The three perspectives of IT service delivery

Friday, 22 May 2009

From Rational decision making for IT leaders, written jointly by Dr Richard Williams BSc, MSc, FLS, MRI and Gordon Miller BSc., Procertis Ltd

Managing IT service delivery doesn't look like it should be all that hard.  After all, service delivery can claim to be one of the best codified and constrained areas of activity in contemporary business.  The goals, standards and penalties of service delivery are enshrined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which spell out the obligations of each party in the relationship while quantifying the costs and benefits accruing to each.  Sadly, despite this detailed level of required conformance, service delivery as viewed by the business is notoriously difficult to achieve, while SLAs prove to be a focus for conflict rather than partnership.  Why is this so?  And what can business leaders do about it?

Our experience suggests that the underlying problems with IT service delivery can be traced to an incomplete appreciation of what service delivery is, and what it is for.  By building a more complete vision, leaders can create service relationships that are more valuable, reliable and harmonious.  More importantly, they can align themselves with the evolution of the enterprises they serve, ensuring that the business can grasp new opportunities without being held back by IT.  In the process, we'll suggest how SLAs might be reinvented to serve the real needs of the people they are meant to benefit.

Finding all the angles

The most successful established industries and professions share one feature: they all take a multivariate approach to the set of problems at the heart of their concerns.  They produce their results by combining several different angles on the problem, relating specialised views with each other and balancing the claims of each. 

Take property development, for example.  Any property development project can be looked at from a number of different points of view, including those of the financier, the tenant, the architect, the local planning department and so on.  We can expand and abstract such points of view into thematic perspectives such as building use, structural engineering constraints, cost, decommissioning factors, and market opportunity analysis.  This is not a complete list, but it conveys some sense of the distinct angles that decision makers need to take into account when shaping a project.  Notably, these kinds of concerns tend to be articulated and developed within a professional tradition.

We can see the same multivariate approach being used in manufacturing.  In fact, the approach repeats as a pattern at different levels of the manufacturing discipline.  At the product level, decision makers will assess product proposals according to a range of perspectives including cost, safety, sustainability, size, durability, usability, use of exclusive intellectual property, accordance with standards, price, and many more.  Again, the articulation and management of such perspectives can be found in professional bodies, as well as in the hiring and training disciplines of industry players.

Those familiar with software development will immediately see the connection to IT.  Systems too are designed from a number of perspectives, including business requirements, performance criteria, and available infrastructure.  But intriguingly, this universally recognised multi-view approach seems to vanish when we reach the strategic decision-making level where IT is required to prove its utility to the business.  Above the systems design level, we tend to find an abrupt collapse in the number of perspectives used to make decisions.  Even where an organisation has an “IT architecture” function, this team's remit is often limited to preparing and updating a technology roadmap, and any efforts it makes to promote management of the applications portfolio beyond mere cataloguing of existing systems may be met with silence or incomprehension.  And, despite the best efforts of technology leaders and academics, there is still no obvious, authoritative source of illumination about the perspectives that should be used for decision making above the individual systems level.

The three perspectives of IT service delivery

We believe that decision makers need to take into account three separate, but interrelated, perspectives when assessing the performance of IT service delivery or considering investment options. 

Continuity view

This is the business-as-usual view of services, which is usually identified with the service management team.  The concerns here are availability, reliability, cost containment and risk mitigation.  The continuity view is often enriched with a strong customer orientation, informed by ongoing dialogue about service performance.

Transformation view

This view of services belongs to the individual or (more likely) team responsible for enabling change in the business through IT support.  Formal ownership of this view often rests with a programme manager.

Delivery view

This view belongs to those charged with delivering a new service into the business environment.  Sometimes known as the “drop” phase, the delivery perspective is associated with development project managers. 

Combining perspectives

In a world where the ability to respond rapidly to change is becoming ever more vital, the three perspectives should have equal significance in the decision maker’s process.  After all, if nothing changed, why would anyone care about transformation or delivery?  However, organisations usually evolve biases towards one or more perspectives, at the expense of the overall view – despite paying lip service to the inevitability of change and its implications for management.

The continuity or business-as-usual perspective is especially strong within IT service organisations.  Many leaders of such organisations would argue that continuity is what they do: the other perspectives in our model do not interest them.  Transformation, in particular, is currently more of a rumour than an actuality in the majority of delivery organisations.  Where transformation is recognised as a real phenomenon, it is often identified with external consultants and seen as a force that threatens continuity.  Delivery is frequently the poorest of these siblings, being regarded as a short-term perspective emanating from a minority team tasked with inserting a new feature into the service landscape.

The differing perceived values of these three perspectives are political.  IT service teams were set up precisely to embody continuity, which gives this perspective a natural advantage in the wider organisation.  Put bluntly, continuity is where most organisations' moral investment is to be found – even if that investment has been made by default rather than decision.  Transformation, on the other hand, is disruptive, ambitious and, by implication, critical of existing practice.  Those who champion the transformation view may be seen as ambitious, or unrealistic.  The strength of the continuity view, taken with the weakness of the transformation view, typically turns the delivery perspective into a mere client of the continuity brigade.  This is why incremental changes tend to win out over major changes in the evolution of IT services.  In organisations where the transformation view reaches dominance, delivery switches patrons.  

