The Problem with Defining IT Services

IT, as a service, is the little brother of services. It is still immature in its development and still trying to grasp the concept of service. Many IT departments do not get it. They think that service is synonymous with system.

My favorite example of a service is the transportation industry. For example, it we look at an airline that provides the service of transportation, we can compare the IT industry to a more mature service industry. They understand that service is the benefit the customer seeks to consume, without owning the system that provides the benefit. They know the service provides a benefit of moving from point A to point B.

If the customer is a wealthy member of the community, they might use a “full” service provider that handles everything; including collecting them at their front door of point A and delivering them to the front door of point B.

In this up scale transportation service, we find a number of benefits called service components. We find a ground-transportation component, a terminal component, a baggage-handling component, a ticket-processing component, the air-transportation component, a meal and beverage component, and seating component that allow the customer to board and depart the aircraft before other customers.

Over the last 100 years, transportation companies have sought to increase profits by reducing costs, as opposed to increasing value. As a result, some airlines have eliminated service components or charged for them separately. As profit drives the behavior of the firm, profit shifts from being a metric to being a mission, and we begin to manage by numbers, not satisfaction. This results in a dysfunctional airline. In order to gain control over the numbers, management feels they must isolate service components to reduce and fragment them into individual functions. This practice of fragmenting of service components is also known as reductionism.

Computing Services or IT, in its infancy, was started as a “full” service offering. Before the internet, desktops and networking, computing services were specialized and therefore de-centralized. Each service providing system was owned and operated at the department level. Manufacturing, Engineering, Accounting and even HR had its own staff of computing experts. The experts provided data entry service from point A to information reporting at point B. They even transferred data between systems on tape or disk. IT was a full service offering, with every service component included.

As desktops increased access and networking began to connect the individual systems, we could package information together in comprehensive reports. Unfortunately, the lack of vision and standards meant computing systems struggled to talk to each other. The inability of the various isolated departments to reach a consensus on standards and the pressure to drive down IT costs led to the formation of a centralized IT department. For a very brief moment in time, centralized IT departments offered full service information processing.

In the 1980’s the move to re-engineer processes led to the application of capability maturity models began to drive reductionism in IT. Processes were defined according to organizational silo. In the 1990’s the need to be Y2K compliant pushed isolation even further. Breakthroughs in the Internet offered another dimension to computing, however instead of bringing the fragmented pieces together, it drove them further apart.

For the first half of the first decade of the 21st century, IT departs have struggled with different configurations of functional structures and service components. Constantly reorganizing and shifting, hopeful to find the best structure to deliver the benefit of IT.

The science of modern business management is nearly 100 years old. While the principles are as solid as ever, the adaptability of management practices and the lack of willingness to embrace the advances of computing technology formed an estranged relationship. IT departments began to see themselves as having the power to create an automated alternative to outdated management practices.

While the answer was there all the time, many IT departments still cannot see it. In the early 1980’s a move to keep a true service focus on IT emerged in the United Kingdom. Over the years, it was introduced and reintroduced in the United States. Unfortunately, by then, most IT departments were so close to the computing trees, they had no idea there was a computing forest.

Many IT consulting firms define their challenge as moving the technicians away from the tree by providing education and training in ITSM. However, it should not be up to a consulting firm to lead the front line technicians to the Promised Land. That is the job of the head of IT, whether it is a manager, a director or a CIO. The ITSM consultant needs to begin with the leader, and help them re-define what a computing service looks like from the eyes of a business unit.