ITSM Uncovered

This morning I was reading up on Marine Corps Sergeant Dakota Meyer's bravery in being presented America's highest military award The Medal of Honor.  It got me thinking about the word "Service" It is embedded as part of our Industry of IT Service Management.  There are Service Catalogues, Service Delivery, Service Strategy, Service Design and on, and on, and on.  I realized that it is a word that we have completely over used to the point of it losing its core meaning.

In the fall of 1985 I first learned a defininition of the word "Service" in relation to what it means to be a United States Marine like Sergeant Meyer.  Above all else is a Service to God, Country and Corps, in that order.  Everything else falls behind it.  It was a definition that meant something.  Something worth fighting for.  I would now of course, add Family next in line, but at 17, it was simple enough as a foundation to believe, fight and if needed die for.  

Of course this is extreme, but in comparison to the liberal use of the word "Service" in our industry, it highlights the need to take a step back, define and reaffirm our committment to it.  I took a little time today to do just that and I realized that I fight daily in the name of Service.  What I didn't realize is that I fight on as many fronts as I do to defind what I find important.  I hear those in IT profess to understand what they do.  In reality, I see many more who have lost sight of why they do it.  

It is the why which defines my interpretation of Service and that which has put me in the bad graces of some for my stubborn attitude when it comes to doing things right.  A manager I once had, broke it down to me in the most simplistic manner.  He said:

"As long as you do what you feel is the right thing to do in the deepest depths of your being, you have something to defend and no one can question your justification for doing the right thing.  It may not be right, but more often than not it will be, either way no one will question your motives and that you will be able to live with."

Despite the individuals I have pissed off in my career, there have always been those above me who appreciate my passion for doing things the right way.  For not avoiding the hard work.  For not shying away from questioning leadership in defense of what I belive in, and giving 100% when those questions have been answered clearly.  

What I have found, sadly enough is that for many, more time is spent looking for short cuts and quick fixes instead of "Putting in work."  As with anything else, you are only giving anyone a half-assed solution.  If you have a clarity of purpose and a true understanding of the many types of Service you are accountable for, both personally as well as professionally, you can move ahead with a sense of purpose, pride and confidence well positioned to defend any who are looking for the short cuts and easy answers.

So to level set; in a general sense, everything and everyone that touches your life depends on you for some sort of Service delivery.  Whether it is your kids, spouse, pets, familiy members or your business cutomers or peers in all of the technology towers you interact with.  They all want a piece of what it is you have to offer.  That is your Service.  That is the responsiiblity that you have to deliver on.  

More importantly it is your committment to all of those services which will make you successsful.  It takes work and can be overwhelming at times, but understanding your role, what you have to offer with a sense of knowledge and awareness will guide you through making the right decisions, putting in the work necessary and staying focused on what is right, instead of looking for what is easy.

What are the Services you provide in all directions?  Are you aware of them all?  Do you have a sense of committment to each of them with a passion or are you just running on a treadmil for the paycheck?  If not, then you need a gut-check.

Thank you Sergeant Dakota Meyer for winning the Medal of Honor and forcing me back to my basic understanding of Service.

Semper Fi!

Sgt., Rik Jones USMC (1985 ~ 1993)

My experience in IT Service Management has been with large, global organizations either driven by fast moving global markets or supporting highly complex infrastructure and application sets. It is easy in these types of environments to forget the main purpose of technology support. When things break, it is usually all-hands on deck. Needless to say, it is a highly reactive environment. These types of environments suck technologist in to becoming focused solely on the technology rather than the reason for being.

In 2003, I was asked to move back into my old support team to head up the group as my old Manager had decided to resign. During my absence the team had grown substantially and morale was less than desirable. The business was growing, as was the demands placed on the team. Having cut my teeth in this environment I was very familiar with the pressures of ensuring that the business was executing on all cylinders, with as much up-time as possible 24x7. This had, and was once again, taking its toll on even the senior support analysts on the team. One of the first things I did when returning to the team was to have one-on-one sessions with each and every one of the 20 team members to determine not just what they were working on, but more importantly where their heads were at.

