Part #1: Making a difference
This is the first of a 6-part series looking at how Business Analysis can help shape your ITSM strategy and piece together your roadmap. We will start by establishing why Business Analysis is needed.
Synopsis: The world of the IT manager is complex, multidisciplinary, and rapidly changing. IT Service Management is about adding value to the business. The role of the business analysis is to help IT managers get from ‘I have a problem’ to ‘I have a solution I can justify’.
Staying up to date
We were going to start this blog by saying that IT is changing now faster than ever, but if you work in IT, you already know this. New products are released every day and existing vendors feel obliged to pump out new releases twice a year. No one wants to get left behind as innovation in areas such as AI, automation, and analytics, offer a competitive advantage.
New trends and products are appearing faster than new styles in the fashion industry. Last year’s ideas are denigrated as being out-of-date, but cutting-edge ideas are unproven and rarely provide the results the hype suggests. Gartner shares its Hype-cycle as a framework to navigate the latest innovations, and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant analysis has become a quick way to understand the players and capabilities in a marketplace.
However even with this analysis, understanding best practice and the ‘art-of-the-possible’ across IT disciplines is a full-time activity.
Technology experts
IT managers are expected to be experts in technology areas. Quite often if you tell people you work in IT they expect : “I build computers”, or “I develop code”. Most managers in IT have come through technology streams, and there is an expectation that they will retain their technology knowledge.
Considering the rate of change of technology, this is no mean feat. A manager who still gets their hands dirty will get respect from those who work for them, and those who consult them. A job interview for a technical role is not just a test of the candidate, it is also a test of the recruiting manager to evaluate the candidate’s answers.
Managing services
It has been said that Leonardo da Vinci, painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, sculptor, and architect, was the last person who knew everything. Today, even the biggest IT departments cannot have all the skills to manage the full range of IT services. Instead, specialist IT services are bought from venders and sewn together into a seamless whole.
The modern IT manager understands what problems they are solving, and how to manage technical services to deliver the whole. Despite this, IT Service Management is not fully understood even by the technology community.
At the last ITSMF conference, one speaker said how much she liked attending, as the people at the conference actually understood what it is she does. Most techies enjoy the technology, but don’t fully appreciate that it must be diligently designed and assembled into services. The biggest mark of success for the IT department is when users completely fail to appreciate the complexity behind the scenes.
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Business change
Besides the ‘plate spinning’ of delivering an IT Service, the IT manager must develop and deploy new services. They must bring together the technological components and must also navigate the business processes for delivering change.
IT changes are investments that need business cases, roadmaps, and implementation plans. Any project involving new technology will result in changes to ways of working and will impact people. Organizational change is a key part of the success of any initiative, and so this is another skillset needed by the IT team.
Frame the problem
The complexity and rate of change involved in providing and maintaining IT Services has led to a change in behaviour from the modern IT Manager. In previous years we (as a supplier) would describe our range of products and services to potential customers and ask them for their functional requirements.
From a sales viewpoint it would be great if all IT managers with come with a completed business case and a cheque book. Instead, we now meet, and work with, IT managers who bring business problems and ask for our input.
They don’t want to keep up with every new thing. They want to stay close to their business and help it achieve value. They articulate the business problems they are facing and want experts to point them at options to invest in.
At this ‘problem’ stage the IT Manager typically has a minimal budget, no business case, and no process or tool in mind. Instead, they have a problem, and they ask how do others solve it?
Business Analysis to the rescue
The role of the business analysis is to help IT managers get from ‘I have a problem’ to ‘I have a solution I can justify’. This needs to start with developing a clear definition of the business problem. The business analyst can help frame the IT problem as an initiative that will benefit the business.
They would also know how service management practices come together to assemble a service. An analyst who has worked on a solution before would know the costs and benefits, and be able to articulate a clear business case that they know will add value.
Next time…
Next time, we will look at how complexity and rapid change presents the IT manager with ‘Wicked Problems’.