We get what we incentivize. Sadly, we far often incentivize the wrong behaviors.
Once we make a metric a goal or target, people are incentivized to reach it, one way or another.
This Friday, assess what you are incentivizing.
One consideration is that we should be incentivizing outcomes not outputs.
I am thankful the ITIL 4 authors included Organizational Change Management. This is a hole in many organizations as they know how to build and deploy the technical aspects but fall short on the ability to create outcomes because the human areas are unknown or disregarded.
Just my opinion, but, I do not think an external (to IT) OCM group can be as effective as innate OCM within IT.
I talk to many organizations who have a CMDB but readily admit that it doesn’t offer enough value to stakeholders.
There are two major reasons why:
1. When designed and implemented, not all stakeholders were identified and involved. Further, the CMDB was not designed to deliver the desired outcomes.
2. Even if all stakeholders were involved at the beginning, business needs change over time and so do the desired outcomes. The CMDB needs to evolve. This includes both scope and governance.
Getting a CMDB right, and continuing to deliver desired outcomes is difficult, unending work.
The need to do IT Asset Management well has increased exponentially in the last two years. This has occurred for two main reasons:
1. There are more technology assets in every organization that need to be treated as investments than ever before
2. The risk of doing ITAM poorly is increasingly costly
The time is now to decrease cost and risk through a solid IT Asset Management Program.
Was just asked today if Agile and ITIL can coexist. The answer is a resounding “yes”.
Agile is a great way to deliver software, Iteratively. The ITIL frameworks are so much more.
Further, the organizations who integrate frameworks best have gained efficiency which is a competitive advantage.
As a society, we have forgotten what excellence looks like.
The ability to excel is so uncommon, we cannot recognize it.
Do you know what excellence looks like in your job?
The difference between good and great is larger than good and merely average.
We need to seek out and reward great. Great employees are worth 2x average ones for many reasons including performance, culture, and much more.
All team members love working with those who excel (as long as they are good humans).
In the comments below, name someone who excels in their role.
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.
This list could go on and on.
There are so many reasons to be optimistic about the future.
The digital innovation 💡 will cause ripples of disruption.
Not many will be able to navigate the issues at hand.
These skills will cross industries, organizations, and geography. Skills will be valued over industry experience.
Today, we place too much value in experience in these areas when we should be focused on solutions.
Think about these use cases:
1. Staying SOX compliant for Machine Learning. The industry does not matter. Understanding SOX and ML should be the focus.
2. Having great Service Management for the metaverse. With new types of CIs, the focus is understanding how to govern without bureaucracy. It does not matter the industry or geography.
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.
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.