Managing IT processes - a modern pentathlon

David Smith is President of  Micromationinc.com and specializes in Metrics, TCO, ISO 20K and ITSM implementations. This article was published before in the March edition of the ITSMF Canada newsletter.

The recent announcement of Gartner retiring the Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk must have been a shock for many tool vendors, but the reasons which Gartner has stated for this decision reflects the change that is currently going on in the Service Desk tool market. Service Desk tools are still important for modern IT, but the pure Service Desk functionality will not act as a differentiator anymore among the over 75 tool vendors. Instead Gartner stresses that this kind of functionality should be just a component of a larger suite addressing a wider scope. This new challenge puts new vendors in focus. For instance, OMNINET a German ITSM software company that has taken a completely different approach, where the starting point is that ITSM is never an isolated process inside any organization, although often treated this way. The result is an organization with distinct processes and tools over several departments, where a universal solution would be beneficial. By providing a universal platform rather than an ITSM tool, OMNINET offers companies the possibility to organize closely related processes in a single environment called ‘OMNITRACKER’, which offers great benefits.

An example of the advantages of the integrated approach to ITSM is delivered by OMNINET’s customer STRABAG S.E., a multinational and one of the largest construction companies worldwide. BRVZ the central IT-Service Provider of STRABAG S.E. receives 35,000 service requests per year, from 75,000 persons. 15,000 of those service requests include a real demand for new services or IT equipment that needs to be delivered to one of the 2,700 locations and construction sites or IT distribution stocks. Of course, the classic ITIL service support and transition processes are vital to keep heads up in daily IT business at BRVZ. However those disciplines can just partly do the job as BRVZ has to manage huge amounts of charging data records for hundreds of thousands of cost centers at the same time. STRABAG S.E. consists of more than 60 local companies all over the world. The distributed organization puts severe requirements on the development of new or individual services. This is why tightly integrated Service Design and Strategy processes were in direct focus at BRVZ. To design STRABAG’s own interpretation of “best practice” ITIL processes, that span several departments and companies, was complex, to implement them in the existing tools was almost impossible.

Oliver Punz, responsible project manager at BRVZ: “We have chosen OMNITRACKER because of its platform character, flexibility and its guaranteed update release compatibility even for highly customized processes. The result is SCOT – Several Companies One Tool – a platform that provides seamless tool automation from initial customer service request via the purchasing and stock management back to the delivery of a business service including all sub-components. Now we can solve incidents and manage purchase orders in our OMNITRACKER-based ITSM tool at the same time. When CI’s are delivered we can manage our IT stocks in real-time and track the full configuration management process in one system without entering data manually all the time. Even the booking-in of CI’s works fully tool-supported by using barcode scanners integrated with the shipping notes forms and SACM in OMNITRACKER. Last but not least, our IT and purchasing department have a common 360 degree view on our suppliers and our infrastructure and internal IT stocks. Everything is transparent and fully documented in OMNITRACKER. Meanwhile we have extended the scope of this platform to integrate our software development and their projects in our processes, too.”

There are many other areas in which ITIL processes extend into non-ITIL disciplines and methodologies and where an integrated approach offers benefits.

For example, Project Management tasks can be a realistic result of IT-Service Management processes. As soon as a Request for Change (“RFC”) exceeds a certain threshold of complexity, effort or risk it is essential to setup a project. Of course, a simple RFC can use the standard ITIL workflow but complex ones need to be broken down into manageable activities which then need to be planned and monitored.

The handling of requirements also can get you out of the ITIL area. At a certain stage the standard design and review mechanisms described in ITIL might not be able to manage the complex service requirements anymore. In this case classic Requirements Management methodologies are a proven way to transform customer demands into service and system specifications. Additionally as soon as software-related IT services are under construction it becomes essential to perform professional test management and implement bug tracking procedures normally being used in the area of software development.

German ITSM software vendor OMNINET identified lots of every day scenarios where methodologies like Prince2, SCRUM or HOOD perfectly complete the ITIL picture. As for the process coverage in ITIL, OMNINET believes that it will become even more in future. ITSM Tools like OMNITRACKER need to be prepared even for the unexpected. There will be a new demand, where tools instead of acting as a single system or system-suite will have to change into a flexible homogeneous platform and this change is reflected in Gartner’s decision to retire the current Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk tools.

 “The flexible and easy way in which our clients can add or change processes, almost without any limits, is without any doubt what appeals most to our clients”, says Justus Beek, responsible for OMNINET’s North American operations. “They end up reducing the amount of applications they run and can get rid of numerous in-house developed and often unsupported tools. The result is a reduction in licenses, complexity and risks. The approach has proven to be very successful for both small companies and big ones. Companies can freely modify existing templates or configure their own Application Templates, so the scope of the OMNITRACKER platform is virtually unlimited. This is done via a configuration environment, not by writing code.

The strict separation of business logic and core functionality within OMNITRACKER has another advantage. No matter how complex the implemented business processes are, how wide their scope, the core platform remains unchanged. This is true, even for tailor made application templates or for templates with many complex external interfaces. Because of this, OMNINET is able to guarantee in its license agreements that the solution is always release compatible.”

IT-Service Management, Project Management, Systems Engineering, Stock and Order Management, Risk Management – it is going to be a modern pentathlon for most of the IT-Service Management vendors.