The IT Skeptic - Comments for "The future of IT management"

Disintermediation

JamesFinister — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:07:48 +0000

I think Cary's use of the term disintermediation is important here.

I've deliberately, but warily, used the term Shadow IT 2 because for a certain generation of IT managers the term draws a parallel with the first time we faced an apparently similar situation with the business going out and buying their own PCs and running business critical processes using software designed and sold by a teenager in his basement or created in house by an expert in BASIC.

That parallel only holds good to a certain point. Disintermediation is now a fact of life for most of us, as high street travel agents and insurance brokers have found out. We would be doing the business a disservice to suggest that the risks of using salesforce.com are the same as the risks of using an Amstrad PCW.

I wrote sometime ago on my blog about ISO 38500 being the Cinderella, perhaps it really is time she went to the ball

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

I agree with James on all three points.

CaryKing — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:31:00 +0000

I must say I agree with James on all three of his points.

In particular, I believe we will see increasing amounts of disintermediation of IT - what James refers to as "shadow IT" - at an increasing rate. It seems to have nearly reached critical mass.

I seems to me that IT can increase its credibility and trustworthiness by acting as stewards of IT resources and as proactive brokers for value-added IT services. Companies will be increasing their multisourcing efforts. IT is, increasingly, being brought back under the CFO's sphere of influence. Powerful parts of the company, especially revenue generating portions, will seek out their own SaaS application if they are not properly served by IT.

The more IT increases its capability to act as service portfolio manager and develops the resources to run a proper IT business services management unit to act as service prime contractor for multisourced, hybridized services - he better IT will fare.

immature in the language of business

skeptic — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:02:20 +0000

"it's immature in the language of business" That was true. That is one thing that i feel is changing rapidly, and ITSM is one of the forces at the forefront of driving that change.

CIwho?

RichPem — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:47:05 +0000

Spot on Rob. A previous client (oil and gas) regularly told me that their business was information, information, information - yet the voice of their Head of Information Services was delivered through their IT-illiterate Finance Director. It led to a serious of 'tick box' improvements rather than information being properly managed end-to-end, and all that means.

That said, IT doesn't help itself - it's immature in the language of business, and that remains its albatross.

I have been pushing this

aroos — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:45:59 +0000

Now I see that we are heading to a major bend on the road and I have been asking help both from Charles and James in trying to formulate it. ACS is an interesting possible solution for some of the problems that wait around the corner.

I can remember seeing a few earlier on, sometimes as a passive spectator but a few times as a preacher. When I set up Help Desk Institute in Finland in 1992 a lot of people did not see any need for help desks. When I set up the first open ITIL Foundation course in Finland a lot of people saw no need for processes in IT.

One of the reasons I was able to make those observations earlier was that I had the opportunity to travel abroad and talk with people like Malcolm Fry, David Ratcliffe and Ron Muns, to name just a few of them. Now we have this social media which makes traveling less importance. I wrote on Riitta Raesmaa's blog that I feel that I have learned more in the last 12 months than during the previous 12 years. Might be a slight exaggeration but there is some truth in it. Thanks Rob, James, Chris and rest of you.

I was sitting today in a Cloud seminar with Eucalyptus presenting (and happened to read your tweet about sharks and software salesman, good reminder;). The organizers told that their customers are putting up cloud secretly, they do not want their competition to know about it. Sometimes they don't want their IT to know about it.

Aale

Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn’t Make

hazyitsm — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:33:46 +0000

Still one of my favorite all-time HBR articles.

Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn’t Make

grooveless

skeptic — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:36:30 +0000

It's not IT that is missing a groove [begone, mental image!]. It is corporate governance that is grooveless. I still find most Boards have no-one responsible for IT at all: no IT steering committee or IT Director. IT can just watch helplessly.

