The future of IT management

We're having lots of great debate about a number of areas that are supposedly going to transform IT. The focus of this blog is IT management, so here are some thoughts on what is and isn't going to transform IT management, including some long-overdue predictions from the IT Swami!

What a stimulating podcast this week from ITSM Weekly British Edition ("Rest of the World" my arse. The world doesn't end at the White Cliffs chaps, and you ceased to speak for a third of the world about half a century ago). Well it was stimulating for me, and not just because I got (mis-)quoted a lot (thanks Pat for getting closest).

I really do believe that the transformative technologies that get all the fizzy attention are not going to change the fundamentals of IT management. And into that bucket I lump virtualisation, social media, mobile devices, personal computing, BYOD and f***ing iPads (I can't believe how good Apple marketing is at manipulating otherwise intelligent and critical people. More than anything I'm reminded of junkies or besotted lovers I knew when I was young: "for god's sake, get control back of your own life!"). Yes, they'll change some of the mechanisms we use to do the practices if IT management, especially how we communicate, but that's manageable and mostly positive, and certainly not earth-shaking.

I'm equally convinced that we are not seeing a radical shift in those fundamentals of IT management because of outsourcing in general or cloud in particular. And that's because I don't believe we are seeing a radical increase (sorry James). Oh sure, Cloud and the Third World have both caused an up-tick in the amount of outsourcing right now. But I am going to blog sometime on the fallacy of linear extrapolation. Sunrise, sunset. The curve is up right now. That doesn't mean it won't go down again as outsourcing goes back out of fashion as it has done in the past.

I'm misinterpreted as saying I don't think these things matter, or they will have zero effect. I'm not saying that. I'm saying they won't change our strategies in the governance of IT, they won't change the principles by which we operate, they won't change the overall practices we employ.
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What's more, I don't believe any of us have some mystical ability to see the future. Prognosticators have almost invariably been spectacularly wrong in the past (IT or otherwise), and the lunatic pace of change right now only makes that more likely. So when I hear of some supposedly transformative new trend, I want to see the evidence. It's called being a skeptic. And that means evidence of a genuine change under way combined with a causal mechanism why the trend is going to accelerate (usually a feedback mechanism, or the collapse of a damping mechanism). Even then I'm going to keep my powder dry as long as possible, because in the real world I'm spending other people's money and risking other people's laboriously accumulated assets.

The IT SwamiBut if you demand some guesswork about the future, no-one gives more reliable forecasts than the IT Swami. He's been buying up land in the Wairarapa lately, hoping that more of Peter Jackson's mates will follow James Cameron out here to buy up big green squares of New Zealand. I gather he (the Swami, not Cameron) has been funding that operation with what he grows on the land he already owns, so he may not be around for long. But right now he's quite close to Wellington, so I braved a drive over the Rimutakas with a bottle of Wild Turkey and an MP3 of the podcast on my Droid to loosen his tongue.

I'm not saying which had more effect, the audio or the bourbon, but here's three predictions about the future of IT management from the Swami :

1) I've said in the past we'll see a shift in emphasis to more on Governance, Service and Assurance and less on Infrastructure, Lifecycle and Operations. The changes caused by all that guff [virtualisation, social media, mobile devices, personal computing, BYOD and f***ing iPads] , because there are some changes, will mean we have to work harder at defending the organisation from IT as we lose some control over that IT itself. Please don't rush off Chicken Little style and quote me as saying there will be no more Infrastructure, Lifecycle and Operations. Unlike some pundits I'm talking about a shift in weighting here not a transformation.

2) We need to do more around communication channels with users, obviously. As Pat mentioned in the podcast, we need to "spy" on external user communities to see what they are saying. But I don't think that is as big a deal as some make it out to be because (a) for many of us our users are not uncontrolled - we share an employer, and (b) that's just one more source of detection for existing incident and problem processes. More important in communication is to teach the business how to govern IT properly - IT as a resource, not IT as a department - and to teach the users how to be grown-up in their use of IT at work.

3) There just might be a really significant change to IT management brewing and one of the bellwethers is this blog from Charles Betz who is usually way out there on the intellectual/theoretical frontiers of IT. I've always hated the word "process" in IT management and Adaptive Case Management just might kill it once and for all. Now that has the potential to be transformative to IT management. In comparison the iCandy is a geegaw.

Comments

Teach the business how to govern IT properly...

