Impact of Experience on the Bottom Line

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As I learn more about the applications and implications of Experience Management – and its potential impact on IT Service Delivery – the Return on Investment is unmistakable.

It has been proven that improved experience drives better services which brings money savings and increased funding in the future.

The secret is understanding the service delivery from the consumer’s perspective. This should permeate the entire breadth of IT services.

Let me know if you want to learn more about Experience Management.

Bringing ITAM to Life

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If an airplane crashes, it is usually on either take-off or touch-down. Once up in the air, we take safety for granted. Sure, there might be turbulence, but it is not too big of a deal.

The same is true for your Asset Management – both software and hardware. If there is an issue, it usually occurs during onboarding or decommissioning. Once in the middle of the lifecycle, there may be turbulence, but not that big of a deal.

If you are wanting to improve your Asset Management program, focus on the processes to onboard and decommission.

These are the places where issues like technical debt, audits, compliance, and low return on investment occur.

I started in the Asset Management world in 1994. That was a LONG time ago and the problems then are the same as now.

Bureaucracy or Governance?

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I think we all have seen Service Management organizations that were too bureaucratic.

This was not the goal but it just happened over time. Rigidity was bountiful.

The cure for bureaucracy is consumer focus.

Whether through the use of Experience Management, or not, Service Management organizations must consider the end (consumer’s view of value) at the beginning.

This is also addressed in ITIL4’s “Engage”.

The vision must be on outcomes.

Relationships

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I once worked for a CTO who did not talk to a main business stakeholder. In fact, this stakeholder was one of two customer-facing groups served by IT.

I tried to bridge the two.

It was a strange predicament for me.

The stakeholder appreciated my involvement as I tried to align my group with his group’s needs.

The CTO was unhappy with my involvement. I never could understand why.

He liked to control the situation. He was important.

So, the stakeholder spun up their own shadow IT group. Over time, they needed fewer and fewer of the CTO’s services, making his role and organization less important.

This is a true story.

Disruption

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The rates (or cycles) of change are picking up speed.

When we look back over the past two years, it’s almost unbelievable. Things we thought would never change were disrupted.

However, the next two years will have even more disruption and change. Let’s look at some potential changes to what we do and how we do it:

– Machine Learning and chatbots combined will become the first touch for most Service Desks. If so, organizations must get their Knowledge in tip-top shape and shift resources accordingly.

– With so many Changes coming through automation (e.g. CI/CD), Configuration Management (CMDB) + Change Management must be strong.

– More and more non-IT assets/CIs will be included in Asset and Service Management programs that transparency must increase as non-traditional business stakeholders become more strategic.

– Redundancy is everywhere because of the low tolerance for outages. The recent outages from Microsoft, Facebook, etc , have shown that outages occur more from Changes than technology failure. However, the complexity is increasing. We need to improve our change risk assessment abilities. We will see this trend increase due to the increasing complexity.