Does IT Service Management Matter?

Hani Elbeyali is a data center strategist for Dell. He has 18 years of IT experience and is the author of Business Demand Design methodology (B2D), which details how to align your business drivers with your IT strategy.

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The "easy saves" are gone—"saves" like workforce reduction, outsourcing, out-tasking, and consolidating are all behind us now. Although these methods have shown quick and easy operating expenses (OpEx) reduction, they could not hold for long.  They are not strategic and don’t contribute and correlate directly to the long-term growth of revenue and the bottom-line.

Creating IT value for the organization is not easy, but sustaining IT value creation has never been more challenging. The CIO role continues to evolve into a business leader. This creates pressure for the CIO to warrant the reliability of the IT organization’s capacity to deliver similar business value longer term, if not more. Using IT service management methodologies and frameworks is essential in understanding and sustaining IT value for the firm. But there are so many frameworks to choose from, five of which most widely accepted are: ITiL, CobiT, TOGAF, CMMI, and IT-CMF^[1].

Which One Is Right for You?

IT service management and architecture frameworks are centered on improving some aspect of IT life cycle. The common themes of these mythologies are: reduce IT cost, align IT with business, and increase IT value for the organization.

But it’s confusing to say the least--these methodologies were designed from the ground up to provide values to the organization by improving and maturing IT. So, the questions become: How do you choose the right framework? Is one enough? Are they all the same? Do they overlap? Or each provides unique sets of values at different points of the IT transformation journey.

The Three Ws

Table 1.1 answers three questions, When, Why, and How. While the table provides an example to help answer these three Ws, each organization IT strategist needs to work on his/her own three Ws. As you work on your scenario, I suggest getting consensus from all constituencies. Upon completion, you will need to socialize these three Ws throughout the organization's disciplines or Lines of Business to get required support.

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IT Management and Framework Mapping

By taking a closer look at each of these four widely accepted IT management methodologies and tools, you notice an area of an overlap, but, also space where these IT management tools complement each other. Figure 1.1 is shows a transformation journey program to shift IT OpEx cost from conservatively 75 percent of total IT budget, to only 50 percent, while increasing strategic spend from 25% to 50%. The graph is plotting what and when to apply the four IT services management tools during the transformation stages. While ITiL can be leveraged across the entire evolution of IT transformation end to end, enabling tools like: CoBiT and TOGAF are great to help kickoff the transformation program, and resulting tools like: IT-CMF can help measure the outcome of the transformation.

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IT Management Methods. Click to enlarge.

Figure 1.1

Change is the only constant we know, organizations change, and IT alongside, therefore, IT strategists constantly need to compensate, adapt and try to stay ahead. At any point of the IT transformation journey, large enterprises will find an interest in using one or more of these service management tools.

^[1] Due to the similarity of CMMI and ITiL we’re not going to cover CMMI in this article.

Please note the opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect those of his employer.

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