that don't make the transition face loss of competitiveness, while the IT organisation faces loss of credibility and influence and most importantly impact.
The challenges are many, ranging from the technical to the organisational and cultural. Service delivery depends on turning a business process into a systematic process that IT can automate and manage with technology.
But turning business processes into systematic processes requires cooperation among multiple internal organisations and the ability to balance multiple, often competing objectives. The Service Delivery Manager must break down barriers, balance competing goals, gather broad support, and find a technology solution that adapts to the new processes and minimises disruptive changes.
The Service Delivery Manager must then continually promote the value of new processes and technology solutions even as they require people to change their behaviour, sometimes dramatically. For without behavioural change and without broad support, the mission will fail. Here are four keys to a successful transformation into a pro-active IT service delivery:
From vision through implementation, secure executive commitment.
- The Service Delivery Manager must obtain the complete commitment of the executive team, not just for defining goals but also for execution (and all the difficult cultural changes associated with execution).
- This is where many Service Delivery Managers run into difficulty.
- The executive team readily participates in defining cross-functional goals and conceptualising new processes, but support often wanes in the face of implementation. The Service Delivery Manager must arrange the development of the execution plan and become its untiring champion.
Drive IT alignment with business objectives.
- When it comes to a service delivery initiative, the executive team defines the goals, and the Service Delivery Manager drives execution.
- This ensures that technology and the IT organisation are aligned with those goals. The Service Delivery Manager's central and often high-profile role in ensuring alignment is critical.
- For example, in medicine today there's a specialist for just about every body part, condition, and treatment. While all these experts and all this technology are wonderful, they can do little to contribute to the health of an individual without one doctor who takes responsibility for the patient, sees the bigger picture, and coordinates the use of specialists, tests, and treatments to ensure they are aligned with the overall health of the patient.
- The Service Delivery Manager must play this managerial role for the service delivery initiative, and all the executives must support the Service Delivery Manager by breaking down any barriers that exist within the organisation.
Invest with total visibility.
- Many organisations are saddled with a complex technology infrastructure built with a variety of diverse and disjointed solutions. Technology was implemented to solve specific problems in specific areas, and these were patched, upgraded, and replaced as and when required.
- As a result, these organisations are operating with "islands of automation." They are unable to view the infrastructure holistically, which makes it nearly impossible to implement a service delivery strategy.
- A service delivery transformation requires an investment, often a heavy investment, in technologies that support a "complete service" and long-term strategy.
- In order to gain a complete service view, the Service Delivery Manager needs to look at service delivery from the top down:
- top-level goals
- the services required to achieve those goals
- and the cross-organisational objectives to deliver those services
which then reveal the functional issues: aligning people to projects, metrics, cultural barriers, etc. that must be addressed.
- Without a top-down view, for example, a Service Delivery Manager who is not in tune with the top business objectives can build an infrastructure to support a three-tier distribution network only to have the Sales Manager close down the distribution network in favour of a direct sales model.
- In addition, successful Service Delivery Managers also look inward and quickly role-model this top-down approach with the IT department itself.
- The IT department is only a part of the broader organisational challenges. Most IT departments are organised by function:
- a network manager,
- a server manager,
- a database manager
instead of by the services the department as a whole needs to deliver.
- Often, these narrowly-focused roles have competing agendas and interests (funds for upgrades, for example) and lack any method for overcoming these artificial boundaries. Yet the Service Delivery Manager can promote change by mapping teams to the services they deliver.
- Unfortunately, understanding how to transform the IT department to deliver on the top-level goals isn't always easy to see.
Constantly communicate the value of the transformation.
- Before and during a service-delivery transformation, there must be constant communication and promotion of the benefits from becoming a service-focused IT organisation: from evidence to support the impact on top-line goals to the ability to adapt to the changing needs of the business without re-architecting systems, retooling processes, or changing staff numbers or assignments.
- Communicating value across organisational boundaries helps ensure continued support from the executive management team.
- Just as important is the continued promotion of results and grassroots campaigning throughout the IT department. This is absolutely necessary in order to ease the transition for employees who feel the effects of the cultural and organisational changes that result from the move to a service delivery organisation.
- This communication is critical to sustain support across the organisation, no matter how fat away the end appears.
Transforming IT into a pro-active service delivery organisation is a journey with many phases but with strong IT leadership, full executive support, the right level of investment in the right technologies, a top-down view, and an effective communication strategy, the transformation can move forward at a steady pace and deliver tremendous long-term business value. |