This was something that seemed the logical thing to do as a mid-level manager of a support team, which I likened to managing troops under my charge during my 8 years in the Marine Corps. I began every session with one simple question which guided the discussion from that point forward. It may seem like a strange question, but one vital to ask anyone in a support role:

Why are you here?

Profound in its simplicity, I was set back by the general response across the team. Most of the responses began with"I support X application," "I perform monitoring on X systems" or "I respond to user calls about broken hardware." In every case, in my mind these were all wrong answers. Of course these are the functions they perform while on the clock, but as to why they were there, I wanted to hear things like "To make sure the users can do their jobs," "Make sure we can deliver to clients," anything of that vein would have been more than welcome, but it was not what I was hearing. I asked myself why these individuals had lost touch with the basic business deliverable of not only IT, but that of the company as a whole.

To me this is often an oversight of Management lost in administrative responsibilities more driven towards demonstrating delivery to leadership instead of establishing a culture of understanding as to an individuals up-stream contribution to the business strategy and bottom-line. Without that perception of self-worth any individual will quickly loose sight. As a result, you will not get the level of individual performance by a person in technology who is clear on their purpose and contribution to the corporate mission. Take someone in Sales for example, they are very clear on their goals, deliverables, contributions and value to the business. Their approach every day is to bring in new business to raise the bottom line as well as gain a commission, if that is the value structure in place. In technology, this front-line value structure doesn't always exist to drive awareness of their contribution. For this reason, it is vital that managers keep as part of their responsibility matrix, the importance of communicating the team's contribution to the overall business delivery model to its clients and how that helps the business be more successful in relation to other competitors.

Reach out to the business and try to get your hands on the annual report information. That information is not only critical for you to understand, but ot use as a motivational tool to get everyone aligned with the business drivers. We used to love hearing this type of information and where our company sat in the market against our competitors. It became a subconscious driver to feel like we were truly part of the team. Not the IT team, but the corporate team, as a result we pushed that much harder to give the business the tools it needed to help the company compete with its competitors.

As managers, it is easy to get wrapped up in the metrics and numbers in delivering technology. Just never lose sight on the PEOPLE who deliver that technology and helping them feel as a vital part of the business, not just a tool used by the business.

There are mainly two core elements to technology: infrastructure and development. The deployment of these elements and understanding how they are leveraged together is key to any successful organization. Each contains various flavors of implementation that are fundamentally designed to service the business mission. Some provide competitive advantages while others are generally designed to keep the plant operating and are not unique to a specific corporate business process.

Infrastructure is the true foundation upon which all technology rides. In many ways it is not unlike the plumbing, electric, foundation and framing of a house. It is the base that technology depends on to exist. For a start-up, simply getting the business off of the ground distracts from the longer term vision for the company. A technology trap many fall into.
As with a home, designing the right infrastructure will make or break how your technology evolves to meet the business needs both in the immediate and long term. Imagine designing and building a two bedroom home for a newly married couple. It suits their immediate need in starting their new life together. But what happens four years later when they are planning on their second child? That two bedroom begins to not seem as appealing as it once did; a true problem of capacity planning.

Plan, design and build for growth. If you don’t get these right, chances are the results will be both painful as well as costly. Infrastructure however, has an image problem. The power of infrastructure lies not with what the business or end users can see, touch or experience. Because of this, it is often overlooked in terms of investment. This fault is usually what bites most businesses in the ass when system failures begin to occur.

Development on the other hand, is usually the most visible and highly touted. It is these products that ride on the users desktop and provide the entry point to business functionality needed to complete the corporate mission. Whether that development is provided internally, via large commercial software houses or 3rd party vendors, the role is clear: Deliver core business process functionality.

