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September 14, 2009 Service Costing Workshop at the itSMF Fusion Convention in DallasIf it seems that this blog has been pretty quiet, there is a reason: the last couple of months I have been busy working on my book, Running IT Like A Business: An IT Executive's Guide to ITIL and IT Service Management. The manuscript is now in its finishing stages, and the book will be released early next year. But more on that later -- I am planning to do a series of blog posts on the book and some of the fascinating interviews and case studies we conducted for it. But summer is over, and I am happy to be emerging from my brief hiatus to co-present a workshop at the itSMF USA Fusion Convention in Dallas with my colleague and good friend Ron Bradley. Ron has been in the IT Service Management business for 30+ years, and he is one of the foremost experts out there on service costing. Ron and I will talk about how to use the Service Portfolio in the service costing exercise and how to use the cost model to slash costs and improve customer satisfaction. If any of you are in Dallas on Sunday, please stop by to say hello!
Title: Service Costing: Determining True Unit Cost Per Service This hands-on workshop addresses the foundation of the ITFM Capability Model, Service Unit Cost Modeling. Workshop participants will learn about the drivers and benefits of IT service unit costing, steps for building the unit cost model, best practices for unit cost modeling, and enablers to sustaining fine-grained unit cost models. The workshop will also explore how to best leverage the Service Catalog in creating and maintaining your IT unit cost model, and how to use your service unit cost model to enable better budgeting and demand management. All material presented at the workshop will be accompanied by real-world examples and case studies. I look forward to seeing many of you in Dallas! Posted by Boris Pevzner on September 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) June 4, 2009 IT Management Plans and Priorities for 2009 and BeyondBy this time, many organizations are well underway with their 2009 IT projects and many are gearing up to begin their FY2010 IT planning. With this in mind, I thought it might be a good time to go over the "interests and priorities" of IT organizations that we uncovered in our recent 2009 ITSM and ITFM Industry Survey. ITSM/ITFM Interests vs Priorities According to our survey, the top 6 ITSM/ITFM priorities for IT organizations in 2009 were:
These,
for the most part, are no surprise and reflect today's challenging
economic conditions. The surprise came when comparing these
top priorities to the same respondents' ITSM/ITFM interests -- these
are the topics that people were interested in learning more about in
2009 (see chart below). You would expect "interests" and "priorities" to be fairly well aligned, and for the most part they are -- with two interesting exceptions: Developing and using IT performance metrics. This was the number one interest among the respondents, but only came in at number 7 on the list of 2009 priorities. Evidently, with the down economy, IT organizations today have bigger fish to fry, so developing performance metrics is not an immediate priority. However, looking to the future, accurately measuring service performance is a key component of many IT managers' plans. Implementing chargeback. This was fairly high on the list of priorities, yet on the list of interests it dropped all the way down to number 12. The idea of charging internally for IT services has been around for quite some time, but few have actually done it, because it involves so much change to how IT is run, and there are often organizational and cultural roadblocks to doing this. In today's down economy, however, many organizations are starting to come around on the idea of chargeback, and starting to recognize its cost-saving potential. It is unfortunate that it took an economic downturn to get to this point, but this is certainly an encouraging result. Organizations Want To Run IT Like A Business Running
IT like a business has become quite a popular concept these days. I
seem to hear about it everywhere I go: IT organizations all over the
country aspire to run themselves in a more "businesslike" manner. And
the results of this survey really confirmed that. One of the questions we asked was something we like to call
The
Zeitgeist Question -- what phrase best captures your organization's
ITSM/ITFM priorities for 2009? The choices consisted of phrases we have
heard during our consulting engagements, and we invited respondents to
write in their own Zeitgeist Phrases as well. The results are below.A whopping 33% -- one third of all respondents! -- said that "Running IT Like A Business" was their organization's Zeitgeist Phrase. That's a lot of people! This really shows that running IT like a business and everything that goes with it (clearly defined service offerings, SLAs and OLAs, a robust cost model, demand management processes, etc.) is becoming the operative principle at many IT organizations out there, which is a very encouraging trend. "Cutting Costs at All Costs" and "Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency" were pretty popular as well, and there were some interesting write-ins, which you can see above also. Posted by Boris Pevzner on June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) April 3, 2009 Breakthrough Finding: Service Management Maturity Is Highly Correlated with IT SuccessWe recently conducted an online 2009 ITSM and IT Financial Management (ITFM) Industry Survey, with the goal of eliciting some of the prevailing trends and attitudes among ITSM and ITFM professionals. Some of the results confirmed our read of the industry's pulse, while others caught us a little bit by surprise. I presented the results two days ago at the ITFM Association's conference in Atlanta. We are going to publish a white paper detailing the survey results shortly, but I wanted to give my blog readers a sneak peak at some of the most exciting findings. Service Catalog / Costing / Demand Management Maturity vs IT Success Even without the best fit line, the trend is quite clear -- organizations with high ITSM/ITFM maturity scores are more successful. The next thing we did was break down the maturity questions into three subsets -- 13 Service Catalog adoption questions, 10 service costing (ITFM) questions, and 10 demand management (ITDM) questions -- and calculate an individual maturity score based on each subset. Then we made a plot just like the above for each of these subsets. The results revealed a very interesting pattern that is very much in line with what we have been advocating for years. Take a look at the graph below. The Success Trend is the slope of the best fit line for the corresponding plot. It turns out that the Success Trend is 0.38 for Service Catalog adoption maturity, 0.5 for ITFM maturity, and 0.71 for ITDM maturity. This is a very interesting result! It means that if you just have a Service Catalog but don't implement any costing, pricing, demand-driven budgeting, etc. around it -- your IT department will become more successful, but not by a whole lot. If you implement some cost management and service costing concepts on top of your catalog, the benefits are greater. And if you start using your Service Catalog and cost model to manage demand, the benefits are still greater. This is exactly what we have been telling our customers for years -- and now we have direct quantitative proof! You can get the full report here. Posted by Boris Pevzner on April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) February 5, 2009 Consumption-Based Chargeback: Now More Than Ever!Even some organizations traditionally resistant to the idea of chargeback are starting to come around, because it makes so much business sense:
Old "Accountants First" Chargeback: The old idea of chargeback
was a somewhat
arbitrary allocation of IT costs to business units, based on coarse
metrics like headcount. In this model, the business units had no clear
understanding of what
they were paying for. This often resulted in unfair
distribution of IT costs, and a lot of gripes from customers -- and
justifiably so. Why should R&D pay for some of the IT resources
consumed by Manufacturing? This is not the kind of chargeback that puts
customer first.
