Zdenek Kvapil

For many proponents of ITSM and agile (DevOps), CIO’s world does not exist, or they see it only as a tiny part of their worlds. But this world is far the most important. This is the world of internal IT managers who are responsible for entire IT departments, in any imaginable type of organization – start-ups, SMB, corporates, enormously large companies with thousands of people working in IT, banks, telecoms, utilities, pharma, healthcare, government agencies, education, military etc. This is the world of the CIO who is challenged with unknowns, no decisions, no right way forward, ever searching for the least worst solution, fighting with major incidents, regulations, security risks, data breaches, data consistency problems, responsible for petabytes of any possible data, fighting to preserve past investments, while it looks irrational from the perspective of inexperienced manager, who never needed to solve the complexity coming from anything legacy or never worked in organization, where rationality of one is irrational for someone else, where strategies might be hidden, not to be shared across organization.

Major challenges of the modern CIOs are:

• What digital transformation for this specific organization looks like?
• Does more agility generate better and more innovative, truly disruptive ideas?
• Who should lead digital transformation? IT or someone else? Who else?
• Should we push on cost efficiency or prioritize innovations, or both all together?
• Which IT management model is the best for us? ITSM or agile or mix of both or even something more modern, born for digital era?
• How should we encourage cross departments collaboration and disruptive innovations, rather than incremental improvements of what we have?
• How to manage periods of silence and periods of radical changes?
• How to cope with seemingly irrational decisions which happen all the time, while we know that there might be some hidden parts behind of CIO information horizon.

Many CIO’s opt for daily management of something called common sense. They adopted parts of ITSM logic and parts of agile to solve some parts of their problems. As an illustrative figure of some organizations we may indicatively claim 20% ITSM and 10% of agile. But there is still 70% remaining. Is agile answer for any CIO problem? Or ITSM?

That CIO “common sense” is about making decisions at every possible moment, based on what happened yesterday, what challenge is coming today and what is the objective for tomorrow. It is balancing available resources (skills, money) to maximize benefits for the whole organization (not IT), or to minimize damage when an outage or something really bad happens.

The world of the CIO is a combination of adaptive and strategic management, where we also may use parts of agile practices or ITSM approaches for specific areas.

The fundamental challenge and the real need for a radically new IT management model is coming from:

• Ability to cope with uncertainty, decision making in ever-changing world
• Built-in zero input processing logic – “no requirement”, “no decision”, “no feedback”, “no go”, “no information available”, “no response”
• Managing self-improvements, self-monitoring, intelligent applications (aka AI, autonomous systems)
• Ability to constantly evaluate where resources should be allocated based on actual conditions and unknown future and expected benefits.
• Prioritize innovation effort in light of operational needs, maintain balance here
• Ability to measure the effect of innovations, understand the effect of resources used in every management domain
• Minimize administrative overhead while making maximum benefits through an efficient management model

These challenges require building from scratch a new management model, where the driving forces are collaboration (not profit of service provider), releasing resources for innovative effort, support for AI assisted decision making, support for intelligent agents, support for new emerging business models, where traditional profit calculations don’t work.

And this will come soon, based on actual knowledge.

Follow @Q4IT  for the next part of this exploration to be posted soon.

Previous parts of Paradigm trilogy is here

Part 1/3 ITSM

Part 2/3 Agile

“What you see is all there is” – this is a biased perception of the world surrounding us, as pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his brilliant book “Thinking, fast and slow”. Let’s explore this bias and its implications on the world of IT governance models and frameworks.

First part of trilogy 1/3 is here – context ITSM

Part 2/3 Agile

Completely new businesses have appeared in last 20 years which are not driven by IT service logic. Software-defined companies are the new phenomena, when disruptive ideas are materialized in completely new software, where radically different business models are encoded. Companies like Amazon, Facebook (and any social media), Google, Spotify, Uber are defined and represented by powerful software, where adaptations of business logic must happen rapidly, where responsiveness to changes is a competitive advantage and a way to drive constant improvements and innovations. New methods of how to adopt changes swiftly, with ability to automatically test and rollback failed changes, created fundamentals of agile development practices like Scrum, DevOps, SAFe and others.

For agilists the world of ITSM is history, slow and old fashion. A new paradigm is born – speed is everything, continual development and adaptations is the only right way of working to enable continually improving customer experience.

Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

Yet again this is not all there is, the reality of many IT departments is not just development of a new software, reality is frequently different:

• Continual inflow of requirements and improvement ideas from customers (business) does work, there might be no requirement, no idea what to do next
• Feedback does not happen, business users don’t have time for testing, no time to think about it
• There is a world of legacy applications in a status of a clinical death while we still need the data stored there. Can agile help with authanasia? How?
• There are security and business-critical applications, heavily regulated environments, where control, change tracking is fundamental prerequisite
• Business strategy change, once top priority project is suddenly terminated. Can you be agile without knowing where you go next?
• Decisions are not taken, progress becomes stagnation.

We must look deeper at another contexts, not limit our horizon of management patterns to paradigms of software developers, there is another world behind horizon.

Follow @Q4IT  for the next part of this exploration to be posted soon.

“What you see is all there is” – this is a biased perception of the world surrounding us, as pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his brilliant book “Thinking, fast and slow”. Let’s explore this bias and its implications on the world of IT governance models and frameworks.

Roots of ITSM are in 90’s when authors, dominantly coming from the world of external service providers collated a body of knowledge driven by service economy principles. Taking inspirations from airlines, telecoms and banks, and a new paradigm was created for that time, represented by the belief “every IT organization should act as a service provider”. Every IT department should create a service catalogue, define SLA’s, define charging models and start managing with an “us” (service provider) and “them” (user, customer) logic. Airlines are here to generate profit over customers, so service management practices developed for external service providers makes a lot of sense as there is an economic transaction, having a single point of contact make perfect sense for the traveller as they need to know where to send inquiries. Any interaction with the customer needs to be recorded to preserve evidence for billing and resolve potential disputes between the client and service provider.

This logic works well for IT organizations which act also as a service centre i.e. shared IT service centres, or fully outsources IT, when IT is a separated legal entity, selling its services to its mother organization or to other companies.

But when we apply this logic to internal IT departments, we see major toxicities:

• IT is separating themselves from their colleagues behind SPOC, service catalogue, SLA’s and reports.
• Resource consumption for administration is increased as additional bureaucracy is created and this increased bureaucracy is not measured.
• IT starts to be seen as costs saving department where efficiency is prioritized over innovations.
• Collaboration stalls.
• Digital transformation is becoming the agenda for anyone but IT which presented themselves as a service provider.

Next part 2/3 context Agile is here

Follow Q4IT on Linkedin or @Q4IT_eu on twitter for the next part of this exploration to be posted soon.