PUBLICATION: ITWEB ENTERPRISE DATE: 25 FEBRUARY 2011

Changing focus
By Paul Furber, ITWeb contributor 14 Feb 2011 Can IT be a service? Can IT systems be looked at from the perspective of service delivery to customers? It's a contentious topic: technology diehards will say that IT needs to be looked at from a technology point of view; business and process management players say that IT needs not only to be a service but should be structured as a set of services.

Remy Zuelle, business consulting manager, IBM Tivoli Popular international standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and ISO 20000 provide business managers with formal ways of checking how IT should work. Remy Zuelle, business consulting manager at IBM Tivoli, says if you subscribe to IT service management (ITSM), then IT does need to be treated as a service. But he's not 100% happy with the 'IT' part. "If you look at business today, mining, transportation, gas, oil and so on, their most important assets are not IT. I would prefer to call it integrated service management because it's not just IT. But definitely IT itself should be a service." Louis Rossam, senior executive of products at Accenture, agrees. "IT is the key enabler to any part of a service in an organisation," he says. "It's the pivotal link."

Patrick Price, principal consultant at CA Africa, says the sole purpose of IT is to support the business services the organisation provides to its customers.

Size matters
Sixty percent of our GDP is driven by small business. "IT systems are the building blocks that make up a business service. Additionally, some of the services that IT provides may be consumed internally in the organisation, but these internal services are, in turn, required to ultimately enable the organisation to provide its business services. Technology, or the technology components that IT is responsible for, is the focus of the internal IT competencies, with these technology components then feeding up to the IT services that, in turn, make up the business services. An IT service strategy is there to measure and understand how IT is supposed to be delivering these services to the business." Garth Hayward, regional manager for Africa at Kaseya, says correctly applying service management has yielded measurable results for his company.

Louis Rossam, senior executive of products, Accenture "We forget that in SA, 60% of our GDP is driven by small business. It's not driven by formal business. On the small business side, we've seen our partners take companies into contracts with SLAs based on ITIL standards. We just finished our analysis and we now have 3 000 companies that weren't formally serviced in the last 12 months. There is no IT without service. ITIL is a stake in the ground; it says this is what good service looks like, this is how to deliver it, and this is how to measure it." So what's the problem? According to Jan Roux, MD of the Integr8 Group, people in the IT industry always see what they do as a service. "But if you speak to the business side, their view is different," he says. "Whether business sees what IT does as a service is still questionable." Edward Carbutt, MD of Marval SA, says the reason is one of perspective. "It's difficult for IT people to step over the fence and look back at themselves and ask, 'What is it that they're offering us and what do we use them for?'"

IBM's Zuelle says business managers want three basic things out of IT. "When we started to talk to CEOs about what they wanted from IT, they said they wanted visibility into services from a business point of view, control of them, and automation so they can free up resources to contribute to business objectives."

Tunnel vision
It's difficult for technical people to step back and look at themselves. The conflict happens, notes Integr8's Roux, when business wants to have their cake and eat it too. "There is a lack of trust between business and IT. In some industries, people are comfortable to go to a cleaning company and buy a service from them. They don't care how it's done as long as the office is clean. But when they go to an IT service provider and ask for a service, they're hesitant to just let go of it and hope the outcome will be fine. They want the best of both worlds to have IT as a service but also to control how it's done." Accenture's Rossam says that's a pretty accurate measure of maturity. "You do find good examples of good integration and connectedness and understanding of IT as a service, but it does depend on the maturity of the organisation and the model." Will the increasing influence of cloud computing change the way organisations approach IT service management? Marval's Carbutt says it will be a mixture of both.

Patrick Price, principal consultant, CA Southern Africa "There are some things in IT service management that you can have in the cloud and some things you will just have to have in-house so you're close to them." Rossam says services will naturally evolve as the security and data privacy issues are sorted out. "Some companies may feel sensitive about certain things today but in five years' time, it's going to be a cloud service. The more mature your IT service model is, the more open you will be to near-shore versus offshore. It's the whole 'I need to see it' versus

'I'm expecting a service'. If you can trust the service and your service management is mature, then you will let go more. If you're immature, then you'll want to count the MIPS and the bytes and the lines of code." For Vernon Vlok, business development manager at Numara SA, the addition of cloud into the mix shouldn't have any effect at all on a company's approach to ITSM. "Your service management structure should stay the same, whether things are in-house or in the cloud," he says. "It's just an additional checkbox. We do have some obstacles to cloud, though. We don't have the legislation within financial services. Our banking sector will have to have some things in-house because they can't send it out for legal reasons.

Ticking boxes
Your service management structure should stay the same. But cloud itself is here and it will just get bigger. We're moving to cloud and software-asa-service (SaaS) because the cost implication is huge and the maintenance is taken care of. In this country, people buy software left, right and centre but they don't often maintain it the way they should. With SaaS and cloud services, that becomes irrelevant." CA's Price says the move to the cloud is purely an alternate provisioning method, "but is one that the internal IT organisation will still be responsible for managing and ensuring that it meets the organisation's business requirements. IT will still be responsible for the delivery of business services to the enterprise whether they are hosted internally or via a cloud provider mechanism."

Susan King, service management executive, UCS Solutions But there's a subtler point too, as Carbutt points out. When more of IT becomes a service, there will be a shift in the focus of service management, particularly with regards to managing contracts and relationships. "Instead of drawing up operational level agreements as they do now, companies will have to draw up proper contracts with the service provider," he says. "That's one change. The other one will be in the ability to manage and support your systems. Now, at some point as we evolve towards having more services in the cloud, there will be a lot of effort and energy required to keep the underlying contract going because the service is so critical. That's where I see our focus shifting."

Will companies become structured like ISPs were 10 years ago, with large Telkomfacing departments and precious little customer service? That will depend very much on competition, notes Susan King of UCS Solutions. "If a provider gets so large that it's either them or nothing, then we're in the same place as we were with Telkom, where you don't have a choice." One of the side effects of IT service management, along with outsourcing, has been the idea that the IT department can be run like a profit centre. Instead of being just another department like HR and legal, IT should charge for its internal services. On the surface, it's an attractive idea. IT, after all, has the potential to be very accurate at measuring what it does, certainly more than other departments. Rossam is not a fan of this approach.

Vernon Volk, business development manager, Numara Software SA "Running IT as a profit drives strange behaviour. If you want more for less, then do process improvement and focus on it. If you put profit into the requirements for IT, then it's a huge additional challenge. And what do you do with those profits?" Adds Carbutt: "Unless IT deals directly with the end customer, it cannot generate profit. The only way you can manage finance in IT is to reduce cost. You cannot generate profit by charging yourself; it's funny money." Zuelle is a fan to a certain extent. "Big organisations in Europe have started treating IT as a profit centre and we have it here as well. Although most of them run their departments like profit centres, they have to give the money back. What they're trying to do is be much more aware of the costs to account for everything and also to incentivise them to acquire other business or run the business for other organisations. It's not just a cash cow thing." And, of course, standards such as ITIL aren't static. They're continually improving and changing as technology does. Perhaps that's the fundamental challenge of any formal management of technology to impose predictability on something that's continually changing under our feet.