New "Customer First" Chargeback: For chargeback to really work, it needs to have a mature, accurate, service-based cost model behind it. This model must be able to compute unit costs for each IT service and assign costs based on consumption, and the costing methodology must be made transparent to the business customer. Having such a service-based cost model as a foundation ensures that IT costs are distributed fairly and alleviates a lot of the common gripes about chargeback, because it helps business customers understand what they are paying for. The upshot of all this is that now is a really great time to implement IT service-based cost recovery principles at your organization. Whether you choose to do full-scale chargeback or "shadow invoicing," this is a worthwhile project that will lead to IT spend reduction and higher accountability both for IT and the customer, as well as position IT as a key contributor to the business. Posted by Boris Pevzner on February 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) November 3, 2008 Using ITFM to Transform the ITIL Paper Tiger into a Cost Cutting Machine
Why the loss of enthusiasm then, you ask? The answer, as is often the case,
is money. While many IT organizations have used ITIL processes and
concepts to streamline and improve their operations, few of them are
able to quantify these gains. And without such quantification, a hefty
ITIL investment is difficult to justify and sustain: what reasonable
business executive will throw millions of dollars at a project with no
clearly documented financial benefits -- especially in today's
economy!? As a result, many execs have come to view ITIL as a paper
tiger - a lot of bark, but no bite. This is why IT Financial Management and Service Economics are such a critical part of any ITIL initiative. Implementing unit costing, chargeback, and demand management helps to lower the overall IT spend, and at the same time the cost transparency these disciplines enable allows for much easier quantification of the resulting savings. ITFM can help turn your paper tiger into a cost cutting machine. Here is just one example that underscores the importance of ITFM and the hazards of undertaking an ITIL effort that is not centered around solid ITFM principles. A number of IT organizations have implemented requestable service catalogs, but our research has shown a remarkable difference between organizations that did so with and without service-based costing and pricing information. Customers who have implemented a service catalog with service-based costing and chargeback have seen:
Those are some serious numbers! On the flip side, customers who have implemented a service catalog without including service-based costing and chargeback have seen:
The other side of the equation is justifying the money spent on your ITIL effort, and that is actually covered in the example above as well, albeit indirectly. It's in the language. Note how the statistics I quoted above are phrased. The first set of stats is very exact and quantitative, while the second is more of a qualitative analysis, the kind that wouldn't fly in the board room. Why? Because in an IT organization without service-based costing and chargeback, it is next to impossible to collect the exact quantitative statistics that execs want to see. In contrast, when IT is built on a solid ITFM foundation, this kind of data is readily available. This is why ITFM should be at the center of any ITIL initiative. It is not enough to develop a long term service strategy, design a best practice based service catalog, and streamline service operation and delivery. While all of these are positive things, to be sure, at the end of the day it comes down to money. The end result of an ITIL endeavor should be a reduction in IT spend, and you need to be able to illustrate that reduction with some hard facts. ITFM and properly implemented service economics can provide both. So how do we lay this ITFM groundwork? Lontra SUCSESS™! This proven methodology can guide your IT organization from a reactive, specialized "job shop," to a "product house" that has full transparency around its products (the IT services) and their unit costs. It can take you beyond building a hierarchical service model, and to cost modeling, unit costing, and cost allocation, giving your ITIL effort a strong basis in Service Economics. This transformation will yield dramatic savings that you can show in stark terms to your executive board. I will explore some of these topics more in my upcoming webinar on November 5th. Posted by Boris Pevzner on November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) October 22, 2008 Slashing IT Spend with Service-Based Costing and Demand ManagementEver since the financial meltdown on Wall Street, corporations all around the country have been scrambling to cut costs, tighten their budget belts, and cut out inefficiencies from their various departments - and IT is no exception. Gartner painted a grim picture of the future of IT spend at its Symposium/ITxpo 2008 on October 13, telling IT execs to brace themselves for hiring freezes and layoffs. According to Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research, "The next big thing in IT is not a technology - it is cost reduction, risk management, and compliance." So how do we achieve this cost reduction? The