Richard Horton picks up some sound advice on beginnings and endings at the recent Service Configuration and ITAM day in Leeds.
It’s normal to start at the beginning. How about starting at the end? Or even, how about doing both at the same time? It felt like that was happening at the recent itSMF UK and BCS ITAM day in Leeds.
The beginning first. Pallab Dasgupta and Jonathan West presented their State of Service Configuration & IT Asset Management paper at the start of the day. Early on one of the attendees asked a “How do I get started with this?” question. You could almost hear the rest of the room hold their breath, hear the collected wisdom of decades of experience in this space, sense the waterfall of wisdom waiting to cascade. Don Page used to describe itSMF events as being the best form of free consultancy and this moment felt like it encapsulated that. The questioner went away from the day armed with a stack of tips and advice, and with quality contacts willing to help.
What about the end? The next presentation was from Kay Ratcliffe who has spent years carefully putting in place a working management approach. She walked us through her journey. Of course there is no such thing as “the end”, and no one was more aware of that than Kay, but her achievements at Leeds Building Society (LBS) will have felt like that to many in the room.
ITIL advises us to start where we are and progress iteratively (excellent advice). But what are we progressing towards? Pallab and Jonathan’s assessment of the state of CM gave a clear indicator of the need to plan before you do, tempting though it may be to start with identifying the tool you want to use. Kay’s talk illustrated how this can unfold and some of the perils along the way.
These might include your senior stakeholder who had bought the original vision leaving, major projects shifting the organisational focus, security constraints, and difficulty securing sufficient resources despite having saved the organisation money. At a more granular level the implications of your scope and the architecture you are working within come into play, and the question of data.
The temptation is to seek perfection, but chasing 100% accurate data may feel like chasing a rainbow. The crunch question is how trustworthy is what we have? If it is good enough to trust for the purpose that it is needed, then we can use it to inform and deliver business value. Then we can be seen as an active contributor to organisational success, rather than a cost to be minimised. Having said that, even then, work in this space is often undervalued within an organisation, so we need to be smarter about highlighting our contribution. In Kay’s case there are the hundreds of thousands of pounds she helped LBS save over the years. True business value delivered.
We finished with a vision of what a zero ticket world might look like, how that would provide significant business value, and bridge the gap between user experience and SLA metrics widely experienced as the watermelon effect. Jaro Tomik, zero ticket evangalist, eloquently explained the concept: “The destination is not fewer tickets. It is fewer avoidable interruptions.”
The problem here is less the data – after all we are swimming in it. It is more how we use the data, painting a picture of how our asset monitoring approach can be transformed by a methodical approach. In this the power of automation lets us reduce noise that overwhelms, and helps us stitch data together into meaningful connections.
So “the end” that we have reached and our current concepts of what is good enough are not the end. AI is enabling us to do more in the automation space and add power to our data. Our vision needs to continue to evolve. Days like this help us on that journey.
Richard Horton
Richard Horton is Head of IT Service Management at NIHR RDNCC. He is a former itSMF UK Director with a history of running itSMF groups and events, and is the current Chair of itSMF International.