It is assumed, although not always the case, that developers understand the business processes and are able to work it into their design to develop effective solutions. Internal development takes that concept even further as these groups exist within the company to provide custom solutions that deliver a presumed competitive advantage within a specific industry. For those companies who can afford this option, the value is clear as it can provide an edge over competitors in the never ending fight for market share. More importantly, it comes down to control. Proprietary applications that may contain functionality based on processes developed from within an organization can leverage the business knowledge in a way that drives development into very specific directions. The disadvantage with any software application regardless of who develops it, is that like Infrastructure, when it fails, there is a direct impact to business.

In the new-world order of Technology, there is a third element to IT which, like the Infrastructure, goes relatively unnoticed until something breaks. This is not software, nor it is hardware, let’s call it what it is; People. Yes, people run the infrastructure and people write code, but then there is Jack O. All-trades. The individual who knows a lot about infrastructure and development, yet also has that special skill to be able to communicate with the customer. Jack is not a Systems Administrator, nor a C# or C++ coder. Nope, this individual knows about Command Windows, X-Terms, Consoles, Windows Scripting Host, SQL Queries, HTML and Java development, tools of the trade. Jack knows how to run IP Config on a Laptop and understand what DNS servers it is connecting to, while running a shell script to recursively remove files from at TMP directory.

More importantly, Jack knows how to explain to the customer that their computer isn’t connecting to the web because when they booted their machine up, it did not pick up a new IP address or DNS settings from the DHCP servers which might be due to a faulty Ethernet cable, port, DHCP isn’t configured or the LAN may just be down. No, Jack will simply say “Let me take a look and see what I can do to get you up and running again.” Take a second or two to run IP Config /all to check under the hood, discover that all network connections appear in order, see’s the lights on the Ethernet port flashing, confirming network connectivity; run IPConfig /release + IPConfig /renew, Ping a few hosts or websites and viola~! Turning back to the user, simply says “There you go, back up and running. If you have any more problems, please let us know and we’ll get right on it.” Jack is on his way again.

This is an example of customer service and support skills in action, leveraging the basic tools of the trade that go unrecognized as a valid technology field in it’s own right. Of course this was a very basic example which does go much deeper than that in terms of ensuring that business services and users are not impacted by infrastructure or development system failures. It is not some individual with English as a second language behind a desk reading from a script calling themselves IT Support (I’m sure I will have more to write about in that space.) I am referring to that undervalued and overlooked position on the front lines of technology, leveraged as a critical element to an effectively run technology environment. This group of individuals needs to be recognized as the not just a “IT guy/gal”, but that bridge which binds a business to its technology.

Service and Support, long the beaten down step-child of any industry, has taken no more public abuse and ridicule than in the world of Technology. In today's modern internet driven society, the presumed "elite" are those who can write code, de-tangle the inner workings of a UNIX kernel, design and manage relational databases or architect a global WAN. However, when all hell breaks loose with those core technologies, who is that one person responding to a business user to take the bullet for the failure? It is the Service Professional who is dispatched to take up the challenge of facing the end user impacted by the failure.

By no fault of the industry as a whole, the relatively young business of technology has been one designed to enable the users as quickly as possible to provide the business with a technological advantage over its competition. Over the years this has meant a rapid deployment mentality which translated to throwing out all sorts of technology solutions with little thought being given to how that technology would be supported after it is in place. The result of which has been an environment cultivating a culture of reactivity.

The goal of these writings is not to address the importance of technology nor the business as the concept of Service can be applied across any industry or technology, but rather the service minded professional that is long overdue in being recognized for their contribution to every industry. The IT Service Profession however, is unique. It is a field that many feel can be performed by any person with a deeper than average interest in technology. "Do you have an email account?" "Yes." "You're hired."

What is being realized as of late is that the Service-minded individual is one that not simply understands technology, but has a unique view of how it should be implemented in a manner that may be more effective than one of the core technologist or the pure business user.

A cultural shift is in the works within most technology dependent businesses today. The ability to stop viewing technology as purely a body of development and engineering elements, but also that of a third piece, which is a people driven function outside of those core roles. We all know technology breaks. It is the management of those breaks through to the restoration of business processes in which the true value player can be found..... The IT Service & Support Professional.

