“I know what services we need to provide.”
Once people start discovering the vision of IT service management, they begin to think in terms of services and about the services that they currently provide to the business. They then start to document these services and develop a service catalog. While this is a good start, it is not sufficient.
If your organization was already providing services that meet the business needs, then why is the organization exploring ITIL? There is obviously a gap between what the business expects and what IT delivers for an organization to explore ways to improve their environment. This gap in expectations needs to be well understood in order to close the gap between what the business expects and what IT delivers.
Services provide value to the business by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve. As such, we must understand what the outcomes are that the business customers want to achieve. To enable this understanding, we must engage the business to understand these outcomes. While documenting the services that we currently provide is a good starting point (and recommended), they must be mapped to the desired outcomes of the business. During this mapping of services to business-desired outcomes, the gaps between what we deliver and the expectations of the business will be uncovered and can then be filled.
Related Course
ITIL Foundation
11 Common Mistakes of ITIL Foundation Newbies Series
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #1: Too Much Focus on the Processes
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #2: Certified and Done
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #3: Focusing on Processes First
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #4: Attempting a Project in Isolation
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #5: Developing a Service Catalog without Considering Business Needs
- ITIL Newbie Mistake #6: Being Too Process Focused