battle cry for reducing IT spend has traditionally been met with marching orders toward improving the IT organization's efficiencies. Common methods include outsourcing, virtualization, cutting out unnecessary expenses, and yes, job cuts. These are all sensible cost-cutting measures, but they only deal with one half of the IT business equation. It is important to remember that the responsibility for IT spend does not rest solely with the IT organization - the business customers who consume IT services bear a large chunk of this responsibility as well. By focusing exclusively on wringing efficiencies from the supply side, many companies miss the low-hanging fruit on the demand side. Applying well-established service-based costing and demand management techniques can dramatically reduce an organization's IT spend by influencing IT customers' behavior and directing them toward IT service choices most appropriate for their needs and budget. This is where Service Unit Cost Strategy for Enterprise Shared Services comes in (we call it Lontra SUCSESS™ methodology). This is a seven-phase process that can help a company take advantage of these low-hanging fruit on the demand side, while making the transition toward running IT like a customer-centric business with full transparency around IT offerings and their unit costs. We have recently applied this approach at three Fortune 500 companies with glowing success. Phase 1. IT (Technical) Services Inventory. Catalog all technical services offered by your IT organization. These are the underlying services used to support IT's customer-facing offerings, such as application hosting, disk space, web analytics, etc. Phase 2. Business Services Inventory. Catalog all business services consumed by your customers. These are IT's customer-facing offerings, which may include email access, use of various applications, Internet access, etc. Phase 3. Hierarchical Service Model. Map all the business services from phase 2 to their underlying technical service components from phase 1. For instance, the business service providing access to a finance system may be built on top of several technical services, such as an Oracle database, a managed server, and a backup service. This will help you align your IT services with business needs. Phase 4. Service Cost Modeling. Create a full cost model by mapping the service model from phase 3 to the appropriate general ledger (GL) cost centers, such that every IT cost element is appropriately assigned to business services depending on it. Identify consumption drivers for each business service. Phase 5. Service Unit Costing. Identify the consumption volume for each business service, and calculate unit cost for each service using this consumption volume in conjunction with the service cost model from phase 4. Phase 6. Shadow Invoicing. Begin generating monthly or quarterly "shadow invoices" for each organizational unit, based on the business services offered, their unit costs, and actual monthly/quarterly usage. This will give you insight into how much each business unit actually spends on IT services. Phase 7. Demand-Driven Budgeting and Planning. Use the service hierarchy and cost model set up in the previous six phases to help IT's business customers plan their IT usage in terms of service units (and their associated unit costs), revise the IT budget appropriately, plan effectively for demand increases, etc. This is the phase where you can really cut down on some IT costs. Once you have a fully developed service hierarchy and cost model, service costs become transparent to the business customers, which translates into an extremely powerful tool in your IT organization's cost-cutting effort. Here are just a few of the things that you can do using this framework:
Applying the Lontra SUCSESS™ methodology will have a profound effect on your IT organization. It has the capacity to significantly reduce IT spend and reveal inefficiencies that you did not even know existed. In today's economy, this is not just a nice-to-have, it could be a matter of survival. Posted by Boris Pevzner on October 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) August 13, 2008 Question to all CIOs: IT budgeting time is here – Are YOU ready?For some, beads of perspiration may be forming at the very question. For a CIO, though the actual budget presentation may be short, it is a critical time to make their case for spending the following year, and more importantly, to introduce new initiatives that will strategically advance the company’s business objectives. One of the barriers to this accomplishment is in the language we speak in IT: technical jargon and complex tables of IT spend not directly linked to the business value or actual line of business consumption – hardly a language that would resonate with your average executive board. Susan Cramm suggests in a CIO magazine article that “CIOs [should] present utility costs as if they were an outsourcer, on a per-department basis, whether it’s for email usage, help desk calls, or the network.” The main takeaway there is that the conversation needs to happen in terms of customer-facing services, not processes or utilities. These services need to be transparent and understandable, in “business-speak,” to the lines of business, and accompanied by an accurate service-based unit price (rate).
