Since the start of the millennium we have all heard that we must do “More with Less”. I recently read an article where the idea of “Less for Less” was looked at from the perspective of if our resources are cut then we will have to cut programs, products, and services also.   Perhaps we should look at how to cut back on to whom and what we produce in order to stay within our means. Government sequestration may have triggered this way of thinking for some service providers. This is a catchy title but is this really the case?   Is there a different perspective on “Less for Less”? Think back a few years when a downturn in the economy negatively impacted the workforce.   Families got creative.   The new trend became staycation instead of vacation.    A staycation meant less travel arrangements for less time in planning, less time on the road or in airports and therefore less missed connections, less cost for the family resulting in less stress and less ...

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.”  Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

Previously, I have delivered several articles on the challenges that IT organizations face in trying to balance opposing goals and objectives especially in light of the fact that in every organization, the one constant is change.   The focus of those pieces described the tension between the perspective that IT is a set of technology components (Internal IT view) and that IT is a set of services (External business view).    They also spoke to the fact that, no matter how well the functionality of an IT service meets stake holder’s needs, it will be of little value if the IT infrastructure is unstable causing instances of unavailability and inconsistency in performance levels .   Of course we (IT/Service provider) must be able to do all of this at the same time as providing services that deliver acceptable levels of quality while efficiently utilizing the organizations resources. So to reiterate, this struggle can be broken down into four general imbalances so tha...

What do we mean when we say “process-centric” thinking? What we mean is that individuals, groups or teams and even an entire organization sees their work and activities being driven by or related to process first, rather than person, technology or information first. Remember that a process is a structured set of activities that take inputs and convert them to outputs that help to satisfy business, customer or user outcomes. When we look to accomplish work or produce a good or service we are going to do that in a structured way (a process). To paraphrase Dr. W. Edwards Deming, “…if you cannot describe your work or what you do as a process, you do not know what you do.” A “process-centric” approach should not imply that you should forget completely about people, technology or information. These are important factors in completing the production of goods and services. It is that these other factors make the process possible. In turn, a process relies on these elements to work most ...