Well said, Rob. “More important in communication is to teach the business how to govern IT properly - IT as a resource, not IT as a department - and to teach the users how to be grown-up in their use of IT at work.”

I am a fan of the book “IT Savvy” by Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill. This point resonates very well with what I believe.

David Lowe

Process mining

Well, I'm not sure I'm ready to say that Adaptive Case Management is anything more than an interesting development on the horizon... :-) But it does point to what has been my approach all along: look at what non-IT practitioners are doing and talking about, and ask, "will this matter for IT management?" ACM in this case showed up for me through following the BPM community, in particular Paul Harmon's BPTrends.com.

I've had a couple discussions about IT process mining in the wake of that blog, and a demonstration of a compelling, as-yet experimental tool that can use status updates, email and other evidence to analyze the "real" flows that work takes. It reminded me of some of the debates that we got into over Value Networks.

Rather than invalidating a process approach, these empirical maps clearly are most useful as inputs back into a refined, more realistic process model. (I'm not ready to give up on the word process - that is a step too far IMO). And sometimes they show inappropriate interactions and bypasses, where the process really should be enforced.

It's in closing the BPM loop (model the process, execute the process, analyze the results, improve the process accordingly) that I think there is real potential.

I've been thinking a bit myself on next generation service desk, stay tuned.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com
http://blogs.enterprisemanagement.com/charlesbetz/

I have been pushing this

Now I see that we are heading to a major bend on the road and I have been asking help both from Charles and James in trying to formulate it. ACS is an interesting possible solution for some of the problems that wait around the corner.

I can remember seeing a few earlier on, sometimes as a passive spectator but a few times as a preacher. When I set up Help Desk Institute in Finland in 1992 a lot of people did not see any need for help desks. When I set up the first open ITIL Foundation course in Finland a lot of people saw no need for processes in IT.

One of the reasons I was able to make those observations earlier was that I had the opportunity to travel abroad and talk with people like Malcolm Fry, David Ratcliffe and Ron Muns, to name just a few of them. Now we have this social media which makes traveling less importance. I wrote on Riitta Raesmaa's blog that I feel that I have learned more in the last 12 months than during the previous 12 years. Might be a slight exaggeration but there is some truth in it. Thanks Rob, James, Chris and rest of you.

I was sitting today in a Cloud seminar with Eucalyptus presenting (and happened to read your tweet about sharks and software salesman, good reminder;). The organizers told that their customers are putting up cloud secretly, they do not want their competition to know about it. Sometimes they don't want their IT to know about it.

Aale

have fluid workflow but still control practices

I'm ready to nail process in IT management. You yourself said there are actually only a few activities that could be called processes. I'm prepared to believe that all of those are performed by professionals that we should give more flexibility to. A model such as Adaptive Case Management that allows us to have fluid workflow but still control practices (not processes) with policy and rules makes eminent sense to me in an IT management context. I'm out to learn more, even if it means reading another bloody book.

True

The seminal work on process management is Rummler's Improving Performance...

Yes - absolutely, there are relatively few true IT processes. My book specifies 9, but an even more rigorous count would be 7. Jan van Bon's ISM calls for 5. But, that doesn't mean the whole concept goes away.

Part of the problem for IT folks I think is that "process" means something specific in computation, and the relationship of that usage to "process" in a human context is troubled. A process in a computer is utterly constrained by binary logic. Human processes, not so much.

My primary criteria for human processes has always been countability. The process needs to be repeatable to the extent that we can reliably count it, and agree that the repetitions are instances of the same thing.

But execution repeatability is a chimera the further you drill in. (This is actually true in computation as well, as the fundamental existence of a binary 1 or 0 is probabilistic at the quantum level on the microprocessor.)

Not sure that the term "practices" is helpful. A process should follow certain business rules. Those need to be minimally specified; less is more. But even ACM admits the need for process invariants.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com
http://blogs.enterprisemanagement.com/charlesbetz/

I miss the "like" button

To click on in for this las comment from the IT Skeptic... Really... We *are* prepared for a change...

Antonio Valle
G2, Gobierno y Gestión de TI
http://www.gedos.es

1000th blog post

I think I'll take the evening off and have a few of those Wild Turkeys myself. This is my 1000th text blog post on this site.
That is excluding ITIL Wizard or polls or BOKKED or podcasts or info pages or other extras, and not counting posts on my other sites... just plain text Skeptic. Whew. Six years.

