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March 12, 2005

Business Alignment in ITSM

Much of what can be figured out about aligning the impacts of IT with the objectives of the business requires the willingness to understand IT as a business. This helps to bring a vocabulary into play that is less technical yet entirely pertinent to the problems at hand. But IT disciplines still need not be forced to resemble non-IT affairs; instead, their business context and direction is what makes them valuable where otherwise they might have just been forceful.

With the business seen as a customer, it is easier to accept that IT impacts should be "productized", and that evaluating IT should happen from the perspective of whether the business is getting a good deal for what it asks for when it orders what IT can offer. The general story is one about the product provided for the payment made. The more specific story is told in terms of how IT takes responsibility for what the business experiences. The following illustrates this story.

Service Availability & Capacity features the management of engineering, configuration and utilization.

Investment Protection features the management of procedures, resources and demand.
 
Both revolve around “quality”, which is essentially the perceived difference between the provider’s delivery and the receiver’s expectation.
 
Quality issues pertaining to business reliance on the IT infrastructure most readily surface in three types of events: incidents, problems and changes.

The language required for understanding this perspective on quality needs to be generic, but it mainly points at risks:
- Incidents refer to interruptions of normal user activity.
- Problems refer to defects or errors in intended product makeup.
- Changes refer to alterations of authorized standard provision.
In all cases, the biggest issue is that they occur unexpectedly and compromise the value to be delivered from their respective subjects (i.e., from user activity, product makeup, and authorized standard provision). Timing can make things better or worse.
 
Against those uncertainties, control is sought. A “control” should be understood generically – as an instance of formally combining a responsibility and authority within a supervisory activity.
 
Investment Protection works against the erosions of optimal value by proactively instituting “controls” on how:
- the availability and capacity of the infrastructure (as established through engineering, configuration and utilization)…
- … is maintained against the essential business requirements – which are, namely, the pressures of compliance (specifications), cost, and supply levels.
 
This table generally shows how, from bottom left to upper right, controls for maintenance of service against the business pressures follows suit. For example, at their respective points, managing certifications directly acts on compliance to specifications, while managing orders directly works on levels of supply.

Meanwhile, the connections of one set of controls to another is conversational:
- from left to right, or from bottom to top, the dialog is mainly about assuring response capability;
- from right to left, or from top to bottom, the dialog is about enforcing current priorities.

Business-oriented IT solutions naturally look at integration across IT and business disciplines, by emphasizing attention to these conversations.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 12, 2005 7:29 PM

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