Do’s for real service

When the economy takes a turn for the worse, cutbacks become the norm. But they shouldn’t be an excuse for neglecting your customers. Of course there’s nothing wrong with downgrading service levels, as long as it doesn’t leave the business and users out in the cold. Offering self-service alone is imprudent, because where’s the sense in having a sales manager struggle for hours in an effort to solve the problem himself if a support employee could have fixed it online in five minutes? Dispensing with all onsite support is an equally unwise cutback. After all, you can’t do everything remotely. It is essential not to make a snap decision on services that are of vital importance to user productivity. What are the three important do’s when budget cuts are unavoidable, but users may not be affected?

Group your users into segments.

Companies divide their customers into groups on the basis of specific characteristics. So why not do the same with users? Why do we insist on lumping all users – except for the VIPs - together? In sales, service, engineering, production, logistics and finance we find managers and core users who influence the company’s turnover and are becoming increasingly dependent on IT for the optimal performance of their tasks. The productivity of these knowledge workers is far more dependent on IT than is the case for top managers, the official VIPs. At an energy company, for example, the commercial department takes care of the buying and selling of electricity on volatile markets. These users constitute only a small part of the total workforce, but are responsible for a large portion of the company’s profit. So you could say that every company has groups of core users who are increasingly dependent on properly functioning systems and reliable support. The growing group of knowledge workers who are vital to turnover, customer care and profit should not be inconvenienced with substandard services. It is important for companies to define these groups clearly (for example in the active directory) and use this segmentation as an essential tool in determining service levels.

Put service mentality into practice.
The word ‘service’ crops up frequently in our IT jargon. It’s a positive sign that more and more businesses are working with a service catalogue, covering aspects such as service-oriented architecture, service catalogues and web services. However, a service catalogue does not automatically mean that the IT efforts are actually service-oriented. There’s often a lack of love for the customer, who is in fact becoming increasingly dependent on IT. For a truly service-oriented approach, three aspects are crucial: First, you need to focus on the customer’s perspective. Reality is whatever the customer perceives it to be, and you need to measure yourself against it in order to improve. Second, a process-minded approach is of the essence. The drafting of flowcharts might mean you have your results on paper, but it doesn’t mean that you are actually following a process-minded approach, which is in fact a prerequisite for internal success. Last, it is important to take an end-to-end approach, which means that duties, authorities and responsibilities must be coordinated to be able to operate across links - and therefore across organisations. Make sure you appoint managers who are responsible for changes across the entire chain. Have them report directly to the CIO - or at least a top manager - who can also step in personally if problems get out of hand due to everyone’s supposed lack of time. It’s a matter of priorities, not time!

Decompartmentalise ITIL.

ITIL can lead to compartmentalisation. The power of ITIL lies specifically in chain management and the sense of shared responsibility. How is it possible that incident management is up tot standard, but problem management is far below par? Why has financial management reached maturity, while configuration management is still in its infancy? Problem management is all about analysing serious incidents that have to be prevented and therefore shares common ground with incident management. When problem management fails, serious incidents simply keep repeating themselves - certainly not a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’. When configuration management is substandard, you won’t be able to tell the value of your software, hardware and certain services. This makes accurate recharging of costs impossible, so how can financial management possibly be seen as mature? The main task ahead for companies using ITIL is to join forces. Nobody should be hiding behind their own safe ITIL segment. Managers need to interact and assume a sense of responsibility towards a joint end result. That’s what it boils down to in the end.

In essence, these do’s are all about improving service. IT staff are in the habit of calling for a tool to achieve this. But that is not what it’s about. You can have all the tools in the world and still fail to realise a service-oriented organisation. To achieve that, you need to connect to the heart of your organisation: people!