As the world of service management moves along the stickier side of its timeline, have we lifted our heads high enough to see what has happened to the people and technology we support? Are we best prepared for the customer of the future and have we created the best service desk cultures to meet their expectations?
ITSM has clearly struggled to discuss topics that seem so simple from a user stand point; cloud, social media and BYOD being the most recent concepts to strike fear into the hearts of our ITIL driven processes and service managers, but are excitedly discussed in public on a daily basis. These are technologies that have been used in homes, offices and streets without much input from us for a few years now and with the exception of lots of white papers and conferences, we haven’t done much at all in the way of building them into our services. A number of software vendors have given us the tools to do it and we still fret. Some service desks think they may now be ahead of the curve because they have Twitter feeds streaming into ticketing systems and can disable stolen iPads with a few clicks. But have we considered that this is perhaps just the bottom of the curve and those still in fear of trying this stuff aren’t even on it yet?
An important thing to remember about these challenges is that the demand has been brought to us by our customers and has been created socially, so we should also react to them socially. Businesses react to change by building processes and strategies in order to accommodate it into their existing structures. Societies react to change by adapting and embracing new things to help make them stronger and quicker. For example, your partner comes home from work and brings you a brand new iPad! Most of you will jump with excitement, tear open the box, download Angry Birds, Facebook and life is brilliant. Next week, your sales director walks into the service desk with their iPad because the email doesn’t work; you panic, shrug and then try to persuade yourself that you know nothing about iPads… “We just buy Dell”.
So how do you write processes for this? It is not like documenting how to access webmail or install your VPN client, those things only change when you say so. You have no control over this because it is socially driven by consumers and markets, Twitter’s latest privacy setting or the next version of Android may completely change the game and you don’t know how many of your customers that will affect or when they are going to ask you about it. Our once glorious empire controlled by asset life cycles, Windows authentication and ITIL books is now at the mercy of a queue of people waiting to use their Christmas present on your wireless network. So is it just having the right processes in place to support this that is holding you back? Perhaps you are waiting for your next budget to buy that cool cloud based BYOD software or have you found another loop hole in the marketing department’s latest justification to unblock Facebook? Is this sensible ITSM or is it just a classic case of fearing things we don’t understand?
So, is there a solution or alternative path to take? Perhaps we don’t need to worry so much about the technologies themselves, but instead how and what they change. The change velocity of social media and mobile devices is far greater than anything ITSM has seen before, and will probably be subject to a hundred more changes before we can re-read that ITIL chapter on change management and write something clever about how your company could manage BYOD. Do any of us really think that the Facebook timeline or Instagram will have a shelf life anything like Windows XP? Of course not, but we do know that right now, they are equally as important to peoples lives. If we focus on learning about how it all changes, what happens in society and at work to influence the development of devices, apps, communication and storage, we can then start to show that we are a digitally cultured service desk that appreciates why and how the world is constantly connected via social media, smartphones and so on. This is how customers of a service desk want to see you, they want you tell them how amazing and useful cloud storage is and not how dangerous and ‘unsupported’ it is. In reacting to social change within the tech culture with a similar change in your own culture, you help build a better understanding between you, the customer and the technology. Social change is often far more visible and immediate than a business change so it promotes the transparency and openness that comes with digital DNA and fundamentally, the internet. In a real IT culture that has the same change velocity as technology, it is not possible to write policies that keep up with all of these changes, so don’t bother. Instead, try to recognise what makes this culture so appealing and successful and re-adjust your service culture to match it. It is not an easy thing, but it is a natural thing and nature supports constant learning and change, not planned releases and written limitations. ITSM has stumbled along this road, trying to apply strategy to these areas and is now at risk of missing all the given opportunities to become a part of it, unless it sees the real issues. The famous quote; “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is true in so many business circumstances and this is no exception. Culture may not fix the email on the sales guy’s iPad, but it does help make it OK if you can’t.
Toby Moore, Idea Technology
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