The governance of service delivery and service performance has never been more important than today.  We have demanding customers and business units, less money and less staff, and extremely complex delivery models, many of which may be outsourced, multi-sourced or shared.

ITIL as a discipline and best practice is a great guide for organisations on how best to support and deliver services that are aligned with business needs.  The success of ITIL however is measured by the performance (SLAs/KPIs) of those services (stats, customer surveys and feedback, proxy measures, etc.) and the effectiveness of the Service Improvement and Business Change Programs that run alongside ITIL services.

So given this and, given the many sources of information that underpin ITIL SLAs/KPIs/Projects/SIPs/etc. (e.g. transaction systems, excel spread sheets, projects plans, word documents, information in people’s heads), 2 key question remains.

“How do you connect all this disconnected information on a single page (or iPad), to understand how effectively ITIL is underpinning service performance in your organisation?”

“How do you decide which aspects of the service require your focus and attention at the next governance meeting?”

The Challenge

For years IS Management have sought the Holy Grail of a well-structured, top-down management framework for IS but this has failed to materialise. Decisions on operational performance, infrastructure change management, third party outsourced delivery and numerous projects require a lot of information to be crunched and brought together for governance meetings.

ITIL/TOGAF/Prince2 have been around for quite some time and are big business.  Consultancies sell time delivering these frameworks and these solutions.  Often they design beautiful paper based processes with wonderful documentation that unfortunately never get adopted.  Software providers deliver solutions that support different bits of it.  Some of them deliver solutions that reportedly support all of it.

The fact is that ITIL/TOGAF/Prince2 are great frameworks of best practice and guidelines, but rarely, if ever, are they supported by one toolset or process within any organisation.

Typically, information on the performance of ITIL , Governance, IS Service delivery (SLAs and KPIs) or IS Projects, as well as the risks, issues, decisions taken, commitments made, SIPs on-going and outstanding actions, reside in (and in some cases are locked in) a variety of systems. MS Word documents, MS Excel spread sheets, MS Project plans, CRM systems, Service Management systems and financial management systems are all the places we keep this locked disconnected information.

Furthermore the information of most value (e.g. the context behind a performance indicator, the progress on an issue, the status of a milestone in a project) may be locked inside someone’s head.

Combined, this mix of data (both the facts and and the context/opinions) is the critical data that we need to aggregate.  When we do, we get to see whether the things we are doing and the decisions we are taking, are having the desired effect on the organizations performance, customer satisfaction, or whatever the key outcomes are that define success.

Current Solution Options

Solutions like Digital Fuel’s Service Flow with reporting platforms like Cognos/Business Objects/SAS and enterprise project management platforms like Planview/Primavera/MSProjectServer are a possibility, but the cost of buying and integrating these platforms is often prohibitive.

Additionally this approach is not quick.  Infrastructure needs to be purchased and implemented, requirements need to be understood, integration points need to be analysed, software needs to be installed, all before the configuration and training is even started.

Increasingly organisations are looking to avoid complex environments with 3-4 tools welded together to get the answer and they don’t want to wait  6-12 months before they start to see results.  They have a governance challenge and they just want it fixed quickly.

So this cost and complexity of building and integrating multiple platforms has led the industry to a much “easier”, but more manual, way of doing things. Excel and PowerPoint based governance reporting dominate business reporting including ITIL and IT Service Management.

To be clear, Microsoft is the most widely used set of tools on the planet for data analysis and performance reporting.

With Microsoft Excel we

1. Extract the performance from all our key systems
2. Build graphs of the performance of each of the metrics
3. Manage our Risks, Issue, Assumptions and Dependencies
4. Track the actions we agreed at previous meetings
5. And manage things like change requests, financial performance, stakeholder engagements, communication plans, etc.

With Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Word we

1. Build visually nice reports for our stakeholders
2. Import all our summary data and graphs do each area or service line
3. Add commentary regarding the performance
4. Update with the latest information on risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies

We do all of the above to avoid the need for big systems, bypass them if they are already in place, and most importantly meet our commitments on governance and performance reporting to our stakeholders.  What we have created is a cottage industry on governance reporting. Moreover every document is usually stored in some sort of document repository as the belief is that this means it is shared and dynamic – is it really?

What would the “almost” perfect solution look like

If we had a magic wand and said “what would the solution look like?” I would suggest that it could be described as follows

• It will be able to understand corporate outcomes and model the direct linkage of IS delivery and projects to those corporate outcomes.
• It will have ITIL/Togaf/PRINCE principles preconfigured inside the system with limited need to build these.
• It will be able to aggregate a lot of very detailed data from any service tools like HP OpenView, BMP Patrol, Remedy, SupportWorks, Assyst, Microsoft , Primavera, etc. etc. and connect that with commentary from people
• It will be able to present the same information rolled up to appropriate levels of summary.
• It will require no infrastructure, can be switched on tomorrow and turned off when no longer required.
• It will be setup within a matter of weeks and used by the people within the organisation with very minimal training.
• It will be able to be deployed to as many users as needed without increases in cost per user.

So back to our questions

“How do you connect all this disconnected information on a single page (or iPAD), to understand how effectively ITIL is underpinning service performance in your organisation?”

As I see it you have three choices.  You either

a) accept the cost, complexity and long lead times that go with coupling a number of large solutions together to deliver this level of connectivity to, or

b) retain or hire a load of people to manually do this and accept the costs, risks, manual errors, and lack of confidence that goes with manual ITIL reporting, as the reports are not directly connected to the underlying data and audit trails of progress, or

c) you find something that looks similar to the “almost” perfect solution I describe above, that will take what you have already, enrich it with context and perspective, and deliver it on single page views (and iPad views) per governance point.

“How do you decide which aspects of the service, or current project portfolio, require your focus and attention at the next governance meeting?”

This remains in the realm of good management but good managers are made great managers when they have the information they need, can consume it quickly, have visual indicators on where to focus their attention, and can get to the detail and audit trail on any item with minimal effort.

When provided with this, great managers make quicker decisions and consequentially are much more likely to achieve the goals they are responsible for delivering.