Give me an experience

Not only do I want to enjoy using applications, I also want to enjoy interacting with the IT organization. So don't bore me with your tedious inside-out service level metrics, communicate with me. Well, at least try to communicate. Think about what kind of experience you think I should be having when we engage. Use every 'moment of truth' to reinforce that experience. And get some meaningful feedback from me (not yet another badly though out survey) and do something with what I tell you. 

Social information management

Managing information from a business perspective has always been a challenge. How do you motivate people to use information systems as they're supposed to be used? How do you ensure data quality? How do you discover what improvements will make a difference? How do you manage change and transition? How can information help your business strategy?

 

Engage your users

-          Get raw feedback (be prepared for a shock)

-          Inform users when there are incidents or outages

-          Generate ideas for improvement

-          Improve relationship with clients who use your apps

 

Stockholm System Syndrome

Ever felt happy with an application when you've completed a longish transaction without it having crashed and losing your data? Yep, that's the Stockholm syndrome: "a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, essentially mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness."

I think of some applications as benevolent dictators. You're obliged to use them and they direct your actions in a polite but firm way: "Please re-enter your data".

Emotional application lifecycle

Your relationship with an app will probably go through a lifecycle something like this.

 

·         Anticipation – you're looking forward to getting the app or being authorized to use it

·         Disappointment – Too high expectations

·         Resignation – Guess you'd better get used to it

·         Acclimatization – It's not that bad after all

·         Frustration – It's habits are annoying me more and more

·         Alienation – The thrill has gone

 

Seeing as all relationships seem to come with a 'best before date', it'll probably end up ugly.

Appersonality

Let's anthropomorphize a bit. Can applications be happy, grumpy, authoritative, lazy, reliable, fickle, cruel, stupid, intuitive, responsive, sexy? Sure they can. Think about it. 

So what about the poor IT services consumer?

The IT community tends to focus on improving their own processes and organizations for the supply of IT services and it’s right that they do so. But on the other side of the demand-supply chain there’s another realm of responsibility that doesn't get as much attention. Often this is the weakest link in the chain, resulting in a disappointing return on investment in IT. What kind of responsibilities do user organizations have regarding demand and consumption of information and IT services?

Operations

· Effective usage of information and information systems

· Ensuring the quality of data

· Interacting with the IT department regarding service calls, service requests etc

Change

· Translating needs into requirements and specifications

· Interacting with the IT department regarding changes and projects

· Designing the manual and procedural side of information systems

· Preparing for transition in the user organization

· Reviewing and testing of the information systems and the organizational readiness

· Implementing change in the user organization

Management & Improvement

· Monitoring the quality of information and its use, including security aspects

· Identifying opportunities to achieve business goals using information (technology)

· Determining new and changed requirements

· Business cases and funding

· Procurement and contracting of IT services

· Interacting with the IT department at a tactical level (services, service levels etc)

· Deciding on and managing changes and projects

Strategy

· Determining strategic goals, direction and architecture for information as an asset for the organization

Governance

· Determining strategic relationships and governance of use of information (technology)

The Business Information Services Library (BiSL) offers guidance for user organizations with respect to how to achieve and maintain an effective and efficient information provisioning, including the relationship with the IT department. It is targeted at both at roles that are directly related to information management, such key-users, information managers, information analysts, business analysts, enterprise architects, but also at roles such as line managers and directors who have the responsibility for ensuring that information is used appropriately within their departments and divisions.

BiSL is free guidance for user organizations, provided by the not-for-profit ASL BiSL Foundation. If you're interested in learning more I'd recommend downloading the free Management Guide.

Loosely Coupled Sourcing & Closely Collaborative Sourcing

Introduction

In my IT Management Consultancy practice I've recently noticed that organizations are struggling with dividing the IT Service Supply Chain into parts that can either be outsourced or given to an internal depart to perform. This paper explores the underlying sourcing principles.

The difficulty is in how activities can be divided into packets of activities that can then be delegated to internal or external departments and how these departments are going to interact.  This didn't used to be much of a problem – you'd usually settle for a division between Business Information Management on the demand side and Application Management on the supply side, with Infrastructure Management behind Application Management, supplying the environments (production, acceptance, test and development/maintenance) that Application Management had specified. So why are people currently struggling, what's changed? I'm going to explore the demand-supply divide another time and now focus on the division of labour within the IT Service Supply Chain. 

Conclusion

As IT landscapes are breaking down into more discrete components and IT Service Providers are specializing in their own sweetspots and becoming agnostic artists, organizing the IT Supply Chain (or Network) is becoming increasingly important. This is reflected in the changes that were implemented in the second version of ASL with the introduction of the processes Supplier Definition, Supplier Management and Operations Management, covering governance and management of suppliers; and the repositioning and renaming of Service Level Management into Contract Management, reflecting that an Application Management provider not only can be engaged directly by Business Information Management in the demand side, but also as a subcontractor by another Application Management provider on the supply side.

The guidance in this area is to critically re-examine how the chain is organized and determine whether it is still an effective instrument. So when you're making sourcing decisions about complex landscapes, please analyse the gray areas and decide on the division between labour based on your evaluation of the need for close collaboration and mutual adjustment and the ability of suppliers to perform in this area. Nowadays sourcing strategy is more about creating a network of loosely coupled interactions than anything else. Just like the organizational design principle of 'decentralised if possible, otherwise centralized', here it's 'loosely coupled sourcing if possible, closely collaborative if not'.

Details: please mail me if you're interested in the paper from which this is an abstract.