My keyword in that last statement is accurate. If the CIO and IT organization as a whole is going to become a trusted, strategic partner within the business, then it needs to present the full cost of doing business with IT: by product, by service line, by line of business, by customer. N. Dean Meyer published an article on the subject and laid out 6 Levels (0-5) for Full Cost Maturity, starting with Traditional Budgeting, then Fair Allocations, then Demand Management, then Accuracy, and finally “Rates - Costs are portrayed in total for products and services, and unit prices (rates) are extracted from the same data.” Getting to this level of maturity from scratch would be daunting for almost anyone, and the horror stories of 30-40 connecting Excel Workbooks have definitely been told around the many IT Financial Management conferences I’ve frequented. Luckily, there are tools out here that automate the process (and, of course, I am biased toward those offered by my company, Lontra – particularly since it is offered with a 60-day service cost modeling and delivery guarantee). Demand Management is also key – a topic I could write an entire blog about and probably will. Knowing the full cost of providing any given service enables IT to have conversations with LOB owners that allow you to predict and record trends in demand, and create rolling demand-driven forecasts that go 5 to 6 quarters out. It also allows your IT Financial Managers to compare your cost of delivery against benchmarks in the industry and make informed spending decisions. If a CIO is armed with the ability to discuss services in business-speak, including accurate service-based costing, and with a more accurate picture of future demand, the answer to “Are you ready for budgeting time?” should be “Bring it on.” Posted by Boris Pevzner on August 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) June 11, 2007 ITIL’s dressed for the corner office
My colleague (and a fellow blogger) Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant steered me toward an article yesterday that really distilled the mojo of the new ITIL release and the buzz it’s been creating in Global 1000 corporations around the world. According to Linda Tucci of SearchCIO.com, with the release of version 3, “ITIL Dons a Suit and Tie.” – and of course, I just had to doodle up a picture for it! – enjoy: This metaphor is as prescient as it is vivid: whereas previous releases of ITIL have been process focused, and in most cases taken on at one or two levels below IT executive management, ITIL v3, with its emphasis on being customer-centric and business-aligned, should at the top of a CIO’s agenda… indeed, according to ITIL v3 authors, the Service Strategy book is one that “every CIO should read.” I would go one step further (brace yourselves everyone): ITIL v3 should be seriously considered by any CIO who would still like to be employed in 2010, when, according to Gartner, 60% of companies with over 1000 employees will have adopted ITIL. The capabilities discussed in the Service Strategy and Service Design books alone are enough to set an IT organization on the path of decreasing overall IT spend and increasing customer satisfaction significantly, and if you don’t have that knowledge, and the ability to implement those lessons learned – someone else will. Posted by Boris Pevzner on June 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) June 4, 2007 ITIL v3 – Building a successful IT service delivery organization brick by brick, with the Service Portfolio as the cornerstone!
In my earlier blog, and in those of my colleague, Molly Hollday, we have speculated about the evolution of ITIL into a service-focused, and ultimately customer-focused, service management framework. To us, this maturation of e ITIL framework was natural and inevitable for one simple reason: in order for any service business to be successful, it needs to be strategic about the services that it offers, and it needs to align them with the needs of the customers. Good news, folks – with ITIL v3, we are getting what we asked for. One of the main focal points of ITIL v3 is the Service Lifecycle – how services are conceptualized, defined, modeled, offered, accounted for, delivered, supported, and improved – and the Service Portfolio is the central management tool and “system of record” for the Service Lifecycle. As Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant mentions in his blog, this brings ITIL to the perspective of the CIO and executive management team and “is focused on the realization that IT Management is accountable for knowing how any given component or device supports a service which impacts or enables a business process and outcome.” For this very reason, ITIL v3 positions the Service Portfolio as the cornerstone of IT Service Management and recommends it as the starting point for every ITIL implementation. ITIL v3 books on Service Strategy, Service Design and Continual Service Improvement lay out the best practices for building an effective Service Portfolio and its published orderable subset, the Service Catalog. (For anyone interested, Troy and I will be covering these topics in a webcast called “ITIL v3: Strategies to Success” on June 5th. To register, click here. If the date has already passed, you can email us for materials from the event.) 
In addition to focusing on the Service Lifecycle, v3’s Service Strategy book places quite a bit of emphasis on the often challenging issue of Service Economics, which includes Service Based Costing and Demand Management as core processes to ITSM. For my team at Lontra, this is the methodology we have been implementing at some of the largest corporations in the world for years, and we have the tools to make the process relatively quick and template-driven – but for those going about it on their own, it can be a daunting task, and ITIL v3 begins to scratch the surface of the critical issues at the heart of IT Financial Management. In a nutshell, ITIL v3 provides the framework you need to align your IT Services with the demands of your business, and do that while decreasing costs and increasing service levels. If that sounds challenging to you, it’s because it is! – so you may want to consult the experts to get you started. You can read a little further here – or just send us an email and we’ll be happy to help with further education and advice. Posted by Boris Pevzner on June 4, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) May 25, 2007 Save Your Failed Outsourcing Initiative (or make sure it’s not doomed from the start!)
Over the last few years outsourcing has become a popular answer when the topic of IT cost cutting comes up (as it often does), but in my experience speaking with numerous CIOs in many of the world’s leading organizations, it is rarely ever as effective an answer as it may seem at first glance. In fact, according to a CIO magazine article, the failure rate is anywhere from 40%-70%. Many outsourcing initiatives are destined to fail because the demand for IT services is not well controlled or accurately forecasted at the organizational level. Most outsourcing is structured so that all new (“out of scope”) services are charged on a “per drink” basis. This means that while the spend for “in scope” services may go down, the total IT costs go up over time because of the uncontrolled “out-of-scope” spend. Knowing what we know now about why it fails, how do we then approach an outsourcing initiative without having to navigate all of the guesswork that comes along with it? And once an outsourcer is in place, how can you ensure seamless service delivery for your customers, and how do you make sure you’re getting what you paid for? For many reasons, a comprehensive Service Portfolio, including integrated Financial Management and Demand Planning capabilities and a requestable, customer-facing Service Catalog, is the answer:
Simply put, before you approach any outsourcing initiative you should know what you need now, what you will need in the future, and how much it costs to deliver what you need internally. You are then empowered to either negotiate a contract with an outsourcer that will meet your needs (and make sure they deliver to it), or keep the service in house with the knowledge that you are able to provide the service better, faster, and cheaper. So, if outsourcing is on the roadmap for your organization, take the guesswork out by getting help from industry experts like my team at Lontra in implementing a strategic Service Portfolio and be sure you’re not jumping in blind. Posted by Boris Pevzner on May 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) May 1, 2007 ITFM’07 Conference Recap: Aligning IT and the Business… with Pixie Dust!
