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IT Service Management in the Living Enterprise

Meaningful customer service matters — even if that customer is internal. In fact, our research has shown that moving from efficiency to external customer experience is necessary but not sufficient. Companies also need to consider employee experience, and find ways to empower their workers to maximize productivity.

To succeed, enterprises are adopting the characteristics of a living enterprise, inspired by the flexibility and agility of living organisms. An important ingredient in this journey is the role of IT service management (ITSM). Let’s discuss the characteristics of a Live Enterprise and its relationship to Agile and ITSM practices.

A Live Enterprise is an organization that is continuously evolving and learning. These organizations are built around the following elements:

• Agility — Organizations, though large, still have the agility and speed of a startup.
• Velocity of ideas — Companies gather ideas, insights and experience.
• Hyperproductivity — Employees focus on customers, and teams can self-learn.
• Competitive advantage — Organizations understand their competitive advantage and use it to differentiate.
• Responsiveness — They have the ability to react and respond to rapidly changing external environments.
• Networked — Companies avoid silos and foster collaborative culture and teamwork.
• Consciousness — Organizations are sensitive enough to create the right balance through eliminating non-productive work and adding value to every interaction.
• Smart workplace — Digital interfaces and a polycloud approach are used to better manage the work environment.

Although each area is important in isolation, the real value comes from the interplay of all these factors, particularly agility and hyperproductivity.

Understanding Agile service management

Hyperproductivity, a critical Live Enterprise building block, requires companies to reimagine their processes so they become simple, self-serving and automated. It also focuses on the use of Agile and DevOps practices, eventually creating the need for Agile service management.

Agile service management requires instilling Agile values into scaled ITSM processes in order to increase end-to-end consistency and speed. It is designed with adequate controls and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that benefit the customers.

Below are some key things to keep in mind while making service management more Agile:

• Always keep the customer in mind. Anything you do should add value to customers, and always work closely with them.
• Keep your employees motivated so they deliver consistent quality service to customers.
• Make the processes as flexible as possible.

What does Agile service management need to be successful?

A cultural shift, commitment from management and a strong desire to undergo long-term transformation is required when building Agile service management. The building blocks are:

• Mature ITSM, such as adopting best practices documented in the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL).
• Continuous work on service improvement.
• Agile-minded individuals who are ready to share knowledge and act as coaches.

In one successful implementation, Infosys worked with leading Australian telecom firm Telstra to deliver its IT strategy, which increased speed to market, reduced costs and created new business opportunities by digitizing and transforming the company’s retail assurance process.

To summarize, ITIL and DevOps can work together to allow us to achieve this cultural shift to Agile service management. ITIL will provide the much needed framework for stable and quality service delivery. DevOps will ensure there is a continuous stream of working improvements. And finally Agile service management can provide guidance for service delivery and respond to challenges and demands in an agile way.

For our clients to stay on their mission, they must embrace the above principles. Only then will they be able to embark on a true digital journey powered through proven processes and Agile ways of working.