Drills, diggers and IT. Each a means to an end not a means in themselves. What the consumer really wants is not the tool but what these tools produce. Holes, bigger holes and…well, what does IT produce?
If you’re reading this I will bet you a rare Yorkshire pound that you are involved in the IT business. But what do you produce, Dear Reader? And why?
I hope it’s none of the things in this document (ok, so I’m guilty of a few):
In Eli Goldratt’s The Goal, each person and machine in the factory was focused on the same goal: increasing sales and revenue. If what you are doing doesn’t help achieve the goal then don’t do it. If you have a choice of two activities and one increases revenue more than another: do the one that increases more revenue. If you are more focused on your individual performance at the expense of the goal: change!
What about the story about the janitor at NASA? When asked what he did, he said “I send people to the moon!” Hard to tie his “sweeping up bonus” to the success of the moon mission, but you see his point?
What about the IT guy/gal who’s working in a bank’s data center installing new Cisco UCS infrastructure to replace the old fashioned legacy stuff? Their goal isn’t “install the infrastructure”, is it? What is their goal? When I say Their I don’t mean that single person, I mean The Bank.
FWIW, here’s what I think:
- IT is no different to other industries, it’s just that while those industries build spaceships to reach the moon, we build unified infrastructure to help the 30,000 staff collaborate on the moon mission project – ie. we supply to those industries. We might not fly the ship, but we do send people to the moon.
- When we focus on the goal of sending people to the moon, and not our Visio’s of ITIL processes, then we are likely to do things that achieve the goal rather than … well, unnecessary activities that don’t reach the goal.
- The top, number #1, can’t-live-without activity that will help send people to the moon is to make it really easy to consume the IT we produce.
The cloud projects, the unified infrastructure projects, the consolidation projects, the collaboration projects, and many more, they all have a goal and that goal is best served by creating the most easy to consume IT system. Let me repeat that writ large:
The goal is best achieved by creating the most easy to consume IT system.
This is a universal ITism. If you’re a vendor or a consumer, this helps you. So, the next time you are working on an IT project think of the end goal hole and see if you’d do something different:
- During planning, think if the IT system could be used for something else to double up on value. For example, if you’re building a Cisco UCS system of 32 blades you could easily get over a thousand VMs on there but it might only be logistically possible to get a few hundred desktops per month deployed: could you repurpose that initially-underused capacity some other way? Overnight risk analysis calculations in a bank? Yes the capacity will diminish, but not for months yet. Think ROI.
- During architecture, think of how many pages of your blueprint are dedicated to helping people use the system. Where’s the Service Catalogue? Where are the tools and guidance to help operations keep the system up and reduce maintenance? Spending six weeks (or more? AGHAST!) on a design should be a crime punishable by spending a year on an IT Operations Bridge where you learn where the rubber meets the road and how adaptable designs are better than monolithic monstrosities.
- During deployment, are you involving the operations and applications people? If you aren’t then you’re deploying a castle of infrastructure and for every week you don’t collaborate with them you are widening the moat around around it, making more work for later. And in the world of cloud, crossing that moat might be too much effort.
- Looking at the handover, how easy is it for people to consume the compute, the network, the infrastructure? This means changes, most likely in ways you can’t foresee. Can your system be completely reconfigured at a logical level, or does it need rewiring in the data center? It better be the former.
- Migrating information: How do you get data in and out of it? Can I Vmotion VMs from legacy to your new infrastructure? Can I cold migrate? How? Does someone else have to work that out later, or can we make it easier for them now?
- Marketing. You have to sell your solution. Data centers are cold and lonely places. Build it and they won’t come unless you advertise, encourage, incentivise, adapt.
Take benchmarks: don’t we just love them in the IT industry? But all they are is navel gazing for geeks. There are much more important things to do to reach the goal but so many of us are addicted to them on both sides, vendor and consumer. Some out there are focused on ROI which is a measure of the consumability of IT. On this I have one thing to say:
Benchmarks are navel gazing for geek at best, bad science at worst, and don’t help you reach the goal at all.
Imagine being a restauranteur who only cares how fast his customers eat and not what they really want? Perhaps some want to eat fast, but perhaps others want him to be open 24×7 and offer healthy food? A successful restaurant has a goal of increasing revenue (not making meals!) and to do that they need to make meals (“meals to an end” ahahha) that satisfy customers’ needs. Simple but important.
I ask you again, Dear Reader, what is it that you do? And why?
No crack, dope or alcohol went into the production of this post.
11 Comments
Very nicely put! Nothing I can argue with.
So – does that mean I’m going soft in my older age, or is it you Dear Stevie? :)
Good one!
Thanks, David :) I’ve changed my mind on many things over the years, ITIL is just one of them (remember the girlfriend analogy?). I know many intelligent and creative people who earn a living from ITIL-related schemes but IMHO they see ITIL as something to cling on to until something better comes along. It would be awesome to see a community such as yours build a successor to ITIL, make it open source, make it for the people and by the people. Who will take the lead in these changing times of clouds and proprietary stacks and open source and everything else that makes our IT orgs creak at the knees as they try to move position?
