ABC of ICT - Attitude, Behavior, Culture

ABC of ICT stands for the Attitude, Behavior and Culture within IT organizations. More than 70 – 80% of ITSM improvement initiatives such as ITIL fail to achieve the hoped for value, more than 52% fail because of resistance. These can be primarily attributed to Attitude, Behavior and Culture. In a survey 94% of more than 500 IT professional declared that current ITIL training and certification didn’t adequately address the ABC issues. The ABC of ICT product set comprising of the book, exercise workbook and assessment cards are aimed at helping organizations tackle these issues. The ABC of ICT Introduction book contains more than 35 case studies many by industry leading experts and gives practical tips and guidance for assessing ABC issues and for trying to resolve them. Many Consulting and training companies are now adopting these people and culture related approaches within their service offerings. The latest ITIL V3 Planning to Implement Service Management book also states that Culture is the biggest reason for ITSM initiatives failing and names ABC of ICT as a best practice reference to help address these issues.
ABC of ICT V3 - IT organizations have been struggling for the last ten years to adopt best practice frameworks such as ITIL in an effort to bring IT under control. However we have generally failed to realize the promised benefits of ITIL. ITIL V3 has now been launched. Is ITIL V3 the silver bullet to solve our problems? Will it finally ensure we realize the promised benefits of ITIL? Or will we fail just like we did with V2. With the increasing importance of IT to business operations we can no longer afford to fail. We must demonstrate we can bring IT under control. This article shows how the Attitude, Behavior and Culture (ABC) of ICT are what will determine the success or failure of your ITSM initiative. Unless we address this ABC then ITIL V3 will be doomed to failure. This article will finish with a few best practice tips to help you ensure that, finally, you are able to make ITSM best practices work and bring IT under control. ch4.4 ABC of ICT V3

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is developed by Kaplan and Norton, is a performance management system that enables businesses to drive strategies based on measurement and follow-up. In recent years, The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has been applied into Information Technology. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a popular tool with its concepts widely supported by international consultant groups like Gartner, Nolan Norton Institute and others.

Commoditization of Shared Service Management

Published: July 20, 2015 • Service Technology Magazine Issue XCI. A report by SDI and TOPdesk reveals a lot of interesting findings about shared service management. More than 90 percent of respondents indicate they have more than one service desk and it proves to be an emerging topic of importance for the organizations. Streamlining processes and improving the quality of organizational services were marked as the greatest benefits of a shared service model. Where service management is becoming a commodity, shared service management is very relevant in these days of a focus on work force enablement, bringing it back to corporate or director level. That is confirmed by 83 percent of respondents who believe that key decision making around shared services will take place at that level.

DESTEP business analysis

The DESTEP analysis is a model widely used in making an external analysis of a company. The DESTEP analysis deals with macroeconomic factors. Here, a company cannot influence them, but they can be important for business operations. DESTEP stands for Demographic, Economic, Sociocultural, Technological, Ecological and Political. The purpose of DESTEP analysis is that you briefly cover all these six topics. For each topic, you can briefly name the opportunities and threats. The most important opportunities and threats can be included in a SWOT analysis.. <read more>

EIA: European Interoperability Architecture

Elaboration of a common vision for a European Interoperability Architecture – EIA . When is this action of interest to you? You work in a public administration. A cross-border public service is about to be developed. You would like to keep costs down and reuse solutions that have already been developed. The EIA should facilitate interoperability and reuse when developing public services.

EIF: European Interoperability Framework

European Interoperability Framework (EIF) for European public services. This non-technical document addresses all those involved in defining, designing and implementing European public services. The EIF should be taken into account when making decisions on European public services that support the implementation of EU policy initiatives. The EIF should also be considered when establishing public services that in the future may be reused as part of European public services.

EIRA (European Interoperability Reference Architecture)

The European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA), is an architecture content metamodel defining the most salient architectural building blocks (ABBs) needed to build interoperable e-Government systems. The EIRA provides a common terminology that can be used by people working for public administrations in various architecture and system development tasks. The EIRA was created and is being maintained in the context of Action 2.1 of the ISA Programme. The EIRA uses (and extends) the ArchiMate language as a modelling notation and uses service orientation as an architectural style. The EIRA is aligned with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and complies with the context given in the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS). Further information about the EIRA can be obtained in the document 'An introduction to the European Interoperability Reference Architecture v0.9.0.

IBM Systems Journal

Special edition on Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME).http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj47-1.html

ISA: Interoperability Sol. for Eur. Public Adm.

Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations. Administrative procedures have the reputation of being lengthy, time-consuming and costly. Electronic collaboration between Public administrations can make these procedures quicker, simpler and cheaper for all parties concerned, in particular when transactions need to be done cross-border and/or cross-sector. The ISA programme of the European Commission facilitates such transactions through more than 40 actions with a budget of some EUR 160 million.
The ISA programme creates a framework that allows Member States to work together to create efficient and effective electronic cross-border public services for the benefit of citizens and businesses. It offers European public administrations a comprehensive approach to the establishment of electronic services that can easily cooperate across borders (interoperable electronic public services). Promotion of the interoperability of electronic public services forms the first pillar of the ISA programme.

