The Top Five Reasons for Orchestrated IT Service Management

Service management systems are IT’s online face to the business. Although employees rely on enterprise applications and personal productivity tools to get their jobs done, they turn to the IT service system for fulfillment when they run into problems. Employees are often disappointed by the user experience and opacity of these service management systems, leading to dissatisfaction with IT in general and widespread use of informal systems. Left unchecked, this unfriendly face can lead to elevated service resolution costs, extended cycle times, and frustration within IT itself, all the while leaving end-users convinced that IT isn’t a suitable business partner.

Meanwhile, back in IT, the need for standard service delivery processes is rapidly gaining favor. The IT infrastructure library (ITIL) succeeded in setting guidelines for IT service management processes (ITSM), while shining a light on the need to become process based. Activity-based approaches, ad hoc approaches, and disconnected silos are now properly frowned upon. The more astute CIOs recognize that their ongoing costs in unwieldy, packaged service management systems represent a disproportionately expensive part of their IT portfolio. Expensive, unfriendly and rigid is hardly a formula for success—especially for a system that defines IT for the vast majority of customers.

This untenable situation has led to the growing allure and increasing adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based ITSM offerings. These twenty-first century services help with the cost issue and are at least superficially helpful in presenting a friendlier face to the business. But, they suffer from rigidity and a failure to embrace true process automation. And, in the absence of true process management, it is impossible to get reports and metrics that reflect reality and can help improve the way IT delivers services to the business.

The better approach is to orchestrate ITSM, whether delivered from the cloud or on premise. This means to automate ITSM processes in a way that they become transparent, configurable, and connected.  Orchestrating processes leads to dramatic improvements in cycle time, compliance, adaptability, accountability, and friendliness.  A friendly face that fronts a flexible and accountable IT operation is a vital precursor to IT success.

Orchestrating Processes
Processes are the connective tissue of enterprises. IT service processes, in particular, connect users to support, support to operations, and ops to apps. IT service processes are often disjointed. This may be because they start off small and then need to scale, or because they can’t flexibly adapt to shifts in the business.  Whatever the reason, disjointed processes are hard to speed up, audit, improve, scale, and modify.

Orchestrated processes are automated, transparent, configurable, and connected. Orchestration leads to dramatic improvements in cycle time, compliance, adaptability, and accountability.

The Top Five Reasons for Orchestrated IT Service Management
Process Driven
World-class IT service, like any world-class service operation, must be process driven. It cannot function effectively as a set of related activities. Rather, activities must be directly linked, triggering action from resources on a demand-driven basis. The requirement to be process driven has direct implications for the architecture of an orchestrated ITSM system. An orchestrated ITSM system must first and foremost be a process automation system, routing tasks through a process in an intelligent manner.

This contrasts with the architecture of traditional ITSM systems—both on premise and in the cloud—which are fundamentally designed as systems of record, with rudimentary alerting and state change capabilities masquerading as process automation. A true process-driven system is built around a workflow engine. In the case of orchestrated service management, the ideal architecture marries a core workflow engine with more classic system-of-record capabilities, such as deep lookup and item tracking. The latter is important for configuration management database (CMDB) purposes in particular.ITIL Out of the Box
ITIL is not without its share of controversy. To some a panacea, to others a false hope, it is controversial even amongst its fans, with many thinking that version 3 is less of an improvement over version 2 than a complication. ITIL needs to be operationalized to be effective. A software system alone does not an ITIL system make. However, ITIL did foment process-based thinking in IT. It succeeded in defining ITSM processes in standard fashion, while shining a light on the need to become process based. Thus, out-of-the-box instantiation of ITIL-defined processes are fundamental to any contemporary ITSM system.

DIY Flexibility
Things change. Level 2 support moves from Chicago to Dallas or to Bangalore. A key application gets sent to an outsourcer or brought back in from an outsourcer. A division of the corporation gets divested or acquired. A new executive decides to adhere to ITIL at a higher level or to pursue lean strategies or both. Changes should be easy to instantiate in an ITSM system. Flexibility isn’t enough, since the cost, risk, and time required to change the workflow, data model, and reporting of the system are typically too high to support the level of change that most organizations experience.