Last week, I was in Orlando for the 5th Annual IT Financial Management Week 2007. I was the Chairperson for the event, so I got to meet a lot of the attendees and enjoyed many fascinating conversations. The theme for this year’s event was aligning IT strategy with the demands of the business. This is a very broad topic, and it tops the priority list for many CIOs today. In my introduction, I compared it to that old EDS Superbowl commercial about building an airplane in the sky: we in IT are “servicing” our business customers, and helping them to achieve their business goals, even as the business is constantly changing, moving, and morphing. And that’s what the Business-IT alignment is all about. One takeaway was that, while the speakers approached this topic from a variety of different angles, a consensus quickly emerged around one important thing: You cannot meaningfully talk about alignment without first having defined the IT Service Portfolio which is the common denominator between IT and its business customers – and thus the very thing in which the alignment is embodied. Nowhere did this concept come through more clearly than in the CIO panel discussion, which I moderated.
While each panelist approached the topic of IT-Business alignment from a different angle (globalization, demand management, outsourcing, corporate restructuring, M&A), they all agreed that a well-defined, actionable Service Portfolio is the cornerstone of any IT organizations that is striving to become aligned with the demands of the business. Service Portfolio is what all the critical interactions between IT and the business revolve around: IT financial management, demand management, service request management, and IT self-service.
From the audience’s questions I know that they enjoyed interacting with the CIO panel as much as I enjoyed moderating it. The last question really captured the spirit of the conference (especially given that we had a Disney executive on the panel!) – “If you could spray pixie dust and make your business-IT alignment challenges go away, would you do it?” While having business and IT magically and instantaneously aligned seems hard to resist at first blush, the panel CIOs were unanimous that they wouldn’t want to rob their teams of the experience of this journey, with all the learning and professional growth that it brings. Besides, who needs pixie dust when there are experts who can guide you on this journey and make it that much more fulfilling! Posted by Boris Pevzner on May 1, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) April 23, 2007 ITIL v3: From Process to Strategy
Most CIOs embrace ITIL as a natural best-practice framework for service management. However, few would say that it helps them show business stakeholders why investing in service management results in solid return on investment. One of the driving factors behind this challenge is that ITIL has historically been process-oriented and directed towards a strictly IT audience. To prove ROI for any initiative, you need to have the customer in mind, and in order to serve that customer you need to take a strategic approach to the services you offer, and align the processes behind it in order to best deliver what the customer needs. What is needed is a top-down view of IT Service Management – and when ITIL v3 on May 30th, 2007, I anticipate it will meet that need. Sharon Taylor, ITIL’s chief architect, told Computerworld that, “one of the gaps that evolved was that the focus on service management became very operationally based’” says Taylor. “The big change that we’re introducing is to take a broader viewpoint of what service management encompasses, [including] strategic considerations, the design implications, the cultural and organizational change implications. So the major shift is to introduce service management from a life-cycle perspective, as opposed to just a process-based view.” The new IT Infrastructure Library is aligned to the five phases of the service life cycle: 1. Service Strategy 
The focus on Service Strategy means that the productization and alignment of IT Services to the needs of the business will be front and center in any ITIL Adoption initiative. What this means is that the definition of those services, along with demand planning in terms of services, and developing a service-based costing methodology, all through the Service Portfolio, has become the starting point to optimizing the way IT organizations do business. In short, whereas existing ITIL standards are directed at a strictly IT audience, ITIL v3 makes sense to the business stakeholders, as well. For IT organizations just starting out in ITIL, now you know where to start. For organizations deep into their ITIL initiative, the time couldn’t be any better to take your ITIL initiative from process oriented to strategic in just 60 days! Posted by Boris Pevzner on April 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) April 9, 2007 The Service Portfolio and the Service Catalog
Out of sheer curiosity, I searched Wikipedia today for information on Service Portfolios… and boy was I ever disappointed. No results for Service Portfolios, and the article on Service Catalogs is lacking to say the least. I won’t argue that managing service requests is “a” benefit to having a service catalog, but how much do your executives really care about service requests? Are you talking to your CIO about how your service catalog has brought benefit to the organization through allowing your customers to make more well-defined requests of you? Probably not, or I submit you shouldn’t. A Service Catalog and Service Portfolio are as much about managing service requests, as the CMDB is about storing inventory. There are a number of service catalogs on the web that you can look at… but what I'm rarely seeing is the ‘business perspective'… where are the examples and case studies of organizations using their service catalog to “Manage IT Like a Business”? True, Service Catalogs are the perfect way to go about establishing standards amongst IT offerings, but even more importantly, the Portfolio takes that catalog to the next level by separating supply from demand and furthermore enables highly structured evaluation of:
In light of the need for visibility into these valuable metrics, I foresee the tactical, request-centric Service Catalog of the past being left behind by the strategic demand planning and financial management capabilities, among others, built into the Service Portfolio. Keep an eye out for more information on Service Portfolios and benefits from us and from ITIL v3 just one more month! Posted by Boris Pevzner on April 9, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) March 5, 2007 IT Services: Who Pays for Them?
