strategy

Enterprises are wrestling with the conflicting needs to chase competitiveness in a world of endlessly changing technology, whilst still remaining mindful and careful. In IT we are caught in the same bind. I have written about this squeeze before in "To Protect and Serve".

This year I'm looking at solutions: how IT can deal with the dichotomy with Multi-Speed IT. By embracing Agile, DevOps, BYOD and other "liberation" approaches, and integrating them into our ITSM, risk, and governance practices, we can create an IT environment with a better chance of responding at the speed of business, whatever the business chooses that speed to be. This article proposes a nuanced approach to two-speed IT, where each lifecycle implementation is a blend of the two "speeds".

Over on the Pink Elephant conference blog, I talked to Pink Elephant’s AVP Product Strategy, Troy DuMoulin, who blogs regularly and – I think – with lots of insight. We don’t always agree (see my recent post) but anyone who themes his blog around the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has got to be worth reading, and the content rewards the effort.

Being a simple soul with only a limited grasp of ITIL, sometimes I'm sure I've missed something obvious. Like when I went looking in the Service Strategy book to find where the overall business plan or organisational strategy informs the service strategy. If IT is your business, if you are an IT service provider company, then I can see SS working. But for an internal service provider, for an IT department, SS reads as if service strategy is developed in isolation from the rest of the organisation, as if we treat the rest of the organisation as a remote customer of services instead of as the same team, from whom we take direction. At what point in SS do we ask the Board? At what point does the corporate executive inject policy? Where do we align with the business strategy? Or did I miss something?

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[Updated: My review of ITIL V3 "Service Strategy" is no longer available at the original website so I am reposting it here.] If V2 taught us how to walk, V3 teaches us to run. Trouble is, many organizations are still sitting down.

ITIL Version 3 makes a big ask of the ITSM industry. It will be fascinating to watch how it shakes out. The scope of ITIL is an order of magnitude wider now: how many individuals and organisations will have the knowledge and skills to step up to the new requirements?

Let us start with an interesting quote: