My previous BSM evolution postings focused on mega-corporations and large IT organizations with a myriad of personas.  In this post, I will contrast the experience of a relatively small IT shop of roughly 30 full time IT operations personnel.

Back when the economy was cooking along, an up and coming commercial construction company grew right out of their business model.  Historically, they utilized a decentralized model, setting up and staffing a stand-alone onsite operation for each new project. This model was excellent at delivering customized project support, but lacked scalability and leverage; with remote site spin-up slow and error prone.

From an IT perspective, the CIO realized they needed to, in his words, "Consolidate and professionalize the IT operations", with the following goals:

• 1. Improve quality of service and experience for worksite users & applications
• 2. Contain IT costs and efficiently scale current IT personnel to meet growth
• 3. Improve speed, accuracy, and agility of spinning up new project worksites

Key Personas:

CIO

• Many years of commercial construction experience
• Personally drove IT consolidation / professionalization strategy and roadmap
• Directly engaged in evaluating and selecting the solution vendor/consultant

VP of IT

• "Co-pilot" for CIO on strategy, drove project deployment and vendor engagement

Subject Matter Experts (SME)

• One for performance and availability tools / architecture
• One for service management process workflow and automation (helpdesk)

Two Key Parallel Evolution Paths:

Path A:  Performance, availability, and quality of experience monitoring

Step 1: -Deployed synthetic end-user / application monitors, agentless remote site infrastructure monitoring, and general WAN/LAN management

             -Basic service experience reporting, and per-site performance dashboards

Step 2:  -Enterprise infrastructure fault/performance (agent based system, OS, DB)

             -Central "IT Command Center" event console with trouble ticket integration

Step 3:  -In-depth application management modules (exchange, SAP)

             -Advanced network services (route analytics, performance)

Path B:  Service management process workflow and automation

 Step 1:  -Single call/request center organization established

              -Incident management (utilized pre-packed ITIL module)

 Step 2:  -Knowledge management process, analytics and automation modules

 Step 3:  -Configuration and change management process/automation

              -Service Level Management definition and basic reporting

An Uncommon Sequence of Evolution Steps

Notice the interesting order of the steps.  The CIO dictated that the performance monitoring path start with remote site end-user / application experience monitoring.  The original roadmap proposed by the system integrator recommended starting with basic data center tools, advancing through central event console, then application and database management, and finally end user experience.  This is a traditional evolution path, but the CIO was adamant that, "what happens at the remote work-sites IS the business".  So, he wanted an immediate awareness of remote site experience to drive the design of every step in the roadmap. 

There was a similar "cultural" direction from the CIO on the service management workflow path.  Again, the CIO insisted that Knowledge management be moved up in the evolution before configuration, change, and service level management.  Typically, significant knowledge management execution is viewed as "icing on the cake" by most organizations, and only implemented after all the other core ITIL processes.

This CIO believed that analyzing and formalizing knowledge learned from successes and failures of spinning-up remote sites and dealing with issues was the best early investment. This approach immediately became part of the standard IT culture, and played a significant role in guiding change and configuration management process definition.

The CIO's Project-Based perspective

This CIO is indeed very ITIL savvy, but I think living and breathing the commercial construction business had a significant impact on his choice of system integrators. During the bidding process for the ITSM/BSM contract, it came down to three competitors in a direct "shoot-out". System integrator number one and two brought product and ITIL experts to the shoot-out, concentrated very heavily on features and functions, and gave a fixed-price bid of 200 deployment days. 

System integrator number three brought a project manager to the shoot-out, and changed 75% of the discussion to, "here is how we will navigate the project and be successful". Can you guess who won? It shouldn't be news to anyone that a CIO's background alters the decision criteria, or the roadmap vision.... But it is always interesting to observe it in action.  Maybe I will write a post about that someday

Conclusion

This IT organization is relatively small, so the decision making process and personas are greatly simplified compared with the large corporations previously analyzed. Despite the CIO's unique influence on approach and deployment sequence, in the end, the same fundamental truths of BSM/ITM evolution apply.... Just on a different scale, agility and timeframe.    

Bryan Dean - BSM Research

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