We would like to refer to the article from
ALIGNING IT WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION’S BUSINESS NEEDS USING SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Service Management or the IT Infrastructure Library is not a term that we’re commonly familiar with. In fact, we’ve rarely heard about it. Well that was all about to change. Held on the 27th of March 2017 at the newly opened Mövenpick Hotel Colombo, Service Management 2017 dealt with closing the gap between people and technology.
In case you’re lost, this Service Management is a set of practices that align IT with an organization’s business needs. In essence, think of it as a guide or toolkit on how to use Information Technology to your businesses advantage.
First up was Jonas Bridgwater, Director of Creative Software
Jonas was up on stage to deliver the welcome address. Apart from relocating to a new office, Creative Solutions has also been renamed to Creative Software. The reason? To differentiate themselves from design solutions and establish themselves as a software development company.
He spoke about what Creative Software offers such as software development, application management, quality assurance and product development. He went on to explain about what Creative Software does. Initially developed in Sweden, the company also caters to local clients such as Dialog, MAS, Expo Lanka, SLT Mobitel and HNB.
The guest speaker for the day was Pieter Hoekstra
Pieter, a Belgian expert on Service Management spoke about working with your leaders, managers to align IT services with the needs of the business. Pieter gave the audience a background about himself and also shared his life experience switching between IT and HR, Management fields and working at Shell Corporation. His company BeGrip, provides service management training, and programs on communication etc.
As a response to the growing dependency on IT, the Government of UKs Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) released a set of recommendation in the 1980s. The reason being that It recognized that Government agencies and also private sector contracts began to independently create their own IT management practices and the Service Management was seen as an approach to bring it all under one roof as a standard set of practices. Initially released as 30 books.
He then took two real life examples
The first was the European Commission. Two departments had priorities in two different ways. The first line of contact would be the line service desk. Anything not working would be an incident. Anything else would be a service request. For example, a password reset is a service request, not an incident. Before adopting Service Management practices, incidents were uncountable. But after sorting out incidents from requests, they found out that tactual incidents were fewer than thought of and IT incidents dropped significantly after the first 4 months.
KPMG was Pieter’s next example. He explained how a service catalogue is the food menu of the IT Department. Providing a laptop for a new employee would usually take around 3 weeks. All because they didn’t have the necessary practices in place. Pieter worked with KPMG and they finally brought down the waiting period to 2 days. It’s all about having your processes up and running in the correct way. As such, you need to have your “menu card” running in the proper way. He then spoke about better priority setting and agreeing on solving time and service delivery time.
Every company is a service company and an IT company at the same time because a service company cannot run without an IT company -Pieter Hoekstra
With that Pieter’s speech came to a close