Six Years?

6 years from now Wednesday, February 7, 2018
6 years before now Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Working time:
12 514 hours
521.4 days
74.49 weeks
1.429 years
17.14 months
assuming a 40-hour work week

72 months
312.9 weeks
2190 days
52560 hours
3.154 x 10^6 minutes

For the metricsexuals in the room.

what's that add up to?

I'm being my usual imprecise self: it's 5 years 9 months ago, 2006-05-16. But your numbers are near enough for me.

Here's another one for you:
1000 posts at say a couple of hours each
Podcasts: 58
ITIL Wizard answers: 44
BOKKEs: 78
Legends: 4
Other pages: 66
8917 comments read
2279 comments written at say 20 minutes each
about 900 spam user-ids deleted
500 spam comments deleted
hundreds more hours building, checking, configuring, maintaining the site

At say $100 per hour what's that add up to? best not think about it.

World Peace

If it wasn’t for your blog a lot of the debate would not be happening you really should give yourself a big pat on the back.

As for the “focus” of your blog, google says:

“A sceptical view of ITIL, CMDB and whatever else ...”
See https://skitch.com/chrisdancy/g9w3b/the-itskeptic-google-search

You seem to be spending the latest few cycles talking about the “everything else” portion.

The time period before blogs was horrible for paper magazine publishers, but they adapted.

Today with so many new forms of media, it really is a struggle to just see any of the debate.

I won’t invite you to a recorded conversation, but I do hope to see you at Pink12.

Kind of fitting that you do so much rich media for Pink Elephant, in a way it helps to see what works and what doesn’t.

In conversations passed, you have referred to me as your “zeitgeist”.

I wanted you to know you are just as much of a “spirit of the times” for myself and a lot of people.

My CEO today told a company wide audience that people still have AS400’s, DOS machines, etc. The idea being at the root of the CIO’s mission it was to secure and make things safe and profitable, and only “lower” level people focus on the shiny fun stuff.

I immediately thought of you and how you are so dead on with things.

I then remember that AS400’s and DOS machines used to be the shiny fun stuff for some people.

As far as the podcast goes, my only comment is to defend the boys. They called themselves “The Rest of The World” because two years ago or about 80 hours of audio, US show was the only thing talking about stuff in a big crazy fashion.

They called themselves the “Rest of the World” as a poke at the US centric show.

After watching reactions globally, I asked a bunch of folks in your neck of the woods to start a show.

ITSM Weekly, the Antiopodean edition, was a direct result of me poking fun at UK team poking fun at my local show.

To be totally fair, NONE of our lilywhite monotheistic or agnostic asses have the right to claim anything using the word WORLD in it.

It would be reductive to take apart your blog piece by piece, so I will only tell you that I value your opinion and I hope you continue to help people have a balanced view of all things shiny.

Peace brother.
Chris

peace is breaking out

Hmm it's time I updated that blog tag-line eh? It's six years old now. Or perhaps not. It supposedly has a significant effect on SEO and "ITIL" and "CMDB" are still hot keywords :) I have always wandered off into other topics. That first year of the blog - seems an age ago now - included posts about best practice, wikipedia, VOIP (twice), IBM, open source, running IT as a business, debasement of terminology, analysts, salesmen, Bullfighter, ISO20000, Microsoft patents, business cases, PC-based TV, acoustic shock, Web 2.0, mainframes, vendors, software branding, Powerpoint... I think this blog has got more focused on ITSM over the years not less. [Note to self to do something about that]

yes I was joining in the spirit of the piss-take with my comments about "Rest of the World". James is a bit exasperated with me of late but in general I like to think we're all still mates.

Not too much peace I hope, that would get boring :) See you in Vegas!

Exaspersated of Little Britain

There was me thinking it was Chris who labelled us as the Rest of the World show, though the point about the title being meant as a dig at the US centricity of the original show holds good.

I think it is actually extremely useful that you are taking such a polarised approach to what is going on out there in IT in the 5% club, though I can't help noticing that in this thread you've presented a much more reasonable position. Well OK, a slightly les reactionary one.

If you joined a few of the dots you would see that Charlie's excellent paper is actually just one part of the same big picture that Aale and I have been hammering on about this year.

Let me just reiterate what we are saying in three points:

1 -There are a range of very real changes heading towards IT at the moment, that are certainly high on the agenda of my customers, which taken as a whole could have a major impact on ITSM. If Aale and I are wrong about that then so is Gartner.

