Bringing ITAM to Life

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?

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

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

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.

ServiceNow Improvements in San Diego

The San Diego release for ServiceNow should change how many organizations do Service Management.

A couple of examples …

With innate DevOps capabilities, Change Management will evolve and needs updates on the process and people side of things. This one is big.

With the updated interface, and great chat capabilities, Knowledge Management will need major improvements to be successful. Also, user and process training may be required.

As business needs and tool capabilities evolve, so do the need to update how you do things.

Frameworks

Was asked 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. The dictate hoe to run IT

Further, the organizations who integrate frameworks best have gained efficiency which is a competitive advantage.

IT Asset Management

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