The Business’s Businesses Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

The world is full of myths. The great flood. The all-you-can-eat-diet. And, of course, the myth of the single business.

The truth is that in many companies, requirements are as varied as the number of departments or operating units IT serves. And that could lead to trouble for IT pros who don't maintain contact with their peers across all the business' environments.

"ITIL talks about how you've got to align to business and it seems fairly simple," says Derek Lonsdale, a principal consultant in PA Consulting Group's IT Infrastructure practice. "But it is a lot harder than it seems. One of the issues is, who is the business?"

Making assumptions on that point might result in IT investing its resources in providing the right outcome for one part of the organization, but missing the boat completely on what other sectors need.

Take a recent example from the work that Lonsdale and PA Consulting have been doing with one client, whose IT group had measured the success of its service desk by average speed of answer-for instance, that it would pick up a call within four rings. It resourced its service desk to support that, but meetings between the service desk manager and business operations peers revealed that they were more interested in speedy resolutions to incidents - i.e. better first-time fix rates so they could get the business up and running again - rather than speedy pick-ups.

Understanding different priorities

Had the service desk manager stopped with that information, without questioning other key stakeholders in the business at large, she might have considered her problems solved by resourcing the service desk to resolve incidents quickly. But then she would have missed out on the call center's very different priority of improving the request management process.

"Call center have a high turnover of staff, so the call center managers need to have new staff on board fast. They can't wait for IT to provide system access, hardware and software requirements that take weeks," Lonsdale says.

For this group, it was more important to deliver a rapid new-hire process that includes automated role-based provisioning for email, SAP and access to other call center systems. That request led into a program of work that probably wouldn't have happened had the service manager not extended the conversation to other parts of the business.

Such conversations may lead to requests that seriously challenge IT, of course. The trend today, for instance, is to focus on incident management since frameworks like ITIL V2 do that really well, according to Lonsdale.

"They don't do request management well at all and that is a big issue in organizations," he says.

ITIL V3 helps on this front, though, Lonsdale says, with more focus on request management as a requirement and through its lifecycle approach to services.

In addition to understanding the particular priorities of a part of the business, it's equally important to be able to prioritize dealing with business incidents from all quarters - to make sure you fix the right things first.

But is the right thing answering the call of the CEO who's having a problem getting his Powerpoint presentation to run, or getting printing back online for the financial department? The CEO might shout the loudest, and perhaps it seems like a good career move to address his concerns first, but if the presentation is for a local Chamber of Commerce luncheon and it's the end-of-the-month financials closing, then priority has to be given to the latter effort.

"What should happen is they should be saying, what's the business impact of the CEO not being able to use his Powerpoint slides at this particular moment in time," says Lonsdale. "Until you meet with the business managers, you won't know that."

And unless you do that, you won't be able to put prioritization matrices within the service desk to ask the right questions, either.

"There are things you can do to educate the service desk so they can ask questions around business impact and urgency," says Lonsdale, a process that's helped along with a good configuration management database that helps you to understand the relationships the item that has failed has with other items. Most customer interest these days is on the ITIL front, says Lonsdale, and he thinks the best practice framework will pay off in really aligning business and IT.

"But IT first needs to understand which processes are going to improve things the most, and that start has got to be what are the business pain points - not not the IT pain points."