Service Governance - a vital step?
Here are 3 questions to kick off 2008 and your organizations' IT Service Management strategy
How old is your enterprise / IT governance model?
Is it relevant to Services and scalable to a wider audience?
What is its measure of performance?
With ITIL V3 being all the buzz and Service Strategy being a core element of this framework, a scalable, stable and performing Governance model to govern services cannot be too far.
You may wonder why one would ever need Governance and anyways what does this really mean?
Think IT Service Catalogs. Think how the services within the IT Service Catalog will be governed.
Think about how the Catalog itself will be managed. Service Governance is a key aspect to enable successful IT Service Catalog governance.
Most Fortune organizations have grown profitably over the last few years, however IT Services are pretty much in either a "project mode" or a "support- solve it" or "douse the fire" mode.
Is it time to take a step back and think about governance and its "connections" to the business?
Let’s look at an example. Earlier there was this article about Defining the Service Owner's role. Do you have this issue of the "invisible" Service Owner? With good Service Governance, comes a good understanding of key roles- the Service Owner's role being in that category.
So the next time you walk into a situation where there is no Service Owner defined, it is quite likely that you will find the absence of formal Service Governance mechanisms.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. Service Governance can enable a number of other functionalities
1) Facilitate inter service dialogue
2) Enable/ Create/ help design a cohesive Service Strategy
3) Drive new services /Phase out obsolete ones
4) Plan, monitor and track the overall IT Services strategy
It is about putting in a formal structure around your IT Services so that stakeholders can understand how Services are going to evolve and who has a stake in the setup.
A good governance model will take into account important stakeholders across IT infrastructure, applications and business.
Ultimately we have to address the critical people factor and Service Governance is that vital first step!
