Service is always an issue and individuals and organisations daily face the challenge of overcoming bad service to enjoy the benefits of good.
Users in organisations must make the decision to accept that their computer memory is so poor they are barely able to operate or resign themselves to mind numbingly slow bandwidth? Or they can make their displeasure at bad service known. Organisations could choose to ignore the increasing malicious attacks on their unprotected networks and allow long periods of downtime, but it would be a mistake to do so; and no organisation would ever sit quietly and accept poor IT service. After all, there is a business to run, money to be made.
Technology must continually meet current and future business needs and IT service providers are the ones responsible for protecting the performance and availability of technical services and any supporting infrastructures. Driven to protect more than just service reliability, they must ensure integrity and confidentiality of critical data.
In order to do this, service providers must overcome a diverse set of challenges.
1. Complexity
Supporting a complicated technology environment inevitably requires the management of heterogeneous, multi-vendor networks with numerous layers of technology that must all integrate and function properly to provide critical services. Any weaknesses expose the IT service to increased risk of interruption or compromise.
It is therefore important to ensure that anything used to manage a complex technology environment actually reduces complexity rather than adds to it.
2. Change
Change is continuous: businesses grow, adapt to meet new challenges, streamline to save money, acquire other businesses or offer new products. If they do not, their chances of survival are slim. This fluid business environment requires IT service providers to smoothly adjust the technology environment to suite the organisation`s needs.
Although this is much like trying to consistently hit a moving target, knowing what the target looks like will ensure that the ball is rarely dropped.
3. Regulations
IT service providers are now instrumental in ensuring that organisations comply with the numerous laws, standards and regulations being written at alarming speeds. These laws are designed to protect everything from the integrity of financial reporting to consumers and employees. But they add to an organisation`s technological requirements and increase the complexity of an already convoluted environment.
4. Money
Paradoxically, IT service providers must adapt to continuous business environments, manage increasingly complex environments and satisfy constantly changing requirements, while tightening budgetary belts and forever trying to reduce operating costs. The scales in this challenge are heavily weighted. Sacrifice service for cost savings and the loss to company though service interruptions could be exponentially greater than any saved.
5. Evolving threats
As if the IT environment was not complicated enough, security is yet another challenge that must be managed to ensure service remains at optimal levels. Security threats range from benign to malicious, internal to external and the foreseeable to the unpredictable.
Service providers are as responsible for managing and containing any security threats as any specialists the organisation pays to do so. Due to the challenging technology environment, many different areas in the organisation can display symptoms of security breaches. Unless all areas of the IT operation work together, these warnings could easily go undetected; brushed off as an isolated problem rather than being seen as smoke signals from the fire burning through the whole organisation.
6. Intellectual property
IT is the last apprenticeship: much is learned on the job while little is documented properly. Few processes are self-documenting, thus limiting the effectiveness of any IT service to the skills and experience of the personnel involved. Steps must be taken to ensure that when employees, consultants and other personnel leave the company, their knowledge of the IT environment does not leave with them.
Providing excellent service in the IT industry involves overcoming challenges, jumping hurdles and negotiating a successful and repeatable path through an organisation`s technology jungle. A task more easily expressed than enacted; but one that should be non-negotiable.
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