Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

Web2.0 - Hype, Transformational or somewhere in between?

But first, for those who came in late - here's what wikipedia has to say about Web 2.0 - "... refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users."

I thought Kris, the CEO of Infosys, summarized the importance of web 2.0 quite well in his WEF blog where he said - "There is a quiet change happening. The blogging phenomenon is becoming as important as TV."

So if it is indeed a quiet revolution, has it perhaps been a little too quiet for ITSM to have noticed it? I believe not.

RSS Feeds in ITIL Change Management: The Approval Push & Notification Pull

A while back, as part of a large scale ITIL Change Management implementation, I was in discussions with a large ITSM product vendor. As we set out finalizing the process nitty-gritties, we headed into the issue of notifications and approvals. Within the existing environment, support groups were made change approvers in two scenarios -

1. If the support group needs to explicitly approve a change i.e. there is an impact on the system being managed by that group
2. If there is an outage on a dependent application / component that this group needs to be aware of, although there is no explicit action expected from them

The inclusion of the second instance essentially bloated the number of "real" change approvers on any change and on average we found 70 approvers for any change request! Now, that is a huge number by any stretch of imagination however large and complex the organization.

So, where does the Web 2.0 thingy fit in?

Now suppose for a moment, we are in the Web 2.0 world and I am the team lead of one such support group. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a -

1. Push mechanism for approvals - For all changes requiring my explicit approval based on impact assessment, I continue to get notified (e.g. through email).
2. Pull mechanism for notifications - And since I still want to be aware of outages / changes happening on an outlying dependent system / component but don't need to take an explicit action, all I do is subscribe to the RSS feed for specific tags that include that component.

So all I do is just action my approvals and be informed of outages.

A small productivity increase in terms of time and effort saved - say a very conservative 3 minutes to open that email, go to the Change tool, read up the change and do a very initial evaluation. And when you multiply those 3 minutes by the average number of changes (say 4000 per month) and numbers of approvers/notifiers (reduced to say 15 - still a conservative estimate) - that works out to at least 3000 person-hours each month!

So, are we there yet?

Not any time soon if we look at the roadmap of some of the large players. Perhaps even a couple of years away. But meanwhile, what we are starting to see now is the continuing growth of web 2.0 enabled and subscription based service desks.

How this space matures is something I am keenly watching!