Rational decision making requires that leaders recognise the current status of the three perspectives within the enterprise, and seek to correct the biases.  In some cases, this can be relatively simple.  For example, the delivery perspective can be strengthened by insisting on its independence.  Delivery is a discipline that must be resourced and developed in its own right.  Delivery must also be free to negotiate its collaborations with other perspectives in light of the business's goals.  It should not be merely a handmaiden to whichever other view gains supremacy in the ongoing dialogue.

Gathering the perspectives

Most organisations have a preferred perspective which they tend to use in approaching any kind of business challenge.  This habit is so deeply ingrained in organisational culture that insiders rarely notice it. Management teams put a great deal of unrecorded effort into justifying their actions and the outcomes they experience according to measures dictated by their preferred perspective.  It's as if they're unwilling to let go of the notion that the earth is at the centre of the universe, spending valuable time on devising formulae that will explain their observations of the heavens in terms of this model, rather than adopting the simpler heliocentric model that will account elegantly for the data.  But, just as we shouldn't mock the ancients for not being as smart as Galileo, we mustn't denigrate those businesses that cling to a perspective beyond its sell-by date.  After all, it's hard to know what you don't know.

We advise leaders to recognise the three perspectives of IT capability, and to consider that the organisation may well prioritise one perspective and neglect some or all of the others.  They may find that the different perspectives have different champions – a situation which is (albeit incompletely) reflected in the classic top-layer structure.  The finance director of a company, for example, is naturally charged with promoting financial concerns.  Finance directors are expected to champion this specialist concern, but also to work collegiately with their peers.  Meanwhile the struggle to bring IT representation into the boardroom via CIO and CTO appointments expresses the widely-held feeling that IT's point of view isn't being aired adequately at strategic levels.  The danger here is that the senior IT leader may embody a partial or biased point of view, rather than the fully rounded one that we describe in our three-perspectives model.

Wider participation is the key to ensuring that all three perspectives are addressed.  The sources of the information that will substantiate these perspectives will be found embodied in different people throughout the organisation.  It's unlikely that any one individual will hold all three perspectives equally in his or her mind at any one time, let alone at all times.  But we're not asking anyone to be superhuman: if you have to think about every dimension of the business in every moment, then you'll be overloaded.  However, it is reasonable to ask an organisation to assemble or synthesise a three-perspective account of IT capability and make it available to the decision-making process at appropriate times.  

Towards a new breed of SLA

As we have noted, IT service delivery practices are customarily enshrined in SLAs which are not designed to allow change.  SLAs are written from limited perspectives, and their crucial role in the service relationships means that they bolster those limitations.

To be clear: we're not against SLAs as such.  An SLA – or any kind of contract – is immensely useful in defining and documenting the working relationship between a supplier and a customer.  Without such mechanisms, neither party can be accountable for what takes place during their relationship.  It's the content of traditional SLAs with which we take issue.  As a profession, we need to retrieve the SLA as a mechanism of control and evolve it into an enabler of change.  If change is a given – as everyone agrees – then the working relationships we create must not just recognise that change happens, but also actively facilitate change.

We believe that the way to do this is to replace the hard-coded constraints of SLAs with references to the business's three-perspectives model.  So, for example, rather than being bound to deliver “99.98% uptime”, a supplier would be required to deliver against a variable level produced by the client's model.  The client would be responsible for publishing this data and guaranteeing its accuracy, while the supplier might be given a suitable notice period for major changes in the variable's value.  The SLA would then be acting as a transmission mechanism, linking the dynamics of the business to the engine of IT.  We'll have more to say on this subject in a further paper.

Correcting capability bias

In our discussions with businesses of all shapes, sizes and types, we notice a recurring dysfunction when it comes to understanding the impact of continuous business change on IT support.  We describe this in terms of a skew in the three perspectives of transformation, continuity and delivery.  We believe this skew is holding companies back, and creating a real business threat for many of them.

The problem lies in the relative capability exhibited in each perspective.  Here is the typical pattern of capability across the three key perspectives:

Figure 2: Typical capability pattern across transformation, continuity and delivery perspectives

Note how continuity or “keeping the lights on” dominates the capability curve.  This pattern is remarkably consistent throughout established organisations.  Leaders have yet to articulate the capability pattern they need to apply if they are to adapt successfully in the face of continuous change.  The shape they're looking for is this: 

Figure 3: Ideal capability pattern across transformation, continuity and delivery perspectives

With this balanced capability profile, change really is the norm.  The organisation's attention is focused on the continuous absorption of change.  Resources and attention are allocated equally to the three perspectives so that the business continues to perform successfully during its evolution.  

Authors

Dr Richard Williams – Managing Director

Richard gained a B.Sc. (Hons) degree from Birmingham University in Biological Sciences, a M.Sc. degree from Reading University in Pure and Applied Systematics and a Ph.D. from Warwick University in Molecular Biology.  He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a member of the Royal Institution. Over a period of 20 years in the IT Industry Dr. Williams has successfully started, built and managed his own IT companies gaining first hand experience of almost every aspect of IT design, sourcing, delivery and management.

Gordon Miller – Principal Business Architect

Gordon has 20 years in IT after gaining a degree in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics from the University of Liverpool.  He has vast experience as a business architect, with in-depth business modelling and system specification skills.  Using a wide range of capturing and presentation techniques, he has undertaken consultancy engagements for government and large organisations, mentoring key staff within client organisations on the use of best practice methodologies and tools for large project delivery. 
 

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