What’s needed is flexibility that a non-technical administrator can drive on her own. Think of it as do-it-yourself flexibility. This DIY approach parallels the DIY movement in other areas of endeavor, allowing a person knowledgeable about what he wants to accomplish the ability to get it done without having to retain a specialist. And to do it fast. For an orchestrated ITSM system, DIY flexibility requires, in practice, a visual composition environment to make changes to workflow rules, the UI, forms, data, and integration points.

The litmus test for DIY flexibility is the avoidance of procedural code or scripting. If an editor must be opened to alter procedural code or script, the cost, risk, and sophistication required to make a change skyrockets. Further, system design must be maintained in the database by the system itself. Thus, the workflow, data model, and UI are all perpetually updatable, as are ongoing changes made by the DIY administrator. Most importantly, this visual composition and meta-data management approach allows for easy upgrading to future versions, avoiding the huge upgrade costs endemic to traditional ITSM systems.

Trustworthy
It’s not enough for the service management system to be accurate. An orchestrated system inspires trust in the processes it automates by transparently revealing important metrics, key performance indicators, and audit trails. Comprehensive provision of these leads to fact-based management and meaningful process improvement.

Traditional ITSM systems report on volumes of tickets, incidents, changes, and the like. Orchestrated ITSM systems go beyond this by reporting on key process metrics such as cycle times and process outliers, doing so in the context of service level agreements. Audit trails further inspire confidence by crisply revealing the path and activities behind every action, issue, and change. Regulated industries typically require audit trails, but every shop can benefit from them, especially when an orchestrated ITSM system provides them for free.

Attractive
An attractive user interface is more than just a nicety for a service system. Rather, it is a necessity for the system to become easily accepted by agents and readily used by end-users. Of course, attractiveness in this context requires more than just nice colors and well placed buttons. It requires a high degree of usability, honed from rigorous and savvy user experience design. This is because end-users, in particular, are a frequently changing lot who are infrequent users of the system. Thus, they must be able to use it at first glance, as they expect to do with any web-based system these days, from Facebook to Gmail.

Unfriendly ITSM systems repel end-users, driving them to more expensive and less measurable means of interaction, like hotlines and hallway requests. In the longer term, hard-to-use ITSM systems create the impression that IT is hard to partner with in the pursuit of business goals.Classifying ITSM Systems
Four of the five characteristics described above drive down an orchestrated ITSM system’s total cost of ownership (TCO). These include attractiveness (by readily increasing adoption), trustworthiness (by supporting process improvement), ITIL out of the box (by working right away), and most especially DIY flexibility (by slashing the cost of adaptability).

Given that the characteristics of orchestrated ITSM systems are that they are inherently low TCO and that they are process driven, we can compare and contrast them with other classes of ITSM systems, as shown in table 1.

Table 1

Toolkits such as Lotus Notes or BPM platforms allow the creation of at least rudimentary ITSM functionality, albeit at the price of high TCO. Behemoths such as ERP-like help desks suffer from not being process driven and from high TCO. Ticketing systems are also off-the-shelf products from an earlier era. Though inexpensive, they are not process driven and so provide limited value-add.

SaaS-based ITSM systems fall between the behemoths and ticket takers. They do a better job of addressing cost and usability issues, but are neither sufficiently flexible nor process-centric enough to drive service improvement.  Moreover, no company should be shackled to only a SaaS deployment option just because it wants a modern ITSM system.

Conclusion
The ITSM system should not be a major financial component of any CIO’s portfolio. The fact that it is in so many shops is a relic of the ERP-economics of legacy systems. At the same time, the ITSM system should advance the cause of making IT a friendly and supportive partner to the business.

Orchestrated ITSM provides a new approach to service management that addresses this challenge by marrying a process-driven architecture to low TCO.  It provides flexible deployment options by being available on premise or via the cloud.  CIOs who want to focus their energies and budgets on revenue-generating and cost-reducing initiatives for the business would be remiss not to seize this opportunity.