2 - The major implication of those changes ithat we foresee is the rise of Shadow IT 2.0 with the business, and individual users taking direct control of more of the services they receive and the infrastructure over which they are delivered. This in turn will change their expectations of the service they receive from their own IT department.

3 - The deterministic and predictable model of IT processes, capabilities and functions described in ITIL, which is already difficult to apply in the outsourcing world, will prove to be of little practical use under these conditions

Now to be fair I'm going to split that last point in two. There will continue to be aspects of IT that need to be managed on a factory basis, and I'm not just saying that because that is the bulk of our business at TCS. Tasks like adding new servers to a farm, or resetting passwords lend themselves to that sort of approach. I found out from my time managing a 100% thin client service that fixing most issues came down to one of two basic processes: Retart the users session, or tell them to walk to the cupboard and take out another thin client device and send the old one back in the post. So far so good. The net result though was that the calls to the service desk were proportionally less standardised and more focussed on business process issues than IT.

Y'all have a great time at Pink12, I'll be thinking of you, and of course we are still mates.

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

I agree with James on all three points.

I must say I agree with James on all three of his points.

In particular, I believe we will see increasing amounts of disintermediation of IT - what James refers to as "shadow IT" - at an increasing rate. It seems to have nearly reached critical mass.

I seems to me that IT can increase its credibility and trustworthiness by acting as stewards of IT resources and as proactive brokers for value-added IT services. Companies will be increasing their multisourcing efforts. IT is, increasingly, being brought back under the CFO's sphere of influence. Powerful parts of the company, especially revenue generating portions, will seek out their own SaaS application if they are not properly served by IT.

The more IT increases its capability to act as service portfolio manager and develops the resources to run a proper IT business services management unit to act as service prime contractor for multisourced, hybridized services - he better IT will fare.

Disintermediation

I think Cary's use of the term disintermediation is important here.

I've deliberately, but warily, used the term Shadow IT 2 because for a certain generation of IT managers the term draws a parallel with the first time we faced an apparently similar situation with the business going out and buying their own PCs and running business critical processes using software designed and sold by a teenager in his basement or created in house by an expert in BASIC.

That parallel only holds good to a certain point. Disintermediation is now a fact of life for most of us, as high street travel agents and insurance brokers have found out. We would be doing the business a disservice to suggest that the risks of using salesforce.com are the same as the risks of using an Amstrad PCW.

I wrote sometime ago on my blog about ISO 38500 being the Cinderella, perhaps it really is time she went to the ball

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

Curse of the mobile keyboard

I really shouldn't attempt typing long replies whilst using a mobile device on public transport, the typos just aren't worth it. Didn't there used to be an edit button on this blog?

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

Shadow boxing

I'm quite sure you would see shadow IT as inevitable - it's an opportunity for the outsourcers/service providers after all and their sales people are already all over non-IT functions - but even so I'm not sure I'm buying it, nor am I buying that ITIL is of little practical use just because shadow IT might offer a challenge to the traditional IT function.

For me shadow IT is a question of corporate strategy and governance. In a cost-conscious economy the 'sin now ask forgiveness later' approach isn't going to find quite as much sympathy as it did in the past; the informed CIO will be quick to point out the TCO after all. The struggle for control over technology will go on for as long as IT forget why they exist - although I suspect it's a bit like cars in that as technology gets more complex the layman tends to fiddle less - even so, the principles of driving well remain the same.

Certainly there are challenges to the primacy of the traditional IT department though. I think that's probably a good thing, perhaps the CIO will ensure they become a business function rather than the basement dark forces. And that's where I see the biggest change - they will position themselves less as leaders of technology functions in favour of being consultants in business-enabling information and technology. And whilst the supply of enabling services may well change the make up of the IT function but it won't create a problem that isn't addressed by current service management stuff.

That said, voice teams are smaller than ever before. It's just so damn reliable isn't it. Ideal to port into the cloud. Still, if it doesn't work you're going to want your Supplier Management to hit the provider over the head with the SLA and the provider in turn will review its incident and problem processes...

ITSM will become more governance focused for customer organisations, more capability focused for provider organisations. ITIL is one tool (of a few) that can help with both of these things; might need a few more thousand words in its books of course...

Rich Pemberton

Governance and the power balance

Rich,

Undoubtedly there are those in the supplier community rubbing their hand with glee at the prospect of a re-emergent shadow IT.