I see this problem time and time again: the business does not value IT because IT can't show that the services they’re providing justify the amount the business customers are spending on IT. What to do? The business relies on IT for so many services. For example, when your marketing team brings on a new team member, they likely look to IT to provide the workstation set-up, computer, phone, application access, and ongoing support. But who pays for this service? Is the customer directly responsible for the cost or is it included in a blanket allocation of IT costs that gets evenly spread out across the organization (even if some departments rarely use IT)? Many IT organizations fail to address these and other cost issues associated with the services they provide. This is a big mistake. If IT is to be perceived as valuable, it has to have a well-defined price. There have recently been some notable posts on this in the blogosphere. Dawn Mular makes an interesting point in her blog about how everything costs something—even when it appears to be free. For example, according to a recent Help Desk Institute best practices survey, more than half of all IT service centers surveyed did not know the average cost of a service request. Without a solid idea of how much things cost, these IT centers had implemented operational practices to manage the top three contributors to “incident” volume baselines to get at least some handle on the IT costs. Mular’s main takeaway is that everything costs something, and that an effective IT organization needs to consistently review performance, financial and service data to effectively deliver value for money. Troy DuMoulin observes in his blog that IT departments tend to view themselves as a “cost center” and thus fail to charge for their services. He suggests that IT does this to avoid looking at IT costing in any significant detail. However, even though they are not billing their internal business clients, they still have to account for and report on the cost of delivering IT Services to the business. If they fail to do so, they can kiss their budget goodbye. I have also blogged on this topic before, with particular emphasis on how service-based IT costing methodology can address two critical issues:
Usage-based cost transparency around IT services provides an excellent way to ensure that IT’s customers understand the value IT is providing in a language they can readily understand. Furthermore, as long as IT knows what its operating costs are, it can use pricing to improve alignment with the business by giving business leaders more control over IT resources. (You may want to check out this Service Catalog provide the basis for service-based costing. If IT uses a Service Catalog to determine all costs for a service, they can clearly show how and where the money was spent: i.e., which customers used which services and how much. And implementations of service-based costing are becoming exceedingly streamlined these days: consider, for example, the QuickStart program from my company.
The bottom line is this: The issue of IT spending is gaining more and more attention, as companies increasingly focus on cost containment, outsourcing and financial governance. The business is now demanding that IT organizations track and account for all IT costs. So charging is no longer optional. If IT is to be perceived as valuable, it has to have a well-defined price, which needs to be communicated to IT’s customers in a language that they can easily understand. To do this, IT organizations at most large companies are now deploying Service Catalogs in conjunction with IT financial management and demand planning solutions. Posted by Boris Pevzner on March 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) February 15, 2007 Top Priorities for CIOs in 2007 – Improve Customer Service, and Align IT with the Business Objectives… where do you start?
CIO Insight published an article recently that included a survey of CIOs regarding The Future of IT in 2007. It wasn’t a huge surprise that improving customer service came up as the top priority for IT organizations, or that aligning IT with business objectives was the top priority for IT management. There’s a reason why these priorities rise to the top of the list year after year. IT organizations are focused on the day-to-day operations and are constantly in reactive mode to meet the increasing demands of their customers. It’s a challenge in itself just to maintain and keep the business critical applications up at all times. Just imagine if your email system was down for a day! ITIL (and particularly ITIL v3, for those of us lucky enough to have seen the working draft) tells us that in order to meet the goal of improving customer service and becoming more customer-centric, you need to define the services you provide to your business customers and make them available through a Service Catalog. This may seem like a simple solution, but truly aligning yourself with business objectives and raising customer satisfaction requires much more than just publishing a menu of services to your customers. So what do you need to make it a successful undertaking? You need to prove your value and deliver value. To do this, you need to think like a business, act like a business. Take my Customer-Centric Readiness Assessment by answering the following simple questions. On a scale of 1 to 10 for each of the questions, how does your IT organization rate today? (1 = Not at All, 10 = Absolutely, Completely)
If you scored 91-100, you’re IT organization is already executing like a business. Other organizations could learn from you! If you scored 81-90, you are obviously well under way to being a strategic partner to your business customers. Keep up the good work! If you scored 60-80, you have embarked on the right path to achieving a customer centric IT organization. You could use further guidance from subject matter experts to take you to the next level. If you scored below 60, you are so behind… Consider taking advantage of one of the Service Catalog QuickStart Programs available on the market. Posted by Boris Pevzner on February 15, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) July 4, 2006 Service Catalog and IT Financial Management
As IT Service Management discipline matures, it is fascinating to see how the IT Productization concepts that I’ve been covering in this blog get adopted across a variety of ITSM disciplines. Take IT Financial Management. Until recently, IT finances have been managed against cost centers and activity centers defined in General Ledger systems from Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft. But this year, the IT Financial Management Week conference in Miami Beach is full of presentations touting the benefits of service-based costing and demand management, where financial management of IT is done in terms of services. Thus, IT Service Catalog is now rapidly becoming a key enabler for IT costing, budgeting, and demand planning. To those of us who have been following the evolution of ITSM, this is no surprise. Every IT executive needs to be able to answer the key questions that are critical for operating an IT organization:
The answers to these questions need to be communicated proactively by the IT organization to its business customers to enable them to plan and manage their IT demand and expenses. The only way for an IT organization to achieve these goals is by defining and costing the services it supports in a way that the business customers can understand. Which is where the Service Catalog comes in, particularly if it is tightly coupled with financial management and demand planning capabilities. I will post more on this in the next few days. Greetings from Miami Beach! Posted by Boris Pevzner on July 4, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) February 7, 2006 Service Catalogs and SOA
Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions on how the IT Service Catalog relates to SOA… after all, “IT Service Management” and “Service Oriented Architecture” frameworks both talk about “services” – so they must be related, right? Well, sort of. Since SOA is a methodology that encourages software standardization and reuse, it is clearly aligned in spirit with “IT productization” and IT Service Management. Thus it makes sense that both have “service catalogs” at the very core of their respective frameworks. However, the current state of the art in the industry is that these two service catalog concepts are largely disjoint. The following is a summary of the parallels and differences between them.