Most attempts to open-source ITIL have failed spectacularly.
But we do have MOF which is released open content under the Creative Commons license. Can’t get much more open than that. Note how the world all dropped ITIL and rushed to MOF instead.
FITS is a small-scale version of ITIL which is also public domain, or at least it was, I think it isn’t any more.
CMMI-SVC is copyright but freely distributable and derivative works are allowed internally within an organisation. Much more open than ITIL. hence the stampede of users adopting it instead.
COBIT 4.1 is copyright but it is freely downloadable, and a membership of ISACA for a hundred odd bucks a year buys you all the books to go with it. ISACA’s growing pretty nicely but they aren’t exactly displacing ITIL… yet.
There’s any number of alternatives to ITIL already that are open to varying degrees. that’s not the issue. ITIL has the brand, the mindshare. People want the promise of ITIL.
And ITIL delivers. You know how much criticism I level at the content, the usage, and the vendor community, but I’m more objective than you, Steve – i can see the good in ITIL too. if ITIL were the source of all evil as you paint it, then it wouldn’t have got away with it for so long. the brand would not have survived. it’s a long way from perfect but it works
You should write a book Stevie! I’m in agreement with pretty much everything written. Although I feel sorry for anybody in IT who works for a Bank these days under your business-goal driven outlook.
‘What do you do?’
‘I destroy economies and make everyone miserable ;-)’
Thanks, Rob… but perhaps there’s a reason that previous attempts have failed (has anyone done root cause analysis?). Here’s another (possibly made up) Einstein quote: “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”
Thanks, Martin…acerbic as always! It’s not all doom and gloom from me, nor do I have black and white vision. But I can smell change in the air… or is that Slough West?
I hear you – loud and clear – and it sounds like a nice idea. Sometimes it’s better to just throw away what you have right now and start again rather than navigate through the politics and hassles of the status quo. But I’m not sure we’d be much better off with something new, here’s why …..
People will continue to complain about not getting that magic bullet. I really, really, really don’t think that the biggest issues many people have with ITIL are because of the quality of the content. Sure, it can be better (like anything) and sure, there shouldn’t be misleading inaccuracies across a set of related books that preach about good process and a holistic approach! But before ITIL there was nothing and even when the first books came out we took a big step forward in understanding how to organize this thing called ITSM.
IMHO the biggest problem we have is that people don’t think for themselves, or at least seek the best advice. Too many folks think that their job is to implement ITIL (I call them the “ITIL Fundamentalists”). The smarter advisors keep shouting from the roof-tops “No! Refer to ITIL, because there’s some good stuff there, but keep focused on risk and value and then do what’s right for your business. For heaven’s sake don’t implement ITIL as is!” But, you know, I’m not going to re-hash this stuff all over again. Rob said it quite eloquently enough in his earlier comment. ITIL’s not perfect but it contains a lot of pretty good (strong, even) advice. Take it for what it is and get on and do your job – which means think, adapt and, heck, maybe even contribute back.
I have very little time for folks who say “ITIL says I MUST do this…” And I have very little time for those advisors (“black & white-ists” maybe??) who say things like “ITIL’s crap…” or “ITIL’s just a money-spinner for the vendor community….” or “ITIL”s just a fad”. Come on you smart consultant/analyst types – your customers deserve something more constructive from you!
So, while I’m flattered, Stevie, that you’d consider Pink as a potential developer of a “better ITIL” (to be honest – I think we could do it too!) I agree with Rob that it would be a huge risk and many of the issues that people have today would still perpetuate. But hey – never say never!
:)
Yes, Goldratt does tell us to focus on the goal. And to do that by – in (rarely practiced) order of importance: 1) Maximizing Throughput (approx. net revenue – note see TOC accounting practices), 2) Minimizing (but NOT eliminating) WIP, and 3) Maintaining low Overhead/Operating cost. It is the latter two in which benchmarking can help.
One reason to focus on Throughput is that there are fewer limits on increasing profit by increasing sales than there are limits on increasing profits by reducing costs (cannot get costs below some minimum without causing the organization to fail).
In appropriate operating costs are rarely obvious – especially if “we have always done it this way”. Benchmarks can help organizations gauge their relative Operating performance and efficiency (and perhaps even WIP) as has been (and continues to be) admirably demonstrated in the differences between competing service providers and manufacturers in differing cultures.
I like your use of “ITIL Fundamentalists” though I might use “ITIL Literalists”, just like those good bible folks who put saddles on dinosaurs in the US. A couple of things I disagree with though are (1) that nothing existed before ITIL, and that (2) we’d need to through away everything and start again.
