Subscribe

Five mindset priorities

IT service management is as much about managing relationships and expectations as it is about what the end-user experiences.

By Johann Barnard, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 01 Apr 2014

Warwick Kingsley, principal ITSM consultant at Pink Elephant, believes today's ITSM environment requires IT execs to adopt the following five mindsets to deliver business value.

1. There are no more IT projects
All IT projects are, in fact, business projects, which is a switch made easily enough if the organisation stops thinking of IT as a back-office function. In organisations that have successfully made this shift, there's no longer a blurring of lines between business and IT to the point that it is non-existent.

2. Define value as the business sees it
The only thing that matters to the business is the end result, and the best way to define what is considered as 'value' is to ask the person or people who make that judgment call. This decision needs to be driven by identifying the need and measures of value at the operational level.

3. IT must be integrated at the executive level
It's no longer an imperative for the CIO to have come through the ranks of the IT department. Technical skills are trumped by managerial and strategic skills. By having the CIO part of the strategic team, it allows the IT team to define the business strategy and not simply respond to it.

4. KISS
IT departments have fallen into the trap of believing that the more complex the solution, the more value it adds. Keep it simple and start to embrace the growth of so-called shadow IT. Users often suffer greater frustration from these complex solutions that do not deliver what they need. The shadow IT movement to mobile apps and cloud services is a clear indicator that the business solutions are not meeting a need.

5. Think social and on-demand
The measure of value today is about availability and access to services. This means focusing on the user experience and ease of use as the measure of true value rather than the technical capabilities of user-facing services. No matter the bells and whistles, if the users don't like them, they're unlikely to use them.

Share