The term Integral implies that for a full perspective on any phenomenon , you need to be able to view it from each of the four quadrants , taking into account all possible levels of growth in each of them . Only then do you get a full picture of it .
Given that IT Service Management frameworks today mostly focus on the processes , organisational structure and procedural aspects of providing services to customers , this puts ITSM quite firmly into the fourth quadrant , as indicated in Figure 1 . The premise of this theoretical part of the book is that we can improve ITSM by adding more aspects from the other quadrants to it .
We will discuss the influence of these other quadrants on ITSM first , starting with the lower-left or third quadrant , then following the Integral Model clockwise to end up in the lower-right or fourth quadrant .
Third Quadrant Aspects
The Third , lower-left , Quadrant in the Integral Model contains the internal perspective of a group - in this context an organisation that implements or improves their IT Service Management practices . The internal perspective of this organisation mainly involves the culture of that group of people as well as the interaction among them , viz . communication .
Every organisation , no matter how large or small , has a certain common culture , which is built from the cultures of the individual members and teams thereof , as well as from an imposed corporate culture that is determined by the general way of working and interacting in a company and , by extension , in a country . Looking at individual companies and organisations within those companies , cultural differences can be observed . These differences can be discerned as differences in work attitude : eagerness to jump onto new opportunities and developments , going the extra mile , flexibility in working times , and so forth . One can also speak about an individual ' s culture - this is mostly considered attitude and belongs in the First Quadrant .
Culture impacts IT Service Management , which itself is mostly concerned with implementing a structured organisation and processes in order to provide services to customers in an efficient manner . Processes need to be embedded in the culture of the organisation they need to function in . This means that one implementation of e . g . an incident management process cannot be identical to another implementation . In one cultural environment , it may be acceptable to have longer repair times than elsewhere . KPIs may be stricter or more relaxed depending on the cultural ( rather than IT ) environment .
Culture also influences how easily new or changed processes or other changes are accepted by the organisation : is there a general aversion against change or are people in general happy to adapt to a new environment ? The answer to this question not only depends on the culture of the organisation , but also on the way in which changes are introduced , which , in turn , depends mostly on communication , the second aspect from the third quadrant .
There are two aspects of communication that have an impact on IT Service Management : the communication during implementation or improvement of processes and the communication set up to support individual processes .
Proper communication about the implementation of change in an organisation consists of a number of activities : analysing the stakeholders ; involving people in the preparation ; communicating relevant information to stakeholders at the appropriate time ; continual communication ; finding the right communication methods . All these aspects of communication are situational : they depend on the context , environment and culture of the group that the communication is directed to . As such , the communicators need to adapt their message and themselves to their audience taking these aspects into consideration if they want to get their message across .
Communication should mostly consist of listening and acting on feedback . It is vital to the success of communication to listen to feedback from the audience and act on it . People want to be taken seriously , hence should feel they are being listened to in the first place .
A process is often not something that lives in a single department only : the great majority of ITSM processes run across multiple departments , information needs to be transferred from one group to the other and cooperation is needed to jointly fix an issue . All this hinges on correct methods of communication between the involved people so that the process is streamlined and no bottlenecks occur during handovers between teams or individuals . Tools , such as a Configuration Management Database ( CMDB ) or a Service Knowledge Management System ( SKMS ), help , but a tool is only there to support the process , it cannot replace proper communication between people . Similarly so , the method of communication needs to be selected carefully in order to support the process rather than disrupting it by taking an inefficient way of communication .
First Quadrant Aspects
The First Quadrant in the Integral Model is about the internal perspective of an individual : it covers knowledge , emotions , but
7 itSMFI Forum Focus — December 2016