Ego, politics and fear, oh my!!!

Policies, processes, and people must be assessed and changed…  blah blah blah.   OK, we get it.  We need better policies so that more autonomy on decision capabilities is put into the hands of business interfacing technologist.  E.g. defining basic service levels and policies on new HW acquisition and account creations allows the business analyst to set the right expectations early in discussions and align business request expectations to IT support capability.  Clearly this improves operations, but how does that drive innovation?

Recently Gartner published the 4 myths of IT Self-Service tools .   I’ve met David Coyle and seen him speak at local ITSMF meetings, he is a sharp guy.  However, I do not agree with this assessment.  CIO’s are faced with a do-it-yourself business community.  This next generation of non-IT business users are as technical as most IT proffesionals today.  If IT does not start interfacing with the consumers in a more direct way, IT will continue to alienate themselves.  The problem with the 4 myths article, in my opinion, is it is based on IT driving the project and IT building a portal.  This is the first mistake.  Here is where IT needs to step up and be truly innovative.  Users don’t want to learn yet another tool or interface.  They simply want to their issues fixed.    Second, it’s just another request mechanism.  Two reasons this is not moving the ball forward.

First, consumers of IT services don’t want to have to tell IT there is a problem.  So giving them a portal is of course going to fail, and not adding value.

Second, consumers of IT services don’t want to have to tell IT there is a problem.   Yeah, I said this twice.  Consumers want IT to already know there is a problem, and to be telling them.

An IT self-service catalog/portal (whatever the word of the day is) is just another IT project that a bunch of people are going to wrap their jobs around.  Interject a little politics, ego and some good old fashion “we’ll never be able to support the business if we don’t have this” and viola we have another IT failed project.

Here is a different approach, think about how consumers of the services are interfacing with the technology.  (Website, client application, mobile phones).  Why are we not putting the ability within the interface to display support information or open the ticket directly.   How about correlating that with the monitoring infrastructure to determine if the cause is operationally related, or code issue, or maybe it’s training related.  Whatever the case, why are we focused on self-service being a portal?  Why, because support is an afterthought.  CIO’s need to enable individuals in support positions with better tools to understand the state of the services they are supporting.  Availability, capacity, service relationship, change, etc…  Once enabled they should be expected to do more than handle requests.  They must be empowered to identify risks and have a voice in the consumer community.  Doing this will allow engineering and architecture staff more time for developing innovative technology.  This new and improved support strategy will also help developers and architects think of ways of embedding intelligence in their systems for interfacing both with monitoring systems as well as end-users.

Drop the ego, politics and fear factors, and focus on the end-user and consumers desire to simply perform their function.  End user and infrastructure support is a complex discipline in and of itself.  IT needs to give serious thought as to whether it’s ROI is in building a world-class support organization or a world-class business enablement organization.

Is someone saying “Outsourcing”?…  maybe