The term Integral implies that for a full perspective on any phenomenon, you need to be able to view it from each of the four quadrants, taking into account all possible levels of growth in each of them. Only then do you get a full picture of it.
Given that IT Service Management frameworks today mostly focus on the processes, organisational structure and procedural aspects of providing services to customers, this puts ITSM quite firmly into the fourth quadrant, as indicated in Figure 1. The premise of this theoretical part of the book is that we can improve ITSM by adding more aspects from the other quadrants to it.
We will discuss the influence of these other quadrants on ITSM first, starting with the lower-left or third quadrant, then following the Integral Model clockwise to end up in the lower-right or fourth quadrant.
Third Quadrant Aspects
The Third, lower-left, Quadrant in the Integral Model contains the internal perspective of a group- in this context an organisation that implements or improves their IT Service Management practices. The internal perspective of this organisation mainly involves the culture of that group of people as well as the interaction among them, viz. communication.
Every organisation, no matter how large or small, has a certain common culture, which is built from the cultures of the individual members and teams thereof, as well as from an imposed corporate culture that is determined by the general way of working and interacting in a company and, by extension, in a country. Looking at individual companies and organisations within those companies, cultural differences can be observed. These differences can be discerned as differences in work attitude: eagerness to jump onto new opportunities and developments, going the extra mile, flexibility in working times, and so forth. One can also speak about an individual ' s culture- this is mostly considered attitude and belongs in the First Quadrant.
Culture impacts IT Service Management, which itself is mostly concerned with implementing a structured organisation and processes in order to provide services to customers in an efficient manner. Processes need to be embedded in the culture of the organisation they need to function in. This means that one implementation of e. g. an incident management process cannot be identical to another implementation. In one cultural environment, it may be acceptable to have longer repair times than elsewhere. KPIs may be stricter or more relaxed depending on the cultural( rather than IT) environment.
Culture also influences how easily new or changed processes or other changes are accepted by the organisation: is there a general aversion against change or are people in general happy to adapt to a new environment? The answer to this question not only depends on the culture of the organisation, but also on the way in which changes are introduced, which, in turn, depends mostly on communication, the second aspect from the third quadrant.
There are two aspects of communication that have an impact on IT Service Management: the communication during implementation or improvement of processes and the communication set up to support individual processes.
Proper communication about the implementation of change in an organisation consists of a number of activities: analysing the stakeholders; involving people in the preparation; communicating relevant information to stakeholders at the appropriate time; continual communication; finding the right communication methods. All these aspects of communication are situational: they depend on the context, environment and culture of the group that the communication is directed to. As such, the communicators need to adapt their message and themselves to their audience taking these aspects into consideration if they want to get their message across.
Communication should mostly consist of listening and acting on feedback. It is vital to the success of communication to listen to feedback from the audience and act on it. People want to be taken seriously, hence should feel they are being listened to in the first place.
A process is often not something that lives in a single department only: the great majority of ITSM processes run across multiple departments, information needs to be transferred from one group to the other and cooperation is needed to jointly fix an issue. All this hinges on correct methods of communication between the involved people so that the process is streamlined and no bottlenecks occur during handovers between teams or individuals. Tools, such as a Configuration Management Database( CMDB) or a Service Knowledge Management System( SKMS), help, but a tool is only there to support the process, it cannot replace proper communication between people. Similarly so, the method of communication needs to be selected carefully in order to support the process rather than disrupting it by taking an inefficient way of communication.
First Quadrant Aspects
The First Quadrant in the Integral Model is about the internal perspective of an individual: it covers knowledge, emotions, but
7 itSMFI Forum Focus— December 2016