Tuesday, July 20, 2010

What do ITIL, Alfresco Dining, and Enterprise Open Source Software have in Common?


A new client of ours recently asked me why I had pursued ITIL v3 certification ( Information Technology Infrastructure Library). Actually, she was more direct than that. “Doug, why is it relevant?” She asked this within the context of our discussion on the types of implementations we deliver in our enterprise open source consulting practice. She was quite satisfied with my answer, but only after I cited a specific engagement where another client of ours is beginning to offer an enterprise content management (ECM) system as a managed service to a diverse set of business units across their global organization.

A fresh set of empowered stake holders found themselves inheriting and a series of legacy ad hoc design and deployment decisions that resulted in initially poor performance, a lack of clarity amongst the business users regarding the value the ECM system, and a somewhat demoralized yet highly competent development staff. To date they had only been able to point to limited successes in a fraction of the business units the system was ultimately intended to serve. The new team discovered that there was significant lack of knowledge and abundant misinformation amongst the target business units about the capabilities of the system. Perhaps vendors of alternative offerings had tainted their view, perhaps they had seen a deployed system that had been configured for another business unit, and assumed that what they saw there was all that would be available to them. Comments were coming from business users like....”oh, it has a Wiki”, “oh, it can replace a shared drive with a 5015.02 certified electronic records management repository”, “oh, .....Google like search...we did not know it could do that” …. and all this, several months after the system became available.

Clearly the relationship between the IT department and their internal customers will benefit from the development of a services catalog, a central concept within the ITIL framework. Not rocket science, heck, not even computer science, just simply the development of a standardized list of what they offer. Imagine these two scenarios:

First scenario, customer view – with ad hoc services:

You come to my house hungry, and I offer to cook you something to eat, you have never eaten my food so you don't know if I am a good cook, and you are a picky eater. That is this the business units view of the IT group responsible for ECM at this client, and only a few have even tasted my food, and even fewer have looked in the fridge or pantry to see what is really available.

Second scenario, customer view – with services catalog:

We go to a well known restaurant drive through, famished and on a limited budget, with 30 minutes left on our lunch break. I order a “number #1”, and you, being a picky but hungry customer, order a number #3 with cheese, hold the tomatoes, mayo on the side, and super size that please with extra ketchup. We both get exactly what we expected.

Scenario one is where they are now, scenario two is where we feel they need to be in part via a services catalog as suggested by ITIL.

That was looking at the challenge from the business users view, now lets consider the applications development and operations teams that are expected to deliver and maintain the system for the business units. Clearly, setting up a RACI matrix will help everyone understand their role, and drive successful outcomes. Setting up a configuration management data base system (CMDBs) will record configuration items (CI) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CI's will improve overall results. Let's take the same example, but from the view point of the two kitchens and their chefs, one at my house, the other, at the other end of the drive-through pick up window. Imagine again these two scenarios, this time focusing on the development team and RACI:

First Scenario, delivery team view – ad hoc services:

Your hungry ( customer ) so I (developer) decide to whip up an omelet for you. I grab some eggs, butter, cheese....and tomatoes. I arrive proudly at the table minutes later with my creation, you smile politely, and quietly pick out the tomatoes, and eat around their remnants as best you can.

Second Scenario, delivery team view – with responsibility assignment matrix:
(This one takes longer to describe. A lot of effort went into distilling a menu down to 9 main choices and....over 20 billion served.)-

First, the person who takes your order knows their role, they are responsible ( the R in RACI) for taking your order, and then placing the items cooked by others into your bag, then delivering them to you, and finally, taking your money accurately.

If they routinely give incorrect change, mess up orders, or are too slow, then their boss, who is accountable ( the A in RACI ) will take corrective action up to and including termination.

If there is a highly belligerent customer, the order taker knows they should consult the manager ( the C in RACI ) who may chose to intervene in dealing with that customer.

Finally, when an order takes longer than the company defines as acceptable, then according to policy the meal should be comped or discounted, and a record of this action is made... “Hey boss, I gave that customer a free burger with their meal, it took so long because the cook cut his finger and we all got backed up”....and the boss is informed ( the I in RACI).

Again, scenario one is where they are now, scenario two is where we are helping them move, in this case via RACI, which predates but none-the-less is part of the ITIL framework.

Regarding the CMDB's, this is analogous to the framework provided to the fast food restaurant franchise owner which supplies most of what they need to run the business, from fryers of an exact size with automated temperature control, and bags of fry's pre-measured to fill the basket, to a set menu, building plans, standard employee policies, and even standardized point of sale (POS), labor management and financial systems. In an IT setting, leveraging ITIL's notion of a CMDB is a worthy goal, but it is not always the first goal. More on CMDBs' at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management_database

Effective use of the ITIL framework demands an understanding of where a project is at a given point. If we had been working with this client when the setting up of an ECM was just an idea, rather than 2 years into a struggling project, our initial emphasis would have been on strategy and design. But in this case everyone involved, including us, needed a quick win, short on arm waving, and long on tangible results. Job one, remove the visible warts that caused the business users that were actually using the system the most grief. Job two, set the stage for successful role out to other business units, and in so doing improve the moral of the beleaguered delivery team with the most effective ointment of all, success.

So when is leveraging of a services delivery framework useful? Whenever the risks of confusion regarding the delivery of that service outweigh the effort required to invoke the framework. If the offering has a managed service component, whether you are outsourcing any, all, or none of it, it behooves you to present the offering in the language of your target audience. The notion of a services catalog (menu) service level packages (menu items) and the creation of service level agreements (external contract) and organization level agreements (internal contract) is spelled out in ITIL and provides a simple framework for just that. Enterprise open source application vendors tend to interact first and most often with the developer community. This makes it hard for the message to reach the business users that these systems are often very powerful and frequently at least on par with the closed source systems with which they compete. Immense war chests funded by license fees create effective marketing machines for closed source vendors that intentionally contribute to the fog, but a services catalog can help lift it.

Viewed in its entirety, ITIL provides logical common sense framework to help guide us through strategy, design, transition, operation, and continuous improvement in the delivery of IT services, and we are hard pressed, at least in our practice, to find situations where leveraging these principles does not help our clients succeed, whether we chose to attach the ITIL label or not, and regardless of where our current situation dictates that we should begin. But keep in mind that too say leveraging ITIL is a recipe for “best practices” is like saying putting two pieces of bread around some ground beef is the best way to make a burger. We have to create our own best practices within the context of the situations we face. When we put some ground beef between two pieces of bread we end up with a sandwich. Whether we end up grabbing a burger from a bag, or dining alfresco on steak tartar, toast points, and capers depends on the chef.


Doug Bock is a Principal at Wide Open Consulting and is available at:

doug@wideopenconsulting.com
404-290-1981