Improving service support for Real IT
I think all ITSM practitioners know exactly what idealised service support looks like. It's all well and good painting these idealised dream pictures. The value comes in describing how to get there. There are certain obstacles:
IT culture. We all agree the average or stereotypical IT department is misanthropic. There is lots of hard work going on to change that. Folk forget that improving service is the fundamental premise of ITSM - it is what we work for.
Time. It takes a lot of time to change IT, both as an industry and in individual organisations. "A lot of time" means years, even decades. Not months.
Money. Apple and Rackspace and other service poster-children are in a retail market where those particular companies have chosen a premium-service business model. The majority of IT organisations - what I call Real IT - are NOT in retail dealing with product-buying end-users; or if they are, they are NOT pursuing a premium-service business model. Most of us live in a world where service support has to be provided with constrained budgets and sinking staffing caps.
I wish pundits would stop going on about what the perfect world looks like with unlimited resources and time. Instead they could more usefully offer some advice on how to do better with what we have now in the Real IT world.
But that's hard, and requires knowledge and experience. We hear a lot less about that.
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