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Our Mission
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The Change Challenge- IT
and ITIL
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A story:
A few years ago I was working on a project for a very
successful technology company. They had achieved market
success according to their people and according to Wall
Street through high quality leadership, marketing expertise
and being the first to market with a portfolio of high
quality products.
Times had changed and though still very successful they
knew that they needed to change to continue with their
success. In their case the required change was to increase
market share in the services arena. This meant two key
things: they would need to charge customers for services
that previously had been offered for free and they would
need to learn how to collaborate across the company to
provide the levels of service required.
Yesterday, I spoke with a colleague from my former project
team. He told me that the fourth or fifth consulting team
was at work trying to help the very successful company
change its way of doing business. Still at it, still not
successful and still
trying because they know the future success of the enterprise
depends upon it.
It is hard to change for all of us. My favorite quote
is, ?The only person who really likes change is a baby
with a wet diaper.? It becomes more difficult to change
when you add the complexities of a global enterprise,
technology and prior success. These are one of the
challenges confronting IT today as customers and users and
demand the best new technologies, better prices and higher
quality service. Gilmore and Pine in The Service Economy
take the challenge a step further and posit that what
customers are looking for is the ?experience? that comes
from appropriately combining a quality product with
quality, easy to use service in an atmosphere that engages
him/her in a personal way.
I recently worked with a number of physicians who were
using a recently installed digital imaging system. One
doctor loved that he could drink his coffee in the ICU and
stand by the computer looking at the x-rays of his patient
taken five minutes ago and at the same time talk to his
buddy about Saturday?s upcoming golf tournament. This is
the kind of experience that customers are seeking.
Why ITIL?
ITIL is one tool that is gaining increasing popularity
in the domestic community with an already established
baseline of success in Europe. As you know, ITIL is a
best practices framework that supports success in an IT
services oriented environment. Why is it gaining in popularity?
Emerging business conditions in the IT world indicate
that customers/users are demanding higher quality and
easier to use IT services and that the cost of IT is requiring
IT organizations to focus on a process orientation to
meet both increasing service and price requirements .
NAI Research Report ?
The Change Challenge- IT and ITIL
If IT organizations are to remain competitive they must
work on continually optimizing processes as the key
vehicle for improving service quality and driving down
costs. Gartner research suggests that by 2007 IT
organizations that don?t
adopt process based delivery systems will have their
service portfolios ou tsourced at the rate of 25% per
year. This has captured the attention of many CIO?s! ITIL
provides a consistent, integrated approach with a standard
vocabulary that makes it easier for people to accept and
work with the inevitable changes coming to their world.
Change is never easy and has it particular manifestations
within the IT arena. Extensive research conducted on large
change initiatives conducted by John Kotter of Harvard
indicates a 75% failure rate. Successful, thoughtful change
management has been identified as one essential component
of facilitating the successful adoption of ITIL best practices
that pave the way for designing an organization around
process and the delivery of quality service.
Change in the IT world
Over time we have worked in a variety of organizations and
have found that to create positive sustainable change
there are a number of key factors that must be instituted
if the needed changes are to take place and be sustained
over time. Successful, value added change management
focuses on creating the right mindset in the organization,
on planning how to put a change in place, creating the
infrastructure and tools to support the change, learning
about organizational assets and strengths and mitigating
people?s resistance to the change through communication,
involvement, and education..
Success invariably involves securing the active participation
of senior management (sponsorship), quality communication
and training, the appropriate involvement of all key stakeholders,
having a plan that people can follow and a rationale (business
case) that makes sense to all involved. IT specific experience
indicates a number of additional lessons learned that
must be adhered to if IT personnel are going to make the
needed adjustments successfully:
| ? |
Fear of change is a typical
response. Imposed change is very difficult
for IT people. |
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Manage expectations carefully:
new role of IT, new organization structure, potential
outsourcing are all issues that need to be thoughtfully
addressed. |
| ? |
Don?t let them fail!
They need to succeed. Identify wins and make certain
that they are effectively communicated. |
| ? |
Having more tasks to accomplish
than resources allotted invariably results in IT
frustration. Determine how to best manage
both capacity and availability during the change
process. Some IT change experts say that change
management success is best measured by the reduction
of unplanned work versus total work done. Putting
a metric in place to measure this delta during the
ITIL change process can be very helpful in getting
people?s attention in a positive way.-- |
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IT has very high standards
for quality information. It is their job
to provide quality information to others. They expect
you to provide it to them. Provide them with quality
information or they will invent it and most often
it will not be accurate. |
| ? |
A clear plan with deliverables
is essential |
Recommendations for Change in the IT ITIL
World For success to enter the IT ITIL world
there are number of change factors that must be initiated
thoughtfully, successfully and comprehensively.