You took a much more

hazyitsm — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:23:28 +0000

You took a much more positive approach. We're saying essentially the same thing, that there is a severe lack of governance, at least at the appropriate levels. IT is in too much of an identity crisis right now for us to push hard on the ISO38500 level of governance. Right now the conventional wisdom still can't distinguish between a management problem (IT) and a governance problem (Board and C-suite).

I'd like to see someone charge with the ISO38500 banner. We'll probably have to have a few companies collapse and their Boards be prosecuted or sued before much happens.

Agreed. The hope is that IT will get it's groove back before that happens.

Governance, Service and Assurance

skeptic — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:43:00 +0000

Rocky is right. Ask Sony about security or Amazon or others about availability.

That's where Governance, Service and Assurance come in - the three horsemen who will keep the peace.

the marketing iPads scenario you laid out is a failure of governance. There is huge work to be done to educate Boards and executives on their failure to meet their obligations for management of IT. ISACA are on the long road but I'd like to see someone charge with the ISO38500 banner. We'll probably have to have a few companies collapse and their Boards be prosecuted or sued before much happens.

IT will need to measure the service levels of composite outsourced services because nobody else will. it'll be our job to keep the third-party bastards honest, and to look out for the poor user. that's what i mean by SLAs. And we'll need to provide cohesive IT support of the business services across all the suppliers. Even if a business-level service desk is the first line of support, someone has to do grey-area analysis and coordinate the RCA and incident resolution.

and we in IT will be the cops. Once we convince the business governance to produce decent policies, we'll be responsible for assurance - I'm using the word assurance here as a catch-all for assuring the safety of the organisation, including compliance (to internal policies and external standards, including security and architecture, and regulatory compliance), risk management (including change, problem, continuity and security), and audit. if the business insists on turning IT into a mosh-pit, we'll be the burly security guards, with batons and guns if necessary.

it's possible it won't be called IT any more. But there will always be a bunch of technically knowledgeable people running goverance enablement/execution, service management and assurance of services on behalf of the overall organisation.

Business-consumer Experience

hazyitsm — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:14:16 +0000

Rob,

As much as I'd like to believe that there is a clear distinction between these two perspectives, the reality for many of us is that folks in the business come to us after they've already committed to (emotionally, if not financially) whatever is the Precious of the moment. It's not, "I'd like to get an iPad, can you make it work on our network?" The reality is,

Here's my iPad, and the 10 additional ones for the rest of the Marketing team. My business plan requires that these be fully functional for all staff activities as of last week. If you say you're not ready to support them, or need time to create the apps to virtualize our Windows-only apps on iOS, I'll ensure everyone in the executive meetings know that IT is stifling my ability to meet my goals.

In their "business plan", there is no distinction between useful and shiny. We in IT are the only people left that give a rats behind about a distinction between business and consumer experience. Even CFOs have figured out that their primary job is no longer about controlling costs. It's to allow enough budget for the revenue-generators to revenue-generate. IT's job is no longer about security and controls: it's about enabling revenues at a competitive cost. Remember all those controls we put in place because that's what the business needed from us? I sure do -- Managing group policies to make sure users couldn't hurt themselves and their PCs too badly. Ah, memories. Today, the idea of locking down workstations in order to control costs leads to short tenures for IT managers.

I don't mean to say that controls are no longer relevant; it's just that they can't get in the way. Controls are much lower on the corporate priorities. IT Ops have to be invisible and silent, while still protecting me down all the dark alleys where I insist on going. And cheap. Cheaper than ever before. It's a tall order, to be sure.

SLAs? Ha! SLAs are all about what IT can't or won't do. Business has no interest in SLAs.

I apologize that I'm feeling especially ~~cynical~~ cranky this evening. I really do think there's a lot of good in the de-centralization of IT. And I also agree that there are some controls that are required in order to stay in business. That, beyond social or any other specific technology, is the current transformation. We need to find the sweet spot of "just enough" control, while still being seen as the enablers of business goals. We'll get there, but I think we have a few rocky years ahead of us before that happens.

