ITIL version Next

ITIL version NextThe Panic Ends

Management Information Systems

It’s sometimes hard to remember that ITIL was developed not to control I.T., but instead to control management. As information technology continues to change, it is appropriate to revisit whether management is still effective.

ITSM, with or without ITIL, finds value in “management” according to how well it helps the business get what the business wants from using information technology.

ITIL attempts to capture successful findings about that management as shareable knowledge. ITIL is a knowledge practice about a management practice.

Therefore, the only reasonable expectation we can have of ITSM and ITIL is that they will both evolve. Even if they get rebranded, there is no reasonable expectation that either of them will go away. The more important consideration is to know how they should contribute in their purpose, and therefore how their evolution can be managed as well.

Measuring Up

The greatest fear about ITIL today is that it will cause an organization to send too many of its players off to training camp to learn to play, only to discover when they get back that they learned the wrong game.

A close second place fear is that ITIL is too complicated to meet the expectations that justify using it. This partly stems from an idea that ITIL’s payoff depends on many different process integrations, requiring many processes to be at the same or similar levels of maturity.

And a third fear, rapidly gaining momentum, is that “business” no longer needs to directly care about many particulars of I.T. management because it is being so highly automated.

Consequently, the idea that ITIL is becoming obsolete is gaining publicity.

If it is true, it’s fair to ask what is actually being replaced.

The easy answer is this: if ITIL is a knowledge base for ITSM (IT Service Management), the conceptual level of knowledge is not being replaced but the instructional level is being revised.

Meanwhile, the point of using ITIL’s service management framework must first be to look at what outcomes are needed from using services. The outcomes must represent the productivity of business operations, not the productivity of IT.

Value derived from ITIL

Value of Service• Value elements

• Low risk• High Performance• Availability

Underpinnings of Service• Acute recognition of demand• Systematic technical operations• Sustainable resourcing

Underpinnings of Value• Timeliness• Relevance• Resilience• Flexibility

The essential contribution of ITIL, right from the beginning, was that it offered a re-organization of management based on packaging IT as services for business consumption.

Providing IT organizations with a common reference framework for organized management of I.T.-enablement of business production created an opportunity for more consistent business performance measurement and for improved business-to-business interoperability.

That I.T.-enablement is still the focus of the organization. What has changed far more is the development and availability of services.

The Next Normal: What changed

• Transparent business

• Socially networked services

• Analytic management

• Autonomous infrastructure

• Pervasive I.T.

Advances in all kinds of technologies have created dramatically new capabilities at each level of the I.T.-to-Business utilization stack. The effect of the combined capabilities has completely reset the “baseline” of expectations and the range of potential behaviors. Production can now occur in ways not previously possible or feasible but is also under new kinds of pressure, in part because some combinations also create ad hoc, virtual or unprecedented services.

Critical Enabler

Communications

Accessibility

Monitoring

Automation

Architecture

Business

Service

Management

Infrastructure

I.T.

©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

The Next Normal: What stayed the same

• Transparent business

• Socially networked services

• Analytic management

• Autonomous infrastructure

• Pervasive I.T.

However, the new “baseline” of expectations and the range of behaviors has not changed the logic of how sustained production is orchestrated from I.T. utilization. Instead, it increases the need for organization-wide coordination.

Key Element

Offer

Compliance

Policy

Standards

Capacity

Signature

Interest

Convenience

Control

Scalability

Functionality

supply demand


Coordinating I.T. for BusinessThe general difference between the major I.T. officers actually stages a regular 3-pronged conversation about how to coherently organize I.T. utilization for production

The conversation should create defensible options, expectations, and specifications, so that internal I.T. stakeholders can both leverage and support external I.T. stakeholders.

CIO

COO

CTO

Why How

What

Where

When

Which

DESIGN

ADOPT

IMPLEMENT

PRODUCTION


DefinitionKey Element

Key Influencer

Change Agent

Critical Enabler

Signature

BusinessA model of economic interaction

Offer Request Discovery Communications Interest

ServiceA modality of provision & delivery

Compliance Agreement Feedback Accessibility Convenience

ManagementA practice of process quality

Policy Impact Risk Monitoring Control

InfrastructureAn environment of underlying systems

Standards Support Integration Automation Scalability

InformationTechnology

An operational resource for infrastructure

Capacity Availability Economy Architecture Functionalitydiv

ersi

tyfl

exib

ility

agili

ty

CTOs, CIOs and COOs need a shared mindset.


The Role of ITIL

In theory, ITIL adoption creates an operations “interface” that best allows business to employ IT as infrastructure.

Using ITIL, management takes on the accountability for a successful service orientation of IT provision and delivery.

That accountability tracks related responsibilities that require even information technology which is not supplied as a service to be managed as a service.

The requirement can mean accommodating a wide range of exceptions and alternatives, according to how well a technology onboarding practice is enforced.

The relentless acceleration of new technology introductions makes technology diversity an enormous issue that challenges the immediacy of ITIL’s relevance.

The business today operates in a heterogeneous environment of innovations, regulations, exposures and production lifecycles that exist independently but must be synchronized.

As a result, there is a need for a corresponding demand-side superstructure to accompany the supply-side I.T. infrastructure.

The appropriate corresponding superstructure will be operations strategy.

Business Operations view on IT Enablement

Accountability Signature

Superstructure Operations strategy ADAPTABLE

Interface Service Portfolio VARIABLE

Infrastructure Service Modeling SUBSCRIBED

SourcingResearch & Development

OPEN

The signature characteristics of effective IT enablement today present new norms to be pursued for the current state. The pursuit emphasizes sustainable agility in all implemented areas.


Business Operations view on IT Enablement

Accountability Responsibility Informed Consulted Signature

Superstructure Operations strategy Process AutomationService Performance

Governance ADAPTABLE

Interface Service Portfolio Service Catalog Service EventService Level Agreement

VARIABLE

Infrastructure Service Modeling Service Integration SecuritySystem Configuration

SUBSCRIBED

SourcingResearch & Development

Change & Release Management

Resource Audit

Asset Management

OPEN

The signature characteristics of effective IT enablement today present new norms to be pursued for the current state. The pursuit emphasizes sustainable agility in all implemented areas. Service management readily contributes; value comes from why it is called upon.


The Production Bias on ITIL

In the larger business operations view, ITIL’s end-to-end attention to the lifecycle of services is no less relevant than before. The basic premise is that services are a means of business production.

Typically, each stage of the service lifecycle has included specified processes to cover the direction and completeness of its supporting efforts. But in reality, that use of dedicated processes was always done to provide a basis for operational cost-effectiveness in quality control.

Continuing advances in the automation of information processing will naturally cause significant changes at a prescriptive level of guidance for procedural execution. This can render older procedures obsolete and also generate multiple concurrent alternatives. But these differences do not change the target outcomes of the lifecycle stage.

Since, also, different stages may be executed by different responsible parties, coordination of the parties is critical. It also becomes more evident over time that responsible parties can be significant contributors to a stage without being captive to or optimized for the stage that they affect. The coordination should be both predictive and measured.

In that sense, the main ongoing purpose of ITIL is to be a shared framework of accountability for lifecycle stage outcomes, not based on unique dedicated processes in each service lifecycle stage, but instead on the distinctive constraints, thresholds and impacts of the stage, which incrementally determine when (and when not) a service is ready, acceptable, and appropriate for business utilization.

ITIL version Next

Leadership & Management

Transcript of ITIL version Next