Leading Strategy

We Got the Power: Its Configuration and Service Level Management

In IT, we love being loved by our customers. We WANT to be your heroes. But we realize that to really be of service, we have got to get out of hero mode, and improve our practice! We have got the power, to delight, to deliver, and to do more things with technology than has been done before in our history. This success however, depends upon the logic that configuration management and service level management.
The POWER of agility, customer satisfaction, and improved ROI lies in balanced "service level agreement" (SLA) practice. A balanced "service level management" objective gives balance to scorecard, capabilities, customer satisfaction, and continuous process improvement have 2 ITIL disciplines in common for them- Configuration and Service Level Management.
The IT hero is reading this and looking for the few nuggets that apply or threaten their agenda. The organization responsible for balancing supply and demand are looking for the few things they can do to promote innovation and consistency without hobbling the enterprise. The company is really looking for availability, supportability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
The key to agility, customer satisfaction, and improved ROI lies in ITIL balance, plain and simple.. It is in how we define our relationship to managing Change, configurations, and sound service level management.
The IT hero might now be thinking, yeah perhaps that is important, but it does not solve my problem-- I have unique complexity.. How do I manage the hardware, software, utility, capacity, zones, networks, and partnerships.. If EVERYONE just did their job as well as I did, and knew their business like I do, we wouldn't be in this conundrum. Want to know something?  Just ask me...  
The organization that reads this and says "yes" that probably is important, but it does not solve our problem of schedule being king. We have to do all the old job stuff and all this new process stuff, with less resource, and not burn out the staff we have on board.. At some level we must NOT lose the hero mentality.
The company is looking at the bottom line. It costs money to do business, 75% of costs are in maintaining existing agreements, gas costs more, power costs more, data centers take up energy, can't afford to be a leader in IT without an efficient IT management...
All this is right, correct, and real. AND it's all defined in setting a service life cycle that defines the service, that manages it's configurations (people, process, and technology), and keeps all stakeholders accountable to both their contribution TO, and dependence ON being a good citizen to the disciplines of change and release management.
IT Hero Challenge; Stop being a heroic victim. Optimize your discipline towards giving your personal best despite the shortcomings of others in favor to articulating the requirements necessary to deliver a controllable, measurable service. Many times, it simply involves a willingness to give up the familiar resistance by articulating the needed improvements. You HAVE value, even more value, when contributing to the overall service model.. There will be plenty of problems that will need heroes in the bigger model, too.
IT Organization Challenge: Embrace Change-- 'configuration' is dynamic--not just boxes, servers, applications, bugs, patch levels and widgets but people, organizations and the organic knowledge they carry. Stop acting on assumption that if we Plan and Organize to do something, it will be architect - ed to deliver continuous support for as long as the project lives. Optimize your organizational discipline to embracing the key controls necessary to produce and manage your deliverables. Organizationally it involves a willingness to work together such that the schedule stays king, but the house supporting it stays in harmony.
Dawn C Khan :   LinkedIn   |   Twitter  | 

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