Just In Time Manufacturing System

The Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing system is a planning system for manufacturing processes that helps in achieving high-volume production using the minimal inventories. The system eliminates the inventory of raw materials, work in progress, and finished goods by making them available as and when required. The items are picked up by the worker and fed directly into the production process. The finished goods are produced only at the time they are required for sale. The implementation of the JIT System requires complete transformation of methods of designing products and services, assigning responsibilities to workers, and organizing work. In this book, we shall go through the concepts of the JIT System, its advantages, characteristics, and its contribution toward improving the productivity and profitability of a firm.

KPMG Maturity Model for service organizations

From the moment Richard Nolan introduced his ‘staged model’ for the application of IT in organizations in 1973, many people have used stepwise improvement models. These models were quickly recognized as suitable instruments for quality improvement programmes, thereby helping organizations to climb up the maturity ladder. Dozens of variations on the theme can easily be found nowadays, ranging from trades like software development, acquisition, systems engineering, software testing, website development, data warehousing and security engineering, to help desks, knowledge management, etc. Obviously the kaizen principle (improvement works best in smaller steps) was one that appealed to many. After Nolan’s staged model in 1973, the most appealing application of this modelling was found when the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University, USA, published its Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM). The CMM was copied and applied in most of the cases mentioned above, making CMM something of a standard in maturity modelling. At this moment there even is a project  group working on the development of an IT Service CMM. In Europe there is one standard for quality management, modelled by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). This model uses largely the same criteria as in the USA’s Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. In the Netherlands a staged model was developed upon the EFQM base, and this model was applied to IT service organizations. In the contributions in this part you will find some of the results this has brought.

OCAI culture analysis

Quinn and Cameron's Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI for short) is a validated research method for mapping organizational culture. OCAI is based on a quadrant of four organizational cultures, which differ greatly on the dimensions of internal-external orientation and manageability-flexibility. The model is shown below in simplified form.

SAME - Strategic Alignment Model Enhanced

Based on the separation of duties principle, this information management framework covers three information domains: business processes, information management (Demand) and IT service management (Supply). In terms of management, it also knows three layers: strategy, structure and operations.
Origin/history: The SAME is a re-interpretation of the Strategic Alignment Model by Henderson and Venkatraman and has been redeveloped by Jan van Bon c.s..
When: 2006 More information: see the SAME article.

S-D Logic: Service Dominant Logic

Axioms, Foundational Premises and Concepts of S-D Logic. Service-dominant logic is captured in eleven foundational premises (FPs), which were intended to establish a framework for the service-centered mindset (see first exhibit below). Since the first introduction of the foundational premises, Vargo and Lusch have realized that some of the original FPs could be derived from others and, thus, have identified five FPs from this expanded set of eleven as particularly foundational, essentially the axioms of S-D logic. Many of the concepts (e.g. value co-production/co-creation, value propositions and experiences) underlying this mindset, and thus the FPs, are neither exclusive to nor invented by S-D logic itself (see second exhibit below). Rather, S-D logic captures shifting contemporary marketing thought, in which marketing is seen as a facilitator of ongoing processes of voluntary exchange through collaborative, value-creating relationships among actors (individuals and organizations for example).http://sdlogic.net/

SERVQUAL

The Servqual GAP model provides insight into the creation of customer satisfaction, and the mistakes that can be made in the process. Servqual (short for Service Quality) assumes that customer needs are the focus, not the measurement system or the perception of the organization itself. To measure satisfaction, the model relies on nine variables that capture service quality. <read more>

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a branding term, given to a structured, disciplined, rigorous approach to process improvement. It is a methodology that provides businesses with the tools to improve the capability of their business processes and/or IT processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation leads to defect reduction (Six Sigma literally means only 3.4 Defects per million opportunities occurring) and vast improvement in profits, employee morale and quality of product.
Distribution: While its origins lie in the manufacturing industry, Six Sigma is now used in more than ten industry sectors worldwide, among them IT.
Origin/history: The roots of Six Sigma lie with the invention of the normal curve by Carl Frederick Gauss (1777-1855). After the rise of Total Quality Management (TQM), in the early 1980s Motorola engineer Bill Smith coined the term ‘Six Sigma’.
Founding fathers: Carl Frederick Gauss, Total Quality Management guru Walter Shewhart, and Bill Smith, among many others.
Certification bodies? Individual training and examination for Yellow Belts, Green Belts, Black Belts, Master Black Belts, Champions and Executives available.
More information: see the chapter Six Sigma, by Edgar Giesen and Patrick Teters, in the publication 'Frameworks for IT Management'.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

TQM is a complete management vision in which everyone in the organization is continuously incentivized to fulfill the wishes of the internal and external customer, in order to reach a competitive advantage.
Owner of the copyright: None
Distribution: Worldwide
Origin/history: Evolved from quality improvement philosophies from the early 20th century
When: From the 1970s
Founding fathers: A.V. Feigenbaum, W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran.
Certification bodies? No certification possible - ISO 9000:2000 certification indicates that an organization is working according to TQM principles. EFQM , MBNQA and INK are evolved from TQM.
Useful tools: Plan-Do-Check-Act, brainstorming, Pareto analysis, statistical process control, benchmarking, Just-in-time, among others.