Digital Transformation and the role of ITIL (ITSM)

Every company is a technology company. Period. And every company has an IT department, often out of sync with business. Digital revolution is changing the game. It is becoming a great leveler and barriers are disappearing. You must have watched global leaders at Davos this week (World Economic Forum), every leader was talking about AI, Machine Learning, Fourth Industrial revolution etc. and no one wants to miss the boat. This is a great “leap frog” moment for many who missed the boat in earlier technology transformations and is a level playing field once you leap. So what are we doing internally within our (traditional) companies?

Are we still enforcing policies and procedures to route one incident from one place to other, and supported by so many mails, with nearly a company of the size of a typical startup in cc?

Are we still arguing with business to raise the service request in a certain so-called “structured” way, while world is analyzing unstructured data making predictions for Alzheimer?

Are you still trying figure out what assets are in your network, who owns what?

If you identify yourself with any or all the above, this is your leap-frog moment.

What is ITIL and what was its original intention? I can give a simple definition… in this digital age we should be simple and active.

ITIL is a set of common sense approach to IT support, compiled as best practices, to help document the tribal knowledge, historical issues, spot the risks early, elevate the impact understanding (change management) and helped solve customer problems without asking too many questions.

ITIL adopted in its true spirit was a true leveler for many IT teams, where knowledge documented, customer service improved, risks mitigated. Companies who had adopted the framework, tasted the fruits and expanded beyond traditional IT into business areas – call it as ESM (Enterprise Service Management) blurring the line between IT and Business support. Armed with data, companies are able to bring IT support in-house with automation. Virtual Assistants, conversational AI, natural language processing abilities are getting more and more into the ITSM tools – either out of the box or through APIs.

Why ITIL is important in this digital age?

ITIL brought the entropy down in the chaotic IT support environments, improved operational efficiency and put companies in a position to look beyond IT. Yes companies went through painful process, as bringing order often met with resistance, and I would even state that OCM (Organizational Change Management) was made mainstream by the adoption of ITIL best practices for ITSM.

Digital is raising the entropy levels of the organization even higher. Information overload, global perspective of problem solving, convergence of industries, exponential increase in use cases through hackathons, hurry to bring new functionality and products to market to stay relevant, tech savvy, energetic and “no rules applies to me” workforce and many more…. are changing the way organizations operate internally and externally. Chaotic environments are new norm, and is even considered as good sign for entrepreneurship and innovation! But it is also creating many more silos (you can call them as startups within an organization), as different business units are competing against each other on use cases and problem solving, unless there is strong digital COE exists within the organization.

What it means for IT support? Continuous delivery is the norm – Dev and Ops needs to work together. While Dev creates value to the business by putting the product, functionality and services quickly in the market, Ops ensures its continued availability and stability. 80% of the value created only when the service is usable and continued to be usable. For stability and availability we need order, ITSM processes ensures that.

Now refer the guiding principles below.

Start Where You Are
Focus on Value
Design for Experience
Work Holistically
Progress Iteratively
Observer Directly
Be Transparent
Collaborate
Keep it Simple

Are these guidelines meant for Digital transformation or ITSM? Can you spot any difference? These are the guiding principles of ITIL. Are we not touting for the same when it comes to digital transformation?

Digital transformation is to enhance customer experience, create new business models, value creation and improve operational efficiency. It requires working holistically across the entire supply life cycle, experimentation and iterative progress, awareness creation and transparency, collaboration across multiple business units, systems, devices and customers, and making it simple for everyone.

So the core principles remain same, only where you apply them is different. The teams who had gone through ITIL maturity are better positioned to collaborate with business and advice course corrections sooner than later in the product life cycle. After all, if you can’t service or operate them then it is a lost cause.

What is the way forward?

Assess

ITIL is just a best practices framework for ITSM, it is not restrictive. The changing business needs requires improvisation of the processes. Assess where you are and what you need. You should consider other frameworks along with ITIL while creating process and procedure that works in an agile manner. If the current assessment shows that you are stuck in a spaghetti, then you should leap frog. Yes it is better to start something new, than reengineering.

Partner
There are several products and solutions available now, that partnering with the vendors and service providers will directly put you on level playing field. In this digital area, capabilities for asset discovery, service mapping, cloud management, IoT device management, Machine Learning, Virtual assistant, APIs for integration with other enterprise tools, analytic engines have become the basic must haves.

Automate
In the era of automatic cars, where several complex parts needs to work together, there is no reason to be lethargic in automating IT tasks. Automation became practical only when we added software to the hardware. Both software and hardware are working together in IT since its inception, but we never focused on our own house, when it comes to automation. If you are hiding behind complexity of the environment, then you are delaying the obvious. Automating the tasks will help build a good knowledge base that in turn help more automation, and faster request fulfilment for the customer. Machines are good in documenting what they have done than humans.

Customer centric approach

Traditionally we looked at processes from IT perspective and failed to notice what is needed for the customer. In this digital age, it is all about the customer. If the customer is not impressed, the efforts are down the drain. The best practices doesn’t mean a thing if it is not practical for them. It could be an internal customer who consumes IT services or external customer who consumes products & services of the company, the expectation remain same. While defining processes and developing tools, put the customer perspective first. There are several avenues available to get valuable insights. Like helpdesk interactions, satisfaction surveys, social media postings, product reviews at publicly available sites, and even employee feedback in public sites like Glassdoor etc.

Digital Twin approach:

Digital twin, the dynamic digital representation of an industrial asset, helped visualize and predict performance of the machines under different conditions. The same approach can be used to visually map organizational processes. With the use of data and virtual models links between technologies, applications, infrastructure, people and process can be well understood and adjustments can be made. This is much more important as the support requirements are becoming hybrid and complex with digital technologies taking central stage.

Tying it all together

Holistic approach is key for a successful business and IT relationship. Everyone needs to share the common vision. IT should understand the strategic goals of business.

For successful digital transformations, OT and IT should work hand-in-hand, CIO and Business Leaders needs to work together. Working together means dedicating their time for idea generation, strategizing, use case development, training, upskilling etc. It can happen, only when IT is on stable footing, process driven and predictable. Otherwise teams will be spending long hours in firefighting and applying band aids, and digital transformation talk will remain only as boardroom talk.