Building Bridges
Many of those in the Process Implementation space would readily assent if i were to make a statement that "Every process framework is an Island". Several best-of-breed process frameworks have evolved to the extent that some of them are now an industry (certifications, trainings etc etc). Even "Missionaries" are trained to "spread the faith" ( For ex: 'Black Belts", "ITIL Masters", "CISSP" etc). In my experience, i have come across several situations where discussions on which is the best process framework to adopt, in a particular situation, sometimes tend to border on the ideological-side and practitioners tend to adopt a "My way or the highway" stance.
It is in this context, my thoughts goto John Donne, the famous English poet, who, four hundred years ago, said - "No Man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent (1)" And that is exactly what we are looking at when we talk about integration of process frameworks as a solution for IT services in a holistic perspective
Over the last year, we put together a crack team of several process experts and practitioners in Infosys to work on creating an integrated Process model. After several months of intensive efforts, heated discussions, experience sharing etc etc we have come up with a coherent process model that incorporates the mandates of different frameworks such as CMM, ITIL, COBIT, ISO27001, eSCM and a couple of other popular process frameworks augmented with our IT service management experience as a service provider.
Our objective when we started this exercise was in a figurative way "to build a continent" (ref the poet above!). We figured that by building bridges between these process frameworks we will be able to provide to our customers an integrated and efficient way of delivering on our IT Service management promises. In this journey of creating this integrated perspective, the insights that we had was extremely rewarding and took us into some very interesting areas of research.
For example, one interesting area that we worked on as we created this integrated model was in the area of creating an integrated Organization Role model. IT Organization design is an integrated area and when coupled with our efforts at creating an integrated "best-practice" situation, presents some unique challenges. We had to search through several different organizational concepts to design the one that fits best. It led us to an interesting area of pioneering research in IT service management. This is around the Supply Chain engineering of IT organizations.
Supply Chain engineering if IT services essentially deals with creating a process-based approach to narrowing the gap between Supply-side constraints and demand-side needs. This emergent concept has attracted quite a bit of attention lately amongst the academic community, analysts and industry experts. To some extent, even ITIL V3 uses some concepts, particularly on the "demand-side" in the service strategy section in its new Service lifecycle approach to IT Service management.
Bringing in concepts of Supply and Demand decoupling into the organization design, a lot of clarity and efficiency can be brought into the role definitions. Design of KPIs and alignment of those with process metrics, which is a very weak spot in traditional organization models can be avoided.
In this Building bridges blog series, i will also get some of the process "gurus" who worked on the integrated process product to share their insights as they went about integrating the multiple process frameworks.
Meanwhile, do you have a thought / opinion on this topic? feel free to leave a message below and i will try to include our thoughts on those topics as this series develops.
Comments
Glad to see that an integrated model is being created. While I was at school in CMU, I used to wonder about the eSCM and ITIL bridging in '07 and hence, had asked the author about the same. The author mentioned that the work was already under the way.
Later, I discussed about the ITIL, COBIT, ISO bridging with the author in 2006-7 and then realised that ITIL-COBIT and ITIL-ISO mappings are available in public domains (say ITSMF-USA website or something).
However, this integrated model having bridges containing all these models will be a good value add for the clients of Infosys.
What will be further interesting is the fact that can Infy overlay its artifacts, tools, and proprietary processes on top of this integrated model to ensure "accelerated delivery" of the implementations?
Posted by: Manik Patil | March 23, 2008 01:21 PM