While what is contained inside the IT and SOA service catalogs is quite different, the processes for how they are managed have quite a bit on common:
Recently, I noticed that some of our larger and more mature clients (particularly in the Financial Services sector) have begun trying to bridge these two service catalog “domains” by developing comprehensive service hierarchies (and the associated metadata models) that span software component services, infrastructure services, and business services. The main justification for this is the compliance requirements (such as SOX), which require the ability to perform accurate business impact analysis (“How will an incident or a change to the underlying software or infrastructure components affect the business service?”). This convergence is still quite far away, however. For now, IT Service Catalogs remain only tangentially related to SOA in most Global 1000 implementation. Posted by Boris Pevzner on February 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2) December 25, 2005 Best Practices for Service Catalog Design
Most IT executive I talk to nowadays have a clear goal to “run IT like a business” (or some variant thereof), and they realize that “IT productization” around a common Service Catalog is an essential first step toward achieving this goal. So the question I’ve been getting the most lately is not “Why do I need the Service Catalog?” but “Where do I start?”… closely followed by more detailed implementation questions: "How many layers should a hierarchical service catalog have? Who owns each layer? What is the relationship between the Service Catalog and the CMDB?" Until recently, my response has been very much classic-consultative: “Here is a general hierarchical service model (like the one below), here are some examples for how we have applied this model to help IT shops like yours to put together their service catalogs; let’s spend some time together and figure out which one fits you best and use it as a starting point.” However, in the last few months, as our Service Catalog practice continues to mature (and as the number of the Global 1000 service catalogs we’ve seen and/or helped develop has grown to a few dozen), I realized that we now have enough data to start shifting from the “consultative” service catalog design informed by industry best practices to the “normative” service catalog design based on the industry best practices. At the high level, this “normative” service catalog design pattern that we are starting to use maps to the following three layers in the service hierarchy:
The hierarchical relationships among these three layers fits well with Charlie Betz’s evolving “ERP for IT” data model, which represents this relationship thus: Each of these three layers has its own set of organizational owners, key attributes, and use cases; and it is defined and maintained in a specific system of record within the overall IT ecosystem. Here is a (very abbreviated) table summarizing this information:
Over the last few months, we’ve had good success getting clients to buy into this high-level model. This has made our engagements more repeatable, as all of our service catalog projects are starting to converge to a common structure, which we believe truly represents current best practices among the Global 1000 IT organizations. Watch this space as our Service Catalog model further matures and evolves… in the meantime, comments and ideas are most welcome! Posted by Boris Pevzner on December 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) December 3, 2005 IT Governance Demystified
In my experience, "IT Governance" is the most popular IT buzzword among corporate IT executives and company boards nowadays. But like many buzzwords, this one is far easier to recite than it is to understand, let alone apply. And it certainly doesn’t help that (as it is often the case with buzzwords), there exists a curious dichotomy between what this term actually means and how it is being used by IT vendors trying to latch on to it to increase the appeal of their wares. Given that the “signal-to-noise” ratio on this topic is so low, I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain what IT Governance is, how the term is used and abused by IT organizations and vendors today, and what are the key issues in implementing a useful IT Governance framework. What is IT Governance? A straightforward definition of IT Governance comes from the Board Briefing on IT Governance publication (pdf) produced by the IT Governance Institute:
At the next level, this breaks down into the following five IT Governance areas:
What complicates the picture is that there is no single IT Governance “standard.” Rather, the topic of IT Governance falls at the intersection of three popular frameworks, which are contemporary buzzwords extraordinaire in their own right: ITIL (from the IT delivery and support point of view), CobiT (from the financial auditing and control point of view), and SOX (from the US regulatory compliance point of view). For a high-level - yet rather thorough - treatment of the IT Governance topic, you may want to check out the book by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, from the Harvard Business School Press. IT Governance – State of the art HBS and other theory aside, the predominant reality today, as I have observed it over the last few years, is that IT Governance is not an actively designed CxO-driven initiative but a collection of loosely connected “governance silos.” The most common kinds of such uncoordinated silos that I most often encounter are “project governance,” “outsourcing governance,” “architecture governance,” “data security and access governance,” and “governance around change.” In most cases, these governance silos get created as a reactive mechanism to address a particular need (for example, architecture problems or overspending or duplication). Patching up problems as they arise is a defensive tactic that limits opportunities for strategic impact from IT. Instead, management should actively design IT governance around