The IT Skeptic - Comments for "The keys to a strong ITIL business case "

RTSF

Red Pineapple — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:52:37 +0000

I think the most important component of an ITIL business case is RTSF (Return to Service First). I just dreamt that up but explains my view that the most important issue to address is reducing the TIME durations in provisioning and outages.
TIME is the most important metric and each measured duration becomes an aggregated measurement that can be analyzed.
A valid business case can be built by prioritizing return to service and using elapsed time as a metric. Risk, money, compliance and strategic advantage are wishy washy factors that are always associated with subjective opinions. TIME is not.

Outcomes

JamesFinister — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:48:08 +0000

What we need, and usually lack, are metrics that address the outcomes. Both IT and the business, to be honest, tend to end up selecting "so what?" metrics. Calls answered in under five seconds - so what? Less than 5% of lost working business hours due to IT (as oppossed to sickness, process slack, training, comfort breaks etc.) perhaps more interesting?

The same applies to business cases, often they end up being much more internally focussed than we think they are.

I increasingly feel that there is a distinction to be drawn between the business case for relatively short term enabling/ removal of constraints activity/ correction of what is broken as oppossed to the longer term delivery of benefit/ providing enahnced business capability case, though both clearly have to be part of an overall plan. We confuse these at our peril, and I'm afraid that one are where we do so is in addressing the quick wins. These have a tendency to look like they are value enhancing at the start of the improvement phase, but looking at them after implementation the reality is that the number of other constraints in the system means that the long term value is not delivered. Take improvements to the service desk. I've said this before I'm sure, but what you see is an intial perception that the changes have delivered value because users are happier, but in the long term we have simply got the service desk back to functioning as it should, we haven't delivered anything extra.

metrics that treat IT as a black box

skeptic — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:16:00 +0000

It is my personal opinion that when we say they have no metrics, we mean no metrics that measure what we think they need as an outcome, or more precisely no metrics to measure ITIL. This is that circular reasoning that if the problem is lack of ITIL then the solution is ITIL.

So I was thinking of more general metrics that treat IT as a black box.

How many sev 1 outages per year? we know this one by the scars.
How much does a day's outage cost the business? i bet they know
What does a month's delay in implementing the new sales system cost? I bet they know.
what does the average IT staff member cost per year? HR know

etc etc

This is getting valuable

buraddo — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:04:33 +0000

With my belief that this sort of community site becomes valuable if you discuss practical concepts, I found this post pretty good.

Normally I like "The Skep" because of the critical aspects.

A couple of things. I have not personally witnessed this;
"Thankfully the operational side of IT tends to have strong metrics to support business cases," in fact quite the opposite. The IT shops I run into, the ones that need help do not have metrics which is precisely why they are in the S@*t. They don't know where to start because they cannot see the problem.

Good tips on starting points I have found which have real money attached;
- configuration management - focusing on a software license audit
- capacity management - focusing on eliminating new equipment purchases, or extensions to the datacenter facilities

See how many people can throw in other ideas.

$0.02
Brad Vaughan
http://blogs.sun.com/buraddo