How’s the Service?
Del.icio.usOver the last several months I’ve been asking senior IT execs where they see their organizations going and their greatest frustrations in getting there. It’s been a fascinating set of conversations as you might imagine.
In addition to the usual and still consistent responses around controlling costs, reducing risk and working hard to make things simpler to use and operate the primary objective I keep hearing is that they want IT to be a Service Provider to the business. When I ask why this is so important, I’ve learned very interesting perspectives. One perception shared first by a CIO that I have since received considerable support for is the feeling of being less important to the business than other areas. The phrase I heard that I appreciated most keenly was feeling like “I have to sit at the kid’s table.” The implication is of low relevance and lower respect. I found this disturbing because a great many senior IT execs have multiple degrees and have been leaders in other business units including finance, operations and business leadership. Yet the IT brush paints these talented folks unfairly.
One CIO was particularly disturbed by this and has taken an alternative and very successful approach. He shutdown all IT defined projects and banked his budget allocations. In these times this was a very out of band decision. He then went to his peers and asked them their business requirements to be delivered and operated by IT. Those who were clear and specific received a business plan with service deliverables for their requirements. Those who had no specific requirements received nothing.
In pretty darn short order, an executive meeting was called to find out what was going on. The CIO explained his goal to be a service provider to the business and his intent to development service plans with each business unit needing the IT organization’s services. He then offered to take little direct funding, instead proposing that the business units solicit the funding to “purchase” services from IT. He was challenged immediately being asked if that meant that services could be purchased from externals. To the surprise of his peers he said yes. When his boss asked him if he was feeling well, he replied saying that if his organization could not deliver the required services, the business was best served by going outside.
Three months on a number of unique outcomes had occurred. First, each “customer” had a documented service level agreement in place with IT with specific requirements, deliverables, bonuses and penalties. Second, one of the challengers had arranged with IT to act as the reviewer of third party proposals to deliver some unique and specific services for which IT received funding to do the work. Lastly, the CIO no longer felt ignored or respected less and neither did his team. It goes to a simple concept. His team really delivered when clear measurement and accountability was adopted, and because the service agreements were documented there was no “spec creep” because all parties had agreed on the deliverables.
Business outcomes included a reduction in third party consultants and contractors on seemingly endless projects, the ability to provide training to the IT and non-IT staff and a much tighter relationship between IT and its internal customers.
Is it all perfect? No. I still hear the need to provide a dashboard that coalesces the service level agreement deliverables that can be accessed by the internal customer without having to ask IT to provide it. This of course provided the opportunity for an entry discussion on Novell’s Business Services Management offerings. We aren’t close yet, but I wanted to share this approach with you. The concepts have raised the level of awareness of the contribution of IT and in some cases have actually pulled more funding into projects to be delivered by IT than in the past would never have seen the light of day if only IT had been driving them.
Until next time, peace.
Ross