I agree with you on the governance front, hence my championing on ISO 38500. For all its faults it has the advantage of being slim enough to get the business to read it. If only it came with "Don't Panic" written on the cover.

I also believe we will see an increasing split between the worlds of commodity IT and value add IT.

But here is the challenge that is going to trip up many who make the shift to cloud based services: They are going to discover that the SLA they've signed up to isn't specific to them. They are going to find that availability target is measured across the supplier entire customer base. As long as the supplier is achieving that then their account managers are going to keep smiling through whatever governance meeting you drag them into.

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

Taking up the SLAck

Hi James,

Indeed non-specific SLAs is a tricky one on the surface, but isn't this precisely where ITIL can help? That is, if the supplier cannot deliver a service to back off your business need you go somewhere else, or do something different, or accept the risk. Again, it's nothing that existing good practice doesn't handle.

I suspect in reality most cloud services will be high availability because a multi-tenant platform will in reality have to be designed that way if it is to be commercially successful. In other words, you're not going to design a cloud solution that doesn't meet the needs of the vast majority of your target market.

I'm involved right now in the design of a cloud-based service for a telco. My client's intent, absolutely, is to present availability metrics that are customer-specific (and to automate this). I do believe that providers who consider the service management aspects for their customers will find themselves at a market advantage.

It may not be spectacularly good, but ITIL offers guidance on configuration management and service catalogue management; get them [nearly] right and they will underpin providing service management information on a per customer basis.

Incidentally, in my experience the prime reason for supplier churn in the outsourcing market is precisely that disconnect between the SLA and the perception of service. If you treat the former as the start of service rather than the end, your service will be exponentially better - and the advantage that outsourcers have to be able to achieve this is economy of scale. That they often choose to behave as the IT function always did isn't ITIL's fault.

Rich Pemberton

confuse the consumer experience with the business experience

Rich, I like the cut of your jib.

James,

1) sadly Drupal 5 has never had an edit-comment button. I'll fix some of them for you :)

2) we agree broadly about the trend to reduced central control. We disagree about the significance, including the significance of outsourcing. I don't find it hard to imagine Gartner being wrong, it has happened plenty often before. Charles Wang got them right: “I want to choose my words carefully here, so I’m not misunderstood,” he said. “They’re a bunch of f***ing idiots." Please don't cite any analyst as an authority round here.

3) Google is already writing customer-specific SLAs if you ask nicely enough with enough money (and it doesn't have to be a lot; i have a very small client with an individual Google account manager and a personalised SLA. Sure most of that is an illusion, but when isn't it?)

I've said several times now, let's not confuse the consumer experience with the business experience.

Business consumer
Sir, I propose we acquire this. Here is my business case We wants it Precious
Still need to get the same old sh1t done every day Life is transformed by this thing in my hand
I'm calling the service desk because I want a paper trail I'm not phoning the helpdesk because I can bitch about it on the forums and look clever
we need to give our users enough help that we don't lose money we need to give our customers enough help that we don't lose their business
useful shiny
has a reason gives pleasure
my ass if we lose money my money
tight budgets spoiling self
whatever it takes to get your outsource business go f*** yourself, here's the SLA

Business-consumer Experience

Rob,

As much as I'd like to believe that there is a clear distinction between these two perspectives, the reality for many of us is that folks in the business come to us after they've already committed to (emotionally, if not financially) whatever is the Precious of the moment. It's not, "I'd like to get an iPad, can you make it work on our network?" The reality is,

Here's my iPad, and the 10 additional ones for the rest of the Marketing team. My business plan requires that these be fully functional for all staff activities as of last week. If you say you're not ready to support them, or need time to create the apps to virtualize our Windows-only apps on iOS, I'll ensure everyone in the executive meetings know that IT is stifling my ability to meet my goals.

In their "business plan", there is no distinction between useful and shiny. We in IT are the only people left that give a rats behind about a distinction between business and consumer experience. Even CFOs have figured out that their primary job is no longer about controlling costs. It's to allow enough budget for the revenue-generators to revenue-generate. IT's job is no longer about security and controls: it's about enabling revenues at a competitive cost. Remember all those controls we put in place because that's what the business needed from us? I sure do -- Managing group policies to make sure users couldn't hurt themselves and their PCs too badly. Ah, memories. Today, the idea of locking down workstations in order to control costs leads to short tenures for IT managers.