Dan Kane

True

Charles T. Betz — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:43:03 +0000

The seminal work on process management is Rummler's Improving Performance...

Yes - absolutely, there are relatively few true IT processes. My book specifies 9, but an even more rigorous count would be 7. Jan van Bon's ISM calls for 5. But, that doesn't mean the whole concept goes away.

Part of the problem for IT folks I think is that "process" means something specific in computation, and the relationship of that usage to "process" in a human context is troubled. A process in a computer is utterly constrained by binary logic. Human processes, not so much.

My primary criteria for human processes has always been countability. The process needs to be repeatable to the extent that we can reliably count it, and agree that the repetitions are instances of the same thing.

But execution repeatability is a chimera the further you drill in. (This is actually true in computation as well, as the fundamental existence of a binary 1 or 0 is probabilistic at the quantum level on the microprocessor.)

Not sure that the term "practices" is helpful. A process should follow certain business rules. Those need to be minimally specified; less is more. But even ACM admits the need for process invariants.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com
http://blogs.enterprisemanagement.com/charlesbetz/

I miss the "like" button

avallesalas — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:39:17 +0000

To click on in for this las comment from the IT Skeptic... Really... We *are* prepared for a change...

Antonio Valle
G2, Gobierno y Gestión de TI
http://www.gedos.es

have fluid workflow but still control practices

skeptic — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:13:35 +0000

I'm ready to nail process in IT management. You yourself said there are actually only a few activities that could be called processes. I'm prepared to believe that all of those are performed by professionals that we should give more flexibility to. A model such as Adaptive Case Management that allows us to have fluid workflow but still control practices (not processes) with policy and rules makes eminent sense to me in an IT management context. I'm out to learn more, even if it means reading another bloody book.

confuse the consumer experience with the business experience

skeptic — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Rich, I like the cut of your jib.

James,

1) sadly Drupal 5 has never had an edit-comment button. I'll fix some of them for you :)

2) we agree broadly about the trend to reduced central control. We disagree about the significance, including the significance of outsourcing. I don't find it hard to imagine Gartner being wrong, it has happened plenty often before. Charles Wang got them right: “I want to choose my words carefully here, so I’m not misunderstood,” he said. “They’re a bunch of f***ing idiots." Please don't cite any analyst as an authority round here.

3) Google is already writing customer-specific SLAs if you ask nicely enough with enough money (and it doesn't have to be a lot; i have a very small client with an individual Google account manager and a personalised SLA. Sure most of that is an illusion, but when isn't it?)

I've said several times now, let's not confuse the consumer experience with the business experience.

Business	consumer
Sir, I propose we acquire this. Here is my business case	We wants it Precious
Still need to get the same old sh1t done every day	Life is transformed by this thing in my hand
I'm calling the service desk because I want a paper trail	I'm not phoning the helpdesk because I can bitch about it on the forums and look clever
we need to give our users enough help that we don't lose money	we need to give our customers enough help that we don't lose their business
useful	shiny
has a reason	gives pleasure
my ass if we lose money	my money
tight budgets	spoiling self
whatever it takes to get your outsource business	go f*** yourself, here's the SLA

Accept the risk

JamesFinister — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:57:17 +0000

I think a lot of the discussion will shift to risk, and being mature enough to understand how a combination of risks can filter through to the service/business level risk that your organisation is ultimately exposed to. And yes suppliers are going to aim for high availability, but we also know major cloud providers have had significant incidents, and if they are dealing with several hundred customers being impacted some organisations are going to find themselves way down the queue before they have a meaningful conversation about what went wrong and how to deal with it beyond the information on a dashboard. Yes Google I do mean you.

As for configuration management , well at least one major player can't guarantee what country your data is going to be stored in at any point in time.

All these are issues that can and will be worked around in time, but you can also bet that in the next couple of years there will be some real life horror stories to counterbalance the hype.

