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March 11, 2007

The Ontology of Support in IT-Business Alignment

Business-IT alignment is an ongoing critical success factor of enterprise performance. There, "support" functions of aligning IT with the business are all part of just two basic management issues that describe the problem of responsibility in the business-IT relationship. One, how does IT production fare in providing the deliverables to the business? And two, how well do the needs of the business associate to IT's support? The issues mark the distinction between what IT can do on its own accord (production) and what the business finds valuable about IT (support).

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Once fully articulated, the factors of the relationship's "operationalization" show the belief system that underlies the standing functional organization of the relationship at the given business.

From the bottom up, the layout reflects how the IT "service desk" attains a central role in the alignment. The primary responsibility of the service desk is to bring proper workflow to the support request incoming from the business. The nature of these requests follows along the type of concern that the business has, which falls within three main topics in the relationship's ongoing "conversation". Within each topic, the problem is to solve the potential imbalance or mismatches inherent between the subjects of the topic. These solutions are what comprise the ability of IT to properly align to the business.

As shown, the organization begins with taking what management has in hand -- SME's and assignment authority -- and codifying it for continual reuse by the business, in the form of two key interfaces: a catalog and workflow.

These interfaces moderate any mechanisms for systematically addressing the three key topics of the business-IT relationship:
- business (demand vs. supply)
- service (performance vs. operations) and
- IT (capacity vs. systems).
As seen below, catalogs and workflow each have roles in two of the three topics.

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The substance of the three topics is found in the dynamics of the business-IT relationship, shown here as three factors -- effects, drivers and constraints. In each topic, those dynamics represent how the resolution of the topic's issues may arrive at a suitable level and type of affect on the business.

A key finding in the above is that we can count on the IT "effects" to be critical to the service "constraints", and count on the service "effects" to be critical to the business "constraints".
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Another key finding is that any of the "effects" can be (and usually are) both categorized and measured, with the categorizations sometimes being both hierarchical and deeply detailed. However, management often gets lost in those "trees" to the extent of not being able to see the "forest".

At the higher level, the management effort must accomplish the following:

1. Define the business scope of the service responsibility: this means creating and "productizing" services. What are the SLAs actually covering?

2. Define most requests for operational support in terms of managing service quality. Classes of requests should indicate what depth of exposure must be addressed in the service's handling of the IT provision to the IT user (incidents, problems, changes, etc. a la ITIL). Within each request class, further categorizations should point at the two critical factors of continuity and quality. (Understand how incidents relate to continuity and quality; how changes relate to continuity and quality; etc.)

3. Based on evidence (probably "symptoms") from the IT user, categorize the suspected perpetrators in the request's issue about (or requirement for) continuity or quality.
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This identifies, as seen below, where the touchpoint arises between the request and the workflow needed to satisfy it.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 11, 2007 4:38 AM

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