* Service providers, enterprises work toward common goal of service management
About three years ago, a trade publication rated analysts based on predictions they made, citing relevance and outcome. I remember getting something like a C+ (not a bad grade for the overall pack) on a quote regarding the fact that enterprises and service providers will be largely converging in many respects over time.
The idea was that enterprise IT must become more service provider-like in business model and that service providers must become more enterprise-like in their breadth of services and in their need to manage outsourced services from other providers. I think the editorial perception at the time was that this convergence was at best slow in coming.
Well, I am still holding consistent with the same prediction and am in no way ashamed of the slow progress. The truth is that this trend has been underway in some ways for at least five years and probably has another 10 to go before even its fundamentals have become realized. There are many reasons for this – the primary being that this trend embodies cultural, organizational and technological components that do not change quickly. They are like the slow shifts in the ocean’s salinity that can alter currents and profoundly alter global ecosystems, but are far less newsworthy than the hurricane of the year.
Nevertheless, I would argue that if you really want to understand the management marketplace – these slow-moving trends generally carry the most weight.
Of the two markets, it is generally assumed that the enterprise is the one inclined to move more quickly and show more innovation. However, this is not categorically true, and certainly doesn’t mean that enterprise IT planners should ignore the wisdom coming from their OSS colleagues. For instance, the TMF, or TeleManagement Forum, has some compelling initiatives in terms of dialog with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) on architectural issues. Some members of the TMF are also looking at the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management processes as they relate to their own eTOM process components.
ITIL began as a U.K. government initiative. More importantly, ITIL has become a de facto standard worldwide for IT, or enterprise-oriented, service management. The fact that ITIL is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. is a testament to the long-awaited coming of age for the service management paradigm – not just for service providers, but for enterprises as well.
ITIL’s processes for service management – as contained in “service support” and “service assurance” – have become classical guidelines for a growing number of enterprises worldwide. These service-management processes are generally operationally real-time in nature and include a definition of the service desk function within IT. Components include incident and problem management, configuration management, change management and release management.
ITIL’s service delivery category is more focused on the strategy and planning of services, although it also has real-time components. Its processes include service-level management, financial management, capacity management, IT service continuity management (for service restoration) and availability management. ITIL also has categories outside of service delivery and service support focused on areas such as application management (to include life-cycle requirements) and security.
By comparison, a great many eTOM processes show a distinctly service provider perspective on service management that, as incongruous as they might seem at first, should offer the creative enterprise IT shop a chance to rethink how their business is evolving and what they’re increasingly really about. Just a few examples will hopefully convey what I mean: “Product Development and Retirement,” “Supply Chain Performance Assessment,” “Product Marketing and Customer Performance Assessment,” and “Retention and Loyalty.” “Selling” even crops up as an identifiable business process component – which ought to sound both familiar and relevant to a growing number of enterprise IT execs.