Why is it that every time I seem to be into working on something when my machine decides to want to restart due to some system maintenance installation that occurred in the background? Is there not some way for these automated maintenance scripts to detect keystrokes to determine if someone is actually using the machine?

In tonight’s case, I was working on a PowerPoint presentation needed first thing Monday morning when I was prompted to save all work as a shutdown was commencing. Does anyone understand how utterly frustrating this can be? I would think this would have been something experienced by anyone who works in a networked environment.

In an Enterprise environment such as mine, this type of thing is both necessary and critical to maintaining a healthy environment. Believe me, I understand the need to keep the Windows environment as up to date and protected as necessary, but in terms of impact to productivity, I would think that at some point, and I know I may be pushing the envelope of the individual user’s needs here, it would be nice to not to have work interrupted by some reboot script.

I wonder if this would be the first in a long line of “nice to haves” in terms of an software Service friendly environment. Who knows. I do know that I am more than likely not the only individual out there who has not either lost work due to an unexpected reboot or been interrupted by one that was kind enough to give you time to save your work.

This is a re-post of a piece I wrote back in January 2007 when I traveled back to Tokyo for a visit. I find that what I wrote then is quite applicable to what I do today for work which falls under the umbrella of IT Service Management. The key word in ITSM being SERVICE.

One of the things that I now realize I took for granted when living in Japan was that of service. When most think of service it usually revolves around the service industry. Companies like Hotels, fast food restaurants and others.

Their mission is to provide service to you the customer. However, the service I speak of lives at the individual level, not the corporate level. It is the individual sense of pride and honor in the work that one performs.

We have all been a victim of some disgruntled employee who has to somehow provide a service to you in your time of need. These are the worst experiences that many face on a regular basis in the U.S.. I am not saying that every experience is bad, but a good majority of service is the reflection of one's absolute minimum effort expended to get you what you want. Usually in accordance with some corporate guideline.

In Japan it is different, very different. Sure, there are those rare occasions when you may be confronted with a taxi driver less than enthusiastic about taking you where you want to go when he wants the long fair and you only want to go up the road a bit. But in general, I really was reminded on this trip on what a pleasant experience it can be as a customer.

There were several little things on our way out of the airport that exemplified the service level expected from those encountered, but it was not until I got into the elevator at the hotel that I truly saw it in action. I know this is going to sound very minor, but if you think about what this guy’s job is, and what he did for a living you would see what I am talking about.

He was a porter. This is a guy who basically transfers peoples crap all day long to and from hotel rooms, knowing that the owners of these bags are travelers, people who can afford to travel the world and stay in a hotel as nice as this one.

I think he may have been on his break and heading to the area in the hotel where employees take their breaks when I entered the elevator. The first thing he did, was upon seeing me approach, he placed his hand over the edge of the door to ensure it would not begin to close on me as I entered.

We exchanged brief pleasantries and I began to press the number to my floor noticing that he had not yet pressed his button. By the time he asked me which floor I was going to, I had already pressed the button and it lit up. I then watched him press my floor again and then his. I thought that was pretty amazing service. To ensure that I had actually engaged my floor he pressed my button first before pressing his. That was a sign of service and attention to detail I had never been aware of before. What kind of training could educate someone to ensure the customer would reach their destination regardless of what the customer had done for themselves?

I can tell you that I am not sure I would have been a diligent as he had I been in his position or employment. This was the case for everyone I had run across at the hotel. It is a very weird feeling at first having people wait all over your every need. But at the same time it feels good. Makes one feel special. I will say that for me, I appreciated it, but I know there are many who take that level of service for granted and expect it.

In Japan, you do. Going back to the states, that was one of the things I had to get used to. I mean seriously, if you are working in a service industry would you not see your customers as the most valuable commodity your business needs to exist? Companies focus on the bottom line, but a large part of that is growing customer loyalty and you can not always do that through a brand or product. inevitably the best way is through simply keeping your customers happy and satisfied with the human experience.

