Journey of Seeking for Maturity in IT Jungle !
By Tarig Khalil , President of itSMF-Sudan and CIO of Sudatel Telecommunication Group
The Sudan has one of the active itSMF chapters in Africa . It presents value to the IT community and related industries by connecting people and offering a professional and accessible IT knowledge exchange platform . It also boosts the interest on IT fields among young professionals by offering information and networking for them .
11 itSMFI Forum Focus — December 2016
IT is full of exciting challenges and adventures . In the journey to achieve high quality of services , some stations are central and important and worth stopping at to highlight and discuss lessons learned . In this article I would like to raise some points from these stations .
Steering tools for organizations :
IT organizations are typical controlled systems ; IT managers need to find a steering wheel , buttons and knobs to drive it . These control elements could be available when a solid ITSM platform with well defined process topology is given . Every business unit manager is a process owner and should own the desired level of competence and understanding to handle and control the processes forming his organization and its interfaces to other surrounding processes . These competences and skills will make him drive the organization safely even in unstable times .
Managers understand this fact , but sometimes lack of experience in this field could result in underestimation for the role of ITSM standards and the importance of its smart implementation and practical living in business .
Committing to Service Orientation
The term “ Service Orientation ” is spread widely in the IT business world . Mature organizations should show real understanding and correct deployment of it .
Yes , it is challenging , a lot of effort to be invested to reach an optimum status of service orientation . Customer focus and customer satisfaction are central factors in this dilemma . The balance between profitability , investment , cost saving , capacity optimization from one side and achieving high level of customer satisfaction from the other side is the key challenge here . The solution to achieve the mentioned balance and manage all the mentioned factors lies in owning a smart ITSM platform .
The IT industry depends strongly on service science and whole delivery chains targeting the customer , even if this is not touchable or clear for some actors in the service chain .
An important but less expensive factor IT leaders could tune into to improve the service orientation is the team … team awareness and team culture !
Thus the service orientation principal is to be part of the strategy , internal awareness and team development programs , as it is possible that some employees are influenced by a background of monopoly or unique provider culture that affects their customer focus . In fact the hot competition is a key pillar and best motivation for higher customer focus .
Working with the team to develop and live customer focus culture can turn the customer KPIs in a short time to best values , in addition to further gains like team spirit and creating a healthy business culture .
Internal customers versus external customers : It is common that the IT department inside an organization supports core business of that organization . Thus IT can have more internal business customers than external ones . In terms of service orientation it doesn ’ t mean real difference in service quality or commitment . On the other hand , providing internal customers with low quality service can affect final services provided to external customers , as the SLA closed with the end customer is usually negotiated depending on the OLA closed with internal service providers , IT in our case . However , not all internal services have the same importance and priority , i . e . a close alignment with business is required to agree on service quality required before committing to it .
New Digitization and ICT transformation questions IoT , M2M , Mobile
Business , Big Data and analytics , all are fast growing and evolving fields that are closely related to IT and put additional challenges on IT leaders from different sides . IT departments need to face this challenge by providing solid ITSM processes and tools to support the new business models and fulfil rapidly growing business needs created by these fields . On the other side , IT has the opportunity to make use of the benefits offered by these technologies in ITSM platform to keep a competitive level of service delivery .
The last point elaborates the need for leveraging the capabilities of conventional ITSM processes like incident management , service desk ( or even call centers ) by deploying the new technologies and tools . IoT , for example can support creating useful data on supported devices . The sensors can send early alarms to service desk allowing for proactive and preventive actions to avoid escalations and improve KPI results . As another example application of Big Data can help in collecting and retrieving a huge amount of data collected by IoT devices and build a smart knowledge base or CMDB to increase the efficiency of resolving incidents and improve controlling the operated environment .