* Selling service management to small businesses
It’s no secret that the technology needs of small to midsized businesses are often left unmet. For most SMBs, budgets are lower, IT staff is limited and overtaxed, and strategic planning is secondary. Will these organizations be able to shift their paradigm to take advantage of managing IT from a services perspective?
Let’s begin by looking at process models. There are innumerable products that address service-level management. Many of the vendors offering them are taking advantage of the increased interest in process development and “management of IT as a business.”
Enterprise Management Associates’ research has repeatedly shown over the past two years that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the process model most commonly on the minds of IT groups across every vertical market segment in North America. It was widely accepted in Europe long ago.
But a recent EMA study revealed that companies with fewer than 500 employees are not adopting ITIL or really any process model at the same rate as their large enterprise counterparts. In fact, 30% of the 191 survey respondents indicated that they had no plans to adopt a process model at all.
That’s not to say that there are not some SMB organizations moving down the process path: 19% of participants have adopted ITIL, 26% have developed their own process model, and 23% are planning to adopt an unspecified process model.
EMA sees this as reflective of financial and staffing resources required for this investment. It is not largely a lack of awareness, but rather one of ability to implement.
There are many challenges involved in implementing a service management strategy, not the least of which are dealing with the politics of working closely with business leaders to understand the company’s priorities and goals, evaluating the status of business processes that may or may not exist, integrating silo-oriented technology management, and dealing with all the different personalities along the way. IT must then add to this a solid understanding of how to manage IT from a service perspective, implementing tools and IT processes, negotiating SLAs, gaining approval for SLM purchases, and then training IT and business personnel on the merits of IT service management.
EMA’s research shows that of those SMB organizations that have begun the process of adopting ITIL, service-level management has not been the first priority. Instead, those disciplines that help to address the inherently reactive nature of small businesses have been implemented first. The most common priorities were problem management (93%), change management (69%), incident management (67%), and configuration management (68%). Implementing these particular ITIL disciplines will help to put small businesses’ IT shops in a position to move to service management. But they are not reflective of service management more broadly – creating a gap for these companies that needs to be filled.
IT groups have a finite set of resources – human, budgetary, tools – regardless of company size – so decisions have to be made on a daily basis about how to allocate these resources. For SMBs, this can be related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – basic needs have to be satisfied before more visionary approaches can be tackled. While IT managers can allocate some resources to move in a services direction with the knowledge that it will serve its enterprise well in the long run, core needs must be met to maintain IT functions in the near term.
Most service management products are geared towards large enterprises, but 56% of the products covered in SLM Solutions: A Buyer’s Guide, Third Edition, claimed to target SMB businesses about 20% of the time. This represents significant growth in SMB attention from one year ago.
But how many are truly tailoring their products to SMB needs?
SMBs can and do hire consultants to help them move more quickly towards service management – but as I heard recently from one IT shop, “consultants with ITIL and service management expertise are difficult to find.” Perhaps the call to action in the question of SMB and service management must go out to vendors. Vendors that reach out to SMBs and listen to their needs for simplistic, automated, and phased approaches to service management may in the end help market growth.
