By Donna Knapp Have you ever done business with an organization that liked to brag about all the extras that it provides, but doesn’t get the basics right? To some extent, the accelerated innovation that was sparked by the pandemic fueled this need to focus on the new and shiny. And for some organizations, it is what’s needed to stand out in the crowd, or to compete, or simply to survive. But here is what we know. All the new and shiny in the world can’t make up for a poor customer experience. You cannot sacrifice quality for speed. And a perk here and there can’t overcome the lack of trust that builds up when an organization fails to get the basics right day in and day out. So, what we’ve got to do is strike a balance. A feat that is easier said than done. According to the 2022 State of CIO report, 76% of CIOs say that it’s challenging to find the right balance between business innovation and operational excellence. And yet it is exactly what organizations today need to do… C. All of

I really like teaching Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation course.  I find it really effective to link SRE Foundation to the learners’ needs of incorporating SRE core concepts to ITSM and DevOps (and any other framework!)  This course allows me to explain how SRE improves operational excellence and quality, a key performance measure for ITSM. It also allows me to explain how SRE improves Automation, not only with the DevOps pipeline, but also how Ops uses this data to improve the flow of work into operations, and then automate repetitive tasks by utilizing tools (e.g., ChatOps).  Most importantly, SRE improves collaboration with customers, defining Service Level Objectives (SLO’s) so that IT consistently achieves (and exceeds) customers’ expectations AND delivers VALUE for the organization.  Automated monitoring is NOT enough these days, we must include observability, using automation to manage security, and ultimately delivering improved IT service quality to the business.

Are your service-desk customers sitting in 9C? When customers evaluate your service, do they remember the experience or the statistics? What does that mean for modern IT management? Well, there is a better way to measure. It is called Experience Management. It is an evolution and next level of maturity above that of traditional Service Management. A while back, I read a book called From Worst to First written by Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines. He led the management team hired to turn around the airline after two bankruptcies and ten CEOs in ten years—clearly a challenging assignment. Gordon, along with his team, established a clear plan to turn around the company. They made remarkable changes that took the airline from worst (in almost all categories) to first in just a few years. Greg Brenneman, the COO, wrote a brief article in Harvard Business Review describing the turnaround  read here . This story is personal to me. I lived near one of Continental’s hubs, s

Best practice has proven that to be dynamic and to consistently meet changing business requirements, services must be co-created with our customers.  I learned in a recent ITIL 4 certification class titled Driving Stakeholder Value (DSV)  that providers will start with a stakeholder map and follow up with a customer journey map. If you are not yet familiar with Customer Journey Mapping, I strongly recommend learning about this critical skill needed to enable the co-creation of services.  Once you have a stakeholder map and have mapped the customer/user journey, you will need to identify the roles required. In our example below, we use the two roles of customer/consumer and service provider. Each of these, although not the only stakeholders involved, is critical to the success of co-creation.  Notice a relationship is being established via these responsibilities  Both the service provider and the consumer have responsibilities.  An IT service provider, for example, manages resource

Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog , February 2020 and written by Christian Nissen , IT management consultant and lead author for the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value module. Back in the industrial society, goods were a dominant factor in our lives. But in the “service era” we prefer to replace ownership of goods with access to services and resources without necessarily owning them. This is happening with and without digital transformation , although the latter accelerates this phenomenon: think Uber and Airbnb. In this context, the ITIL® 4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value module – within ITIL 4 Managing Professional – is about the engagement and interaction between service providers and stakeholders and the conversion of demand to value via IT-enabled services. But what does this mean in practice? Previously, services were treated in the same way as manufactured goods: it was the customer’s responsibility to derive value. Conversely, the core concept of ITIL 4 is that value is co-c

ALL CALL SREs REQUIRED!  Let’s take a walk down to the ocean and while you consider the opportunity, benefits, and $$$, think about dipping your toe in. Let’s explore Reliability, Site Reliability, and the Site Reliability Engineer .  No doubt the world is evolving. People are evolving and tech is evolving. Business and customer requirements are evolving. The evolution of systems requires the evolution of engineers. Nature and pandemics put undue stress on our resources! In comes the Certified Site Reliability Engineer .  "Urgent, Urgent, Urgent… All hands on deck!",  is a call that practitioners, managers, and organizations do not want to hear and recognize must stop! Reliability – At a minimum, we recognize that the delivery of service is not dependent solely on the quality of the product itself and the goal is not that the products or service merely be deployed. A service must be operated and sustained over a period. How long? For the life of the service.

Written for LinkedIn.com by  John Worthington ,  Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations Experience Level Agreements & Surveillance Capitalism Does the Customer Really Come First? On Sundays, I try to relax and not think too much about business, but I almost always fail to do so--- Monday’s right around the corner and it’s impossible not to begin thinking about the week ahead... As it happens today I read an article in the NY Times and was immediately drawn to work. Being focused on the digital user experience and recently completing ITSM Academy’s The Essence of eXperience (XLA) Certification   (see my review here ), I found this article unsettling to say the least. Don’t get me wrong, managing the customer experience is definitely key to survival in the digital age, but it’s not a big jump from managing the experience to managing the customer . “These data flows empty into surveillance capitalists’ computational factories, called ‘artificial intelligence’, where

Survival - For a service provider to survive in today’s fast-paced delivery environment they will likely need to move away from old ways of doing things. We hear things like; "Terms matter", "Shift your thinking!" or "Shift the focus!" and "CHANGE the CULTURE!".  It is becoming more evident than ever that our organizational structure including silos could be an impediment. Structure – An organization’s structure impacts how work gets done. Structure influences the actual product and service architecture. Some organizational structures even have siloed within silos.  Structure matters. Silos can fracture the velocity of delivery and the quality of what is delivered. We can transcend silos!  ITIL 4 Foundation or the new DevOps Leader  certification classes are a good place to start learning new and better ways for the conversion of demand to value for service providers. Considerations for Transcending Silos Measurement – High performin

ITIL 4 is an evolution of ITIL V3. Before we start talking about specific processes or practices, it is important to stress that the focus has shifted. ITIL 4 gives us a fresh perspective to service management and emphasizes the customer user experience, the approach to the overall service value system, the service value chain and value streams , and much more.  Download the What is ITIL 4 document from the ITSM Academy Resource Center and be sure to read past the first few pages for more information on the new perspective that drives modern service management. The emphasis is on value from the customer user experience and integrated holistic approach. That does not mean that the processes are going away. Today we refer to a process as a "practice". Practices are broader in scope than processes and include all 4 dimensions/resources including the process. Two processes or “practices” that have been decoupled in ITIL 4 are the Deployment Management practice an

All service providers are in the business of customer and user experience . It is not enough to compete on products and services, how services are delivered is as important as what is delivered. The  customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience customers have with one or more service providers and/or their products through the touchpoints and service interactions with those providers. In order to focus on the outcomes and on the customer/user experience, service providers are seeking to master the art of mapping their customer journey. Doing so allows them to maximize stakeholder value through co-creation of value throughout the entire value chain . The customer journey begins by understanding the overall macro-level of steps or groups of activities that generate the need for interaction between the customer and the service provider. These activities begin at “Explore” and end with “Realize” where the value is actually being consumed by the end-users.   Copyright ©