* Be clear on difference between resources and objectives
With all the pressures on IT organizations to improve performance and accountability while paying increased attention to best practices, compliance and new management technologies, it’s easy to become confused. Arguably, the enterprise management marketplace is at an inflection point akin to where it was in 1991 – when the first platforms emerged to challenge the absolute hegemony of point products in the distributed management environment.
The new changes are structural, architectural, and surrounded by acronyms far more “mystical” in nature than SNMP – such as Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), just for starters.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that I am beginning to see a tendency for circular, or perhaps worse, even Brownian, motion in many IT organizations seeking to get a foothold on this Brave New World but not knowing where to start.
Typically, the catalyst comes from a process-oriented initiative, most commonly from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of best practices. This is an excellent place to start.
But in large enterprises with many different organizations with different processes and procedures, an initiative sensibly growing out of one area – such as the help desk – may not suddenly look so sensible when it’s imposed on another area, say the network operations center. Procedures that are review-oriented (in terms of pairs of eyes) at the help desk may be automated (software-driven) in the operations center. Both approaches may make sense given separate organizational context, but when you put them together, sometimes they can become counter-productive. In some cases, automated problem resolution which can be done in minutes in the operations center may expand into hours and sometimes days when rigid review procedures are imposed.
Similarly, initiatives to invest in new management technologies for corporate-wide IT organizations can become bogged down if they try to do too much all at once. The spirit is right – consistent tool sets with consistent processes and consistent data sharing across multiple organizations. But when imposed from above without proper attention to current procedures, the result can be chaos, or circular motion at best.
Even individual professionals or small groups within an organization may experience circular motion as they seek to jettison old, tried-and-true ways of working for new, more “evolved” processes and management products.
All the best practices in the world and all the advanced management technologies in the world are not going to tell you what you should do and how you should do it. Circular motion comes when catalysts for change – which is indeed what best practices and good management products truly are – become confused with the end objective in itself.
An organization that has as its end objective to “become ITIL compliant” is missing the boat. The end objective in this case should be to become more effective in serving your IT customers. ITIL is a reference point to help you get there, not the end itself. Similarly, and of course this should be even more obvious, no IT organization’s end objective should be to standardize on a single brand or single set of products. Its end objective should be to leverage a consolidated and standardized approach to management to improve its efficiencies.
This may sound like a subtle or perhaps an obvious difference, but trust me, in the real world the difference between recognizing that technology and even best practices are “catalysts” and seeing them as end points is night and day – yet it’s all too often overlooked.
To avoid circular motion in a complex and changing industry in virtually all ways (technology, compliance requirements, best practice awareness and even the role of IT) requires paying attention to operational and business context and, even if you’re not an executive, making that job number one. There is no book to teach you this.
Understanding who you are as an IT shop is, just as in living your own life, something you must decide first for yourself before any of the above resources can truly be helpful. And it’s not a once-and-done process either. How and why you work and what your customers need will continue to change and evolve. To forget this is guaranteed to lead to circular motion – as resources become confused with endgames.
