Journey of Seeking for Maturity in IT Jungle!
By Tarig Khalil, President of itSMF-Sudan and CIO of Sudatel Telecommunication Group
The Sudan has one of the active itSMF chapters in Africa. It presents value to the IT community and related industries by connecting people and offering a professional and accessible IT knowledge exchange platform. It also boosts the interest on IT fields among young professionals by offering information and networking for them.
11 itSMFI Forum Focus— December 2016
IT is full of exciting challenges and adventures. In the journey to achieve high quality of services, some stations are central and important and worth stopping at to highlight and discuss lessons learned. In this article I would like to raise some points from these stations.
Steering tools for organizations:
IT organizations are typical controlled systems; IT managers need to find a steering wheel, buttons and knobs to drive it. These control elements could be available when a solid ITSM platform with well defined process topology is given. Every business unit manager is a process owner and should own the desired level of competence and understanding to handle and control the processes forming his organization and its interfaces to other surrounding processes. These competences and skills will make him drive the organization safely even in unstable times.
Managers understand this fact, but sometimes lack of experience in this field could result in underestimation for the role of ITSM standards and the importance of its smart implementation and practical living in business.
Committing to Service Orientation
The term“ Service Orientation” is spread widely in the IT business world. Mature organizations should show real understanding and correct deployment of it.
Yes, it is challenging, a lot of effort to be invested to reach an optimum status of service orientation. Customer focus and customer satisfaction are central factors in this dilemma. The balance between profitability, investment, cost saving, capacity optimization from one side and achieving high level of customer satisfaction from the other side is the key challenge here. The solution to achieve the mentioned balance and manage all the mentioned factors lies in owning a smart ITSM platform.
The IT industry depends strongly on service science and whole delivery chains targeting the customer, even if this is not touchable or clear for some actors in the service chain.
An important but less expensive factor IT leaders could tune into to improve the service orientation is the team … team awareness and team culture!
Thus the service orientation principal is to be part of the strategy, internal awareness and team development programs, as it is possible that some employees are influenced by a background of monopoly or unique provider culture that affects their customer focus. In fact the hot competition is a key pillar and best motivation for higher customer focus.
Working with the team to develop and live customer focus culture can turn the customer KPIs in a short time to best values, in addition to further gains like team spirit and creating a healthy business culture.
Internal customers versus external customers: It is common that the IT department inside an organization supports core business of that organization. Thus IT can have more internal business customers than external ones. In terms of service orientation it doesn’ t mean real difference in service quality or commitment. On the other hand, providing internal customers with low quality service can affect final services provided to external customers, as the SLA closed with the end customer is usually negotiated depending on the OLA closed with internal service providers, IT in our case. However, not all internal services have the same importance and priority, i. e. a close alignment with business is required to agree on service quality required before committing to it.
New Digitization and ICT transformation questions IoT, M2M, Mobile
Business, Big Data and analytics, all are fast growing and evolving fields that are closely related to IT and put additional challenges on IT leaders from different sides. IT departments need to face this challenge by providing solid ITSM processes and tools to support the new business models and fulfil rapidly growing business needs created by these fields. On the other side, IT has the opportunity to make use of the benefits offered by these technologies in ITSM platform to keep a competitive level of service delivery.
The last point elaborates the need for leveraging the capabilities of conventional ITSM processes like incident management, service desk( or even call centers) by deploying the new technologies and tools. IoT, for example can support creating useful data on supported devices. The sensors can send early alarms to service desk allowing for proactive and preventive actions to avoid escalations and improve KPI results. As another example application of Big Data can help in collecting and retrieving a huge amount of data collected by IoT devices and build a smart knowledge base or CMDB to increase the efficiency of resolving incidents and improve controlling the operated environment.