Leadership or sponsorship is key. The leaders
just truly speak and act from a ?show me the money and
show me the commitment? perspective.? From the beginning,
they must invest the time to learn what they are
committing to and its consequences and impacts. They must
allocate the funds and resources that a make a
transformation of the business possible and they must be
willing and able to answer the tough questions that
invariably come their way and they must communicate again
and again the messages essential to enroll a critical mass
of stakeholders. They must be the change they are
advocating.
In addition to demonstrating the requisite leadership,
the leaders must deliver two other essential tasks that
support the appropriate involvement of others. The first
is the development of the business case
for change. People will need to know about market changes,
emerging customer needs and the data that justify the
significant changes leadership is requesting of them.
Getting impacted IT managers to understand the scope of
what the ITIL processes encompass and fitting them into
the current direction of the organization are critical
to success.
The other activity required of leadership is to develop
the case for meaning required for
appropriate engagement of stakeholders. What does this
mean? Significant change, especially one that literally
changes IT?s world from vertical to horizontal,
necessitates the opportunity for people to explore what is
important to them, what they value and
what is meaningful to them. Leadership?s role is to
position the impetus for improving the ways things have
been done traditionally and then to create the
opportunities for discussion.
While this does not have to be a formal structured activity,
giving people the opportunity to air their feelings, ask
questions and recognize what is important are all opportunities
that leadership needs to create. This sets up the opening
for successfully getting a critical mass of people on
board with a change that requires significant adjustments
to
behaviors, ways of thinking, ways of organizing and ways
of relating. The bottom line is that following this advice
generally results in meeting the end goal, successful
adoption of process oriented IT business supported by
ITIL, more quickly and more easily.
Role
clarity is the next requirement for success in
the emerging ITIL world. In the current world, technical
ability is king. ITIL success assumes technical competence
for managers and then demands abilities in four key area:
financial and business management, demand management,
resource management and process management. Many current
managers are not skilled in these areas, some will never
become skilled some will simply not be interested. The
organizational challenges are formidable. Do we invest
heavily in developing these managers or do we find others
or do we outsource? None of these questions in a complex
IT environment are to be taken lightly.
Additionally, there evolves the challenges of crafting
and communicating the emerging expectations to the
workforce. ?This is what I, your manager, wanted in the
past. The game has changed. This is what you need to do
now?.? As experienced business people we are all familiar
with the magnitude of the task of changing from function
to process and successfully managing the expectations of
others.
These changes require re-thinking how we see the world.
Current brain research indicates that this task can be
accomplished but typically takes 6+ months.
Planning is the third key component of
the change challenge. A comprehensive map is needed to
lead us into the new territory. Most of the people in
our organization are accustomed to thinking and doing
IT in a functional way. Current planning and organizing
are centered in the various technologies and operating
systems in our world: PC group, network group, UNIX, desktop
support. Quality planning requires quality thinking.
Planning to create a map to follow is difficult.
Developing a good map when you don?t have experience
thinking through issues in your new world is even harder.
When you move to a process world and your audience is not
accustomed to the significant collaboration required for
success in the process organized world you truly need
experienced and seasoned hands to help guide you through
the process.
Communication is the final
core change component required for ITIL success. An effective
communications strategy requires listening carefully to
the needs and concerns of the various stakeholders and
then providing them with frequent, repeated communications
delivered through a variety of methods such as meetings,
newsletters, on the web, lunches, etc. (For this paper
we are assuming training to be part of communications.)
These actions, once defined, will
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keep all in the organization informed and involved, |
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open consistent communication channels
with internal and external business partners, |
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maintain a live connection with
external and internal customers, |
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mount a successful educational campaign of interactions
with senior managers, stakeholders, customers, suppliers
and others. |
Conclusion
The changes required to successfully launch an ITIL campaign
are daunting. The path forward is not simple or easy.
What other choice do we have if we wish to be competitive
and meet the service and process requirements of the emerging
IT universe?
The challenges may be daunting but by modeling past
success? and developing an approach that successfully
integrates the value of ITIL with learnings from prior
process re-engineering efforts the potential payback from
ITIL is great. Acknowledging the specific requirements of
an IT universe and using the best tools and models that
change management has available only enhance our
possibilities for success. Are you ready for the
challenge?
Our experience suggests that all successful, value added
ITIL change programs need to include the following components:
| 1) |
Involved sponsorship |
| 2) |
The business case and the case for meaning that
provide the logic, opportunity for expression and
positioning that support people buying into imposed
changes |
| 3) |
Recognition of prior success? to build on |
| 4) |
Acknowledgement of specific characteristics
of IT organizations and your organization (culture) |
| 5) |
Role clarity |
| 6) |
Education and training |
| 7) |
A map- A clear plan with deliverables |
If you discover there are other additional, core components
to an ITIL change program please let us know what they
are and how you implemented them.
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