We all complain about bad service, but do we really provide good service? Do we put our customer's needs before our own? Hell, do we even know who our customers are? Working in Technology, support more specifically, I know more times than not people have no idea who there customers are or to what end they even have a function.

This is something that also applies to the world of IT Service Management. The concept of knowing who your customers are and ensuring that they have the best products or services available to them. And when things break, employing a true empathy by understanding the impact on your customer and doing whatever it takes to get them back into service.

It might be time to stop and think about the true meaning of service or how we provide it, as based on how we expect it.

The concept of IT Service Management accompanied with the ITIL Framework elicits many different responses from all levels of the organization. From the Management side, the general focus question is "What will it cost me?" From Middle Management it is; "How will I allocate resources?" and to the man or woman on the front lines it is "What are you thinking!?" The latter is always the voice that is often missed in communicating the benefits to the organization.

There is plenty of talk targeting the implementation of ITSM or ITIL revolving around defining business requirement to drive IT Services. Processes and steps to providing these services in the most efficient and cost effective manner is not always addressed. Even with the best intention of proactive management of IT environments to predict and support future business growth or potential weak points, communicating that is often an uphill battle day one.

These are all very valid points in delivering a true Service Management environment to any business. In order to achieve this, one area is consistently overlooked; the role of the individual. This can be attributed to the fact that unlike processes or tools, it is extremely difficult to discover, identify and document. It is the intangible element.

Processes can be defined, people can't. Many implementers, whether internal to an organization or brought in from the outside to consult on what needs to occur to improve IT Service to the Business are very versed in the tactics needed to implement any of the areas of IT Service Management. The challenge is convincing the individual that what is being proposed can inevitably make their lives easier.

Communication needs to be tailored to the hands-on audience, much in the same light as you would with Management or even Middle-Management. There is a benefit that needs to be explained to gain buy-in. Explaining the monetary benefits and ROI to senior Management is only one piece of the puzzle. Determining the most effective methods of resource management and reporting to Middle Management is also part of the critical path. Understanding and communicating the true benefit to the individuals who are tied up with daily projects, firefighting or disgruntled users must not be approached as an afterthought.
The term "Grass-Roots" is often thrown around in various seminars and case studies but there are living, breathing people who comprise this Grass-Roots element that are vital to the success in moving forward with any attempt to become a high performance organization. True leaders realize this; successful programs are ones that focus on all levels of the organization.

So what is the key? Some believe that a complete buy-in and enforcement from Senior Management by default, forces the organization to comply. This is not to say that Senior Management buy-in and commitment is not important, but to get to the goal faster, having a motivated, mobilized workforce behind the effort will accomplish tasks and milestones more effectively if the troops are made to feel as if they are part of the solution on delivering the end product.

The truth of the matter is, everyone has their processes. Some good, some bad and some definitely ugly. Nevertheless, they are processes that people put time and effort into developing to make their own contribution to the organization better. Discounting these efforts by pushing new unfamiliar process framework from the top down is not necessarily the right approach. The fact is, that people take pride in their work and are resistant to anything new or mis-branded to make their job seem inefficient.

Then there is the concern about Job security. Many only see a program on Process Improvement, standardization and enhancements, coupled with terms like improved resource management as buzz words to cut head-count. If you are in the position of deploying an IT Service Management Agenda across your organization you have to take into account the human side of the deployment and recognize what is not always being spoken.

It is critical that you provide comfort in the new processes as much as you do selling the need to enhance them. Ignoring the on-the-ground concerns in any implementation of process improvement will only result delays and push back as walls are put up in sub-conscious efforts to protect the domain of the individual. Then you have a nasty mutiny to deal with.

When defining the roles of those charged with driving these new process initiatives, give some thought to the soft-skills side of the communication process. Simply being good at translating the ITIL Framework or Service Management process in general terms is not good enough.
Being able to "dumb-down" ITIL-Speak in a way that can convey benefit and value to be digested by the organization is critical. It takes time and understanding of who you are dealing with, but this is time well spent in terms of moving the program ahead. It is always easier to form an alliance up front than to tear down walls later.