itSMFI 2016 Forum Focus - December Forum Focus ITSMFIV3 | Page 9

organisation, including its setup and processes. The importance of
this quadrant for ITSM is the fact that an SMS does not exist in
isolation, but must be embedded within the organisational
structure. Most likely, an existing organisational structure will need
to be adapted to the requirements of the SMS as well. This involves
organizing teams in such a way that the most effective use can be
made of the people who need to be performing the processes
described in the SMS.
Similarly so, there can be existing business processes in companies
that a new or changed SMS needs to be working with: for instance, a
procurement process that needs to interact with a Change
Management process which calls for the introduction of new
hardware in an environment. There needs to be a logical interaction
between these two processes to come to an integrated workflow
that allows this change to be implemented smoothly.
Tools also have a place in this quadrant. There are many tools
supporting ITSM in the market and some companies also develop
their own. Tools should be there to support the processes; they do
not define the processes. It does often happen that the choice of
tools actually limits the flexibility of the process, which ultimately
reduces efficiency of the workflow and this may give ITSM a bad
name. Moreover, in the case of a multi-customer service provider,
setting up interaction of the service provider’s tools with those of
the customer for e.g. data exchange can make the processes more
efficient, but at the same time this may reduce efficiency if the
interaction is not designed well or cannot be made to work properly
due to the tools’ limitations.
Development in All Quadrants
Referring back to Figure 1, the Integral Model not only consists of
four quadrants, but also allows for growth or development in each
of those. In the context of IT Service Management, this can be
interpreted as maturity.
Maturity of ITSM processes can be measured using methods such as
CMMI-SVC [16], COBIT5 [7] or ISO/IEC 33002 [8] (formerly known as
ISO/IEC 15504), where a number of consecutive stages of process
maturity are defined. These levels can be used to assess the
maturity and effectiveness of an ITSM implementation by looking at
the various processes, but do not take into account other
relevant aspects such as the maturity of communication, cultural
context, motivation and behaviour of people and organisational
maturity. It is these aspects that need to be added to a maturity
assessment of an (integral) ITSM implementation.
Maturity in the fourth quadrant looks at how well an organisation is
set up to support the Service Management System: is there top
management support; is the hierarchy structured in such