the enterprise's objectives and performance goals, across the five dimensions of IT Governance outlined above. IT Governance – What the vendors are saying Given the complexity of the IT Governance juggernaut, and the fact that much of its success is dependent on the company’s organizational discipline and maturity, it’s obvious that no single vendor can “enable IT governance.” Yet you’d never guess this from reading their glossies. Project management solution vendors like Kintana (now Mercury IT Governance Center), Changepoint (now part of Compuware), Niku (recently acquired by CA), PlanView, and PacificEdge have all been repositioning their products as more trendy “IT Governance” solutions. Many IT asset management vendors have done the same. And most recently, the venerable Systems Management suite vendors like HP OpenView have also jumped on the IT Governance bandwagon. There is no doubt that all these vendors provide useful solution pieces that contribute to solving the overall IT Governance jigsaw puzzle. But it’s hard to make sense of the pieces unless you can see the front of the puzzle box – what the completed jigsaw will look like once the pieces are in place. So what does a successful IT Governance framework look like? Key issues in implementing a successful IT Governance framework Every successful IT Governance framework that I’ve seen includes an organizational component and a technology component. The organizational aspects are neatly summarized by Weill and Ross as “Ten Principles of IT Governance”: involve senior managers, ensure clear exception-handling, provide the right incentives, assign ownership and accountability, provide transparency and education, etc. At the technology level, the key question is: What are the concepts that need to be defined to enable effective IT Governance, and how to implement the processes and tools that make these concepts actionable? The answer is guided by the old maxim – Define. Manage. Measure. Improve. – because…
Over the last two years, most IT organizations have gone through the painstaking exercise to define the services they are delivering (through the IT Service Catalog) and the projects they are working on (through IT Project Portfolios), implementing systems to manage the delivery of these services (through Service Delivery Management) and projects (through Project Management), developing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the quality and cost of delivering these services and projects, and using this information to improve their delivery processes. Those who implemented this framework successfully (along with the organizational and policy best practices), have seen dramatic improvements along all the key dimensions of IT Governance: business-IT strategic alignment (by focusing on the services and projects with the highest business impact), value delivery (by realizing operational efficiencies through process and infrastructure automation), risk management (by formalizing business continuity provisions as well-defined IT services and by addressing regulatory compliance requirements through increased process definition and transparency), and resource management (by tying their service delivery systems directly into human, infrastructure, and knowledge resource repositories). Following these key principles, supported by the appropriate tools, companies can ensure that “IT Governance” becomes more than just a buzzword, but an actionable methodology to most effectively harness the awesome power of information technology in the interests of the business enterprise. Posted by Boris Pevzner on December 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1) October 26, 2005 Re-Emergence of the Service Catalog
I was recently at a meeting with fifteen Fortune 100 CIOs, discussing with them my vision for service delivery management around the Service Catalog. Most of the heads in the room were nodding in agreement, but the CIO of one of the Big-Five accounting firms took issue with me: “Service Catalogs? – that’s noting new. We’ve had a Service Catalog for the last ten years!” After some quizzing, it became clear that what he was referring to was a list of available services, applications and capabilities delivered and supported by the IT organization. It’s true that such “inventories of services” were quite popular with IT organizations 5-10 years back, as this gave IT shops an illusion of being in control of the services they were delivering. However, these “inventories” (usually an Excel spreadsheet) quickly turned out to be not maintainable (falling out of sync with reality soon after their initial creation), not actionable (lacking service request and fulfillment mechanisms), isolated (usually merely a point of reference used primarily in the help desk function) – and thus ultimately destined to failure. Enter the “IT-Business Alignment” imperative of the last three years: the need for IT organizations to become more “customer-centric” by aligning the services IT delivers with the most critical business functions of the organization. This alignment has prompted a resurrection of the Service Catalog as a means to capture and communicate those linkages. In fact, in many leading-edge companies today, the trend has been toward positioning the Service Catalog as the central element in the ITIL/ITSM service delivery models. In the words of the CTO of a large Federal government agency, “The vendors and IT operations alike have recognized that continual state of change and agility are a way of life in today’s IT world and that the Service Catalog provides the basis from which these changes can be managed.” Service Catalogs are now being offered (by vendors like my company, Lontra) as a robust capability that no longer simply capture a list of services but also facilitates:
This is a long way from the old “inventory of services” spreadsheet! Unfortunately, the terminology can be confusing… even if you are the CIO of a Big-Five accounting firm! Posted by Boris Pevzner on October 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) |