As for supplier churn, that's a whole other issue with a whole heap of causes that we all bear some responsibility for, but I think we would all welcome a shift to more outcome based contracts as long as they give the supplier freedom to innovate sensibly.

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

Taking up the SLAck

RichPem — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:02:16 +0000

Hi James,

Indeed non-specific SLAs is a tricky one on the surface, but isn't this precisely where ITIL can help? That is, if the supplier cannot deliver a service to back off your business need you go somewhere else, or do something different, or accept the risk. Again, it's nothing that existing good practice doesn't handle.

I suspect in reality most cloud services will be high availability because a multi-tenant platform will in reality have to be designed that way if it is to be commercially successful. In other words, you're not going to design a cloud solution that doesn't meet the needs of the vast majority of your target market.

I'm involved right now in the design of a cloud-based service for a telco. My client's intent, absolutely, is to present availability metrics that are customer-specific (and to automate this). I do believe that providers who consider the service management aspects for their customers will find themselves at a market advantage.

It may not be spectacularly good, but ITIL offers guidance on configuration management and service catalogue management; get them [nearly] right and they will underpin providing service management information on a per customer basis.

Incidentally, in my experience the prime reason for supplier churn in the outsourcing market is precisely that disconnect between the SLA and the perception of service. If you treat the former as the start of service rather than the end, your service will be exponentially better - and the advantage that outsourcers have to be able to achieve this is economy of scale. That they often choose to behave as the IT function always did isn't ITIL's fault.

Rich Pemberton

Teach the business how to govern IT properly...

actionableitsm — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:29:17 +0000

Well said, Rob. “More important in communication is to teach the business how to govern IT properly - IT as a resource, not IT as a department - and to teach the users how to be grown-up in their use of IT at work.”

I am a fan of the book “IT Savvy” by Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill. This point resonates very well with what I believe.

David Lowe

Process mining

Charles T. Betz — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:05:51 +0000

Well, I'm not sure I'm ready to say that Adaptive Case Management is anything more than an interesting development on the horizon... :-) But it does point to what has been my approach all along: look at what non-IT practitioners are doing and talking about, and ask, "will this matter for IT management?" ACM in this case showed up for me through following the BPM community, in particular Paul Harmon's BPTrends.com.

I've had a couple discussions about IT process mining in the wake of that blog, and a demonstration of a compelling, as-yet experimental tool that can use status updates, email and other evidence to analyze the "real" flows that work takes. It reminded me of some of the debates that we got into over Value Networks.

Rather than invalidating a process approach, these empirical maps clearly are most useful as inputs back into a refined, more realistic process model. (I'm not ready to give up on the word process - that is a step too far IMO). And sometimes they show inappropriate interactions and bypasses, where the process really should be enforced.

It's in closing the BPM loop (model the process, execute the process, analyze the results, improve the process accordingly) that I think there is real potential.

I've been thinking a bit myself on next generation service desk, stay tuned.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com
http://blogs.enterprisemanagement.com/charlesbetz/

Governance and the power balance

JamesFinister — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:58:59 +0000

Rich,

Undoubtedly there are those in the supplier community rubbing their hand with glee at the prospect of a re-emergent shadow IT.

I agree with you on the governance front, hence my championing on ISO 38500. For all its faults it has the advantage of being slim enough to get the business to read it. If only it came with "Don't Panic" written on the cover.

I also believe we will see an increasing split between the worlds of commodity IT and value add IT.

But here is the challenge that is going to trip up many who make the shift to cloud based services: They are going to discover that the SLA they've signed up to isn't specific to them. They are going to find that availability target is measured across the supplier entire customer base. As long as the supplier is achieving that then their account managers are going to keep smiling through whatever governance meeting you drag them into.

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

Curse of the mobile keyboard

JamesFinister — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:45:59 +0000

I really shouldn't attempt typing long replies whilst using a mobile device on public transport, the typos just aren't worth it. Didn't there used to be an edit button on this blog?

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/