The next evolution is naturally the componentisation of services, which leads us to self-service and automation, which when done right, the whole business process streamlines, and the business reaps the benefits.
For once, technology solutions seem to be driven by businesses wanting more control over their IT services or IT supported business processes, in parallel fuelled by business minded IT strategiests who want to structure and commodotise certain business IT requirements to handover this kind of control back to the user.
This is the evelution of all forms of cloud computing (private, public and hybrid), in fact it sums up the evolution of IT over the past 15 years. The evolution of web standards and computing power, has enabled todays’s business offerings to become on-demand and accessible from any location, at any time using any device.
The next evolution is naturally the componentisation of services, which leads us to self-service and automation, which when done right, the whole business process streamlines, and the business reaps the benefits.
But before you do all that, you need to know what are the services you have or want to offer your users, have you catalogued them, and even have you priced them.
I once worked for a bank which over years have developed something called a Product & Price guide, which like a restaurant, was a menu of the services IT provided and the prices albeit internal wodden-dollars, but represented the fully loaded true cost of a service in the menu. Any guess what, price influences behaviour.
In recent times, before automation and self-service, a typical service request could take days to weeks to deliver. Users had no idea where their requests were in the approval process or delivery queue. With a self-service model, using a service catalog, a request only takes minutes to hours.
As important as the luxury of self-service, it is as important for the user to have greater transparency and control, both IT and users can track and manage the lifecycle of the service request. This is not limited to the concept of IT, but as componentisation of other facilities or processes, this concept of self service can and will be extented to HR, Procurement, Loans or any other service.
The solutions are there, whether they are located in-house or out in the cloud, catalogue driven utility based services, IT or otherwise, once defined properly and orchestration is organised, the benefit to the hierarchy of any organisation are ample.
This brings us back to catalogues, without them, self-service is just a concept without legs to stand on.
Ever-increasing pace of business combined with the higher expectations and increasing demands for services and the risks associated with them, will force any service delivery organisation to suffer if they have not invested in