How to Unlock the Hidden Value in Your ITSM Investments

How do you unlock the hidden value of your IT Service Management (ITSM) investments to deliver on all the promises made when set down the ITSM path?  If you are like a lot of organizations, you embraced the ITIL framework as you set off down the road to ITSM.  Operationally, things are working well.  The Incident, Problem and Change processes are working and you have even enabled a Service Catalog with requestable services.  Things are getting fixed more quickly and are less likely to breakdown.  Requests are fulfilled more quickly and accurately.  You are managing your resources fairly well.  You have many projects in the works that support the business.  Even with these successes, do you still have constant pressure to reduce costs and get budgets approved?  Are you still struggling with low perception of IT value in your organization?  Why doesn’t the revenue departments see IT as a strategic partner instead of cost center?

When you embarked on this journey and made ITSM investments,  you believed the perception of IT would change.  The business would see you as a “valued” partner working lockstep on the same objectives and priorities they have set for themselves.  Yet you struggle to manage competing priorities and expectations from the business.  They want it sooner, or their project is more important than another, and you don’t seem in sync.

Well, strap in for a four part series that will take you on a journey that may change the way you think about ITSM and the strategic linkage to IT Financial Management (ITFM.) This will provide you the key to unlock the promises and expectations associated with embracing ITSM. It is a journey with stops and layovers in some less understood concepts in both the ITSM and ITFM frameworks, and leads to new capabilities that can elevate your organization from a cost center to a business partner. In return this will change the dialog you have with your customers from “Why does IT cost so much?” to “We’d like to buy more of that.”   

We are going to start the journey with some clarification around the nature and strategic importance of the Service Portfolio and then a discussion on a model to enable fully functioning services that will be a game changer for your organization.  From there we will spend some time looking at how to link your portfolio of services to cost models with a clear value proposition for your customers.  We’ll also share directional guidance on value paths to help you navigate to the destination that works best for your organization. We will also cover some tips on elevating your conversations you have with your business constituency in terms they understand. We are going to leverage aspects of both ITSM and ITFM to unlock the hidden value, and we are calling this Service Financial Management (SFM).  

Here is a look at the itinerary for our journey:

Stop 1:  Anatomy of a Service Portfolio  

• Dispel some common misunderstanding of what the Service Portfolio is, and its role as the navigation system on the Road to Service Financial Management.

Stop 2:  Building Complete Services

• Discuss a framework and approach to build and manage services that meet customer expectations and articulate the value proposition.

Stop 3:  Establishing Value with A Service Cost Model

•  Establish the value linkage between services you manage and the costs to provide those services to your customers and business partners.

Stop 4:  Understanding Service Financial Manage Value Paths

•  Overview of the various options and capabilities associated with creating “service value” by leveraging SFM.

Join us next week on our first stop where we dive into the anatomy of a Service Portfolio.