I agree nothing like ITIL existed, but before ITIL we had the knowledge that created ITIL. We had something called common sense IT practice, including bad practice (which hasn’t gone away with ITIL!). What I think happened was ITIL “rose above” that practice to provide an abstract framework. So ITIL was an evolution of common practice. What I’m arguing for is another evolution. Imagine the timeline: Step 1 – Common Sense IT Practice, Step 2 – ITIL abstract practice, Step 3 – the next step of evolution
Which brings me on to throwing everything away: I don’t want to do that. I found it interesting that Stephen Mann has been hearing folks talking about a “return to ITIL v2″ (my paraphrasing, could be off-center) because I think this is a “let’s get back to our roots” and I think it indicates a desire to get “lower down the stack”. I think there is some awesome stuff in ITIL today but we aren’t treating like a real library and extending it.
So here’s my suggestion: with the fantastic community behind Pink why don’t we make ITIL actually be what it stands for: about IT, about Infrastructure, and a Library? Why can’t we put a system in place to collect the practices of that community into a library. These could be what I would call concrete practices that are specific to a business vertical and/or a technology and are “below” the abstract practices offered by the current ITIL. A body of knowledge, a library, a system. An open system that makes it easy to contribute, share and understand what could be a huge system.
I think we are uniquely positioned to do this today more than any time in the past with the ubiquitous tools we have for social media, the open source model, the dam of extensive practice by communities like Pink: everything is there, we just need to put it all together… and throw nothing away. :)
Quite a few points and with my short attention span I’ll probably miss some so I will intentionally focus on two …
Totally with you on the initial topic … when I had a real job with a large UK postal operator (it makes me laugh when we try to disguise organisations like this) I was faced with an internal marketing guy describing his team as the Saatchi and Saatchi of said org. My swift and somewhat terse response was that he is a postman, like me and my IT team, and if he wasn’t then he shouldn’t be working here. I know he didn’t get it but it shows that the issue isn’t confined to IT and orgs have too many people who see themselves as HR or Finance people say rather than in the org’s key role (where the outcomes are delivered). So ITIL or any other IT framework, methodology, standard, etc. is not responsible for this. The organisation and its employees are. Too many of the latter forget that they “work for an organisation that delivers letters” or “provides communication services”. I can only assume that I thought differently because I went out delivering mail (only the once unfortunately) when I joined … but it made a big difference to my attitude to what I was working for … the proverbial cog in the machine. I’m still surprised that all new employees don’t have to spend time in the frontline when joining an org (although sending the janitor to the moon might be a little extreme). IT people definitely should.
The whole ITIL v3 vs. v2 thing relates to a couple of points IMHO. The first is that a 10 process and service desk ITIL v2 was extended to a 20-30? process ITIL v3 when most adopters still used no more than 5 v2 processes (I’m not saying they need to as they should adopt what they need). My observation here is that ITIL v2 is Empire Strikes Back to v3′s Return of the Jedi … read into this what you will. But beyond this I will talk about people saying that they “do” ITIL, when “do” is the wrong word, and in reality they have adopted a handful of processes and implemented technology but haven’t understood the concept of services and service delivery throughout the IT team. Plus processes such as problem management and service level management lie dormant after the initial flurry of project delivery activity. This is compounded by the fact that these same orgs now “do” ITIL v3 because they bought a service catalog or sent their people on an ITIL v3 bridging course. There is probably no appreciation, or internal adoption, of the concept of the service lifecycle. Having said all this, does it really matter what version of ITIL (if any) they use if they have fully understood and deliver against the need for business/customer-focused service delivery? We need to move away from placing so much emphasis on the qualifications and place more on how IT people think about supporting business outcomes.
Another point comes back to what I have been describing as “back to basics” ITIL or “just enough ITIL” (might have stolen the latter off Rob Stroud) … we need to get back to the original ethos of ITIL when you use its good/best practices as you deem necessary to solve IT and business issues. There is some great stuff in ITIL, we just need to step back to remember why ITIL was created and to understand how best to use it. It’s not about training and technology (although the technology does make it so much easier), it’s about changing the way that IT people think about the part they play in delivering business services, increasing revenues, saving costs, making customers happy, providing control, etc.
Like Rob, I am not anti-ITIL – I agree with Don Page of Marval when he describes it as “documented common sense”. ITIL has also brought so much good (and professionalism) to both the IT community and individual orgs. I just despair when people overstate their position or when third parties understate the level of difficulty in its adoption. We need to be more realistic about ITIL.
I’m bored now ;) and need to do some proper writing in my role as an industry analyst or as I like to think of it “someone who tries to help organisations make practical use of all the technology and IT thinking out there created by far smarter people”.
Spot on.
For too long we have been trying to define our relationship with the business as a Value added partner, when at the end of the day, we are a provider of IT Products and services that are focused on supporting of fulfilling a defined business need. Our relationship is not defined as a partnership, but rather through the Consumption of those products and services by the business. The only person who is qualified to rate the Quality, Value and Suitability for Purpose of those services are the consumers using them to deliver results for their businesses (be that rocket science or financial services).
Outside of the workplace consumers have choice and given a choice they would not choose to do business with a provider who was difficult to work with, was always more expensive than they first estimated and never deliver the products on time. So why do we think that these same people will continue to tolerate that kind of behavior in a business environment where their own livelihood depends on their ability to do their jobs?