I don't mean to say that controls are no longer relevant; it's just that they can't get in the way. Controls are much lower on the corporate priorities. IT Ops have to be invisible and silent, while still protecting me down all the dark alleys where I insist on going. And cheap. Cheaper than ever before. It's a tall order, to be sure.

SLAs? Ha! SLAs are all about what IT can't or won't do. Business has no interest in SLAs.

I apologize that I'm feeling especially cynical cranky this evening. I really do think there's a lot of good in the de-centralization of IT. And I also agree that there are some controls that are required in order to stay in business. That, beyond social or any other specific technology, is the current transformation. We need to find the sweet spot of "just enough" control, while still being seen as the enablers of business goals. We'll get there, but I think we have a few rocky years ahead of us before that happens.

Dan Kane

Governance, Service and Assurance

Rocky is right. Ask Sony about security or Amazon or others about availability.

That's where Governance, Service and Assurance come in - the three horsemen who will keep the peace.

the marketing iPads scenario you laid out is a failure of governance. There is huge work to be done to educate Boards and executives on their failure to meet their obligations for management of IT. ISACA are on the long road but I'd like to see someone charge with the ISO38500 banner. We'll probably have to have a few companies collapse and their Boards be prosecuted or sued before much happens.

IT will need to measure the service levels of composite outsourced services because nobody else will. it'll be our job to keep the third-party bastards honest, and to look out for the poor user. that's what i mean by SLAs. And we'll need to provide cohesive IT support of the business services across all the suppliers. Even if a business-level service desk is the first line of support, someone has to do grey-area analysis and coordinate the RCA and incident resolution.

and we in IT will be the cops. Once we convince the business governance to produce decent policies, we'll be responsible for assurance - I'm using the word assurance here as a catch-all for assuring the safety of the organisation, including compliance (to internal policies and external standards, including security and architecture, and regulatory compliance), risk management (including change, problem, continuity and security), and audit. if the business insists on turning IT into a mosh-pit, we'll be the burly security guards, with batons and guns if necessary.

it's possible it won't be called IT any more. But there will always be a bunch of technically knowledgeable people running goverance enablement/execution, service management and assurance of services on behalf of the overall organisation.

You took a much more

You took a much more positive approach. We're saying essentially the same thing, that there is a severe lack of governance, at least at the appropriate levels. IT is in too much of an identity crisis right now for us to push hard on the ISO38500 level of governance. Right now the conventional wisdom still can't distinguish between a management problem (IT) and a governance problem (Board and C-suite).

I'd like to see someone charge with the ISO38500 banner. We'll probably have to have a few companies collapse and their Boards be prosecuted or sued before much happens.

Agreed. The hope is that IT will get it's groove back before that happens.

grooveless

It's not IT that is missing a groove [begone, mental image!]. It is corporate governance that is grooveless. I still find most Boards have no-one responsible for IT at all: no IT steering committee or IT Director. IT can just watch helplessly.

CIwho?

Spot on Rob. A previous client (oil and gas) regularly told me that their business was information, information, information - yet the voice of their Head of Information Services was delivered through their IT-illiterate Finance Director. It led to a serious of 'tick box' improvements rather than information being properly managed end-to-end, and all that means.

That said, IT doesn't help itself - it's immature in the language of business, and that remains its albatross.

immature in the language of business

"it's immature in the language of business" That was true. That is one thing that i feel is changing rapidly, and ITSM is one of the forces at the forefront of driving that change.

Accept the risk

I think a lot of the discussion will shift to risk, and being mature enough to understand how a combination of risks can filter through to the service/business level risk that your organisation is ultimately exposed to. And yes suppliers are going to aim for high availability, but we also know major cloud providers have had significant incidents, and if they are dealing with several hundred customers being impacted some organisations are going to find themselves way down the queue before they have a meaningful conversation about what went wrong and how to deal with it beyond the information on a dashboard. Yes Google I do mean you.

As for configuration management , well at least one major player can't guarantee what country your data is going to be stored in at any point in time.

All these are issues that can and will be worked around in time, but you can also bet that in the next couple of years there will be some real life horror stories to counterbalance the hype.

As for supplier churn, that's a whole other issue with a whole heap of causes that we all bear some responsibility for, but I think we would all welcome a shift to more outcome based contracts as long as they give the supplier freedom to innovate sensibly.

James Finister
www.tcs.com
http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/

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