Sustainable Advantage and ITSM Process Automation

When many folks think about automating ITSM processes, they’re thinking about ways of getting consistent outcomes at a lower cost. They tend to get that pretty quickly if they’re using a modern tool. That’s the first ROI for ITPA/RBA. What many don’t expect is the second payback—sustainable advantage.

IT can view this advantage in two ways – one is the sustainable advantage in-house IT has over outsourcing; the second is the sustainable advantage IT can deliver to the business. What, exactly, am I talking about?

Allow me an analogy. IT has done a fantastic job of automating many business functions. The work IT did to deliver the business automation provided by the likes of SAP, Oracle, and others was the engine for much of the productivity improvements of the last 2 decades. The automation of discrete functions provided some efficiency, but the biggest bang of efficiency and effectiveness came from the ability to better understand and tune business processes once they were automated. As a customer once told me “If I get competitive advantage from my General Ledger, I’m doing something illegal. Everyone is automating the basic functions. That’s now table stakes and all of my competitors have or will have the same tools. Sustainable advantage comes the ability I now have to focus on my process and to make the processes my business uses into world beaters”.

It’s time for IT to focus on IT so that it can better support the business. In many shops the ‘table stakes’ have been met—they have a Service Desk, they have Configuration tools, they have Change Management, they have Event Management. Here are the next steps:
Define – your processes in terms of the steps taken to support a change required by the business. Don’t think about IT tasks in isolation. What is the sequence of IT tasks required to support a change the business wants?

Automate – your processes across the task tool silos and organizational boundaries.
Measure – your processes and compare them to desired outcomes and business KPIs.
Improve – your processes based on the information gathered through the measurement of automated processes.

Continually improving your processes is the only sustainable advantage. Everything you can buy to improve your outcomes can be bought by your competitors too. Your sustainable advantage will come from within your organization. Automating processes and measuring them is the foundation. As the Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius said, “Dig within; there lies the wellspring of all good. Ever dig and it will ever flow”.