Peeling back the Improvement Onion

On my next entry I will discuss an interesting organizational unit that is missing in most IT organizations that would address the problems discussed here.

There has been a tremendous amount of press around ITIL and Service Management. And in actual customer engagements there is a lot of focus on the cross-organizational processes. Unquestionably this is all vitally important, but we should not forget the tremendous opportunities for efficiency and quality gains awaiting in the Technology Administration Processes (TAP).

The actual quality of an IT service (for example: an ERP Application) requires a many different technology organizational groups to be involved - database administrators (possibly some on dbms' such as a DBA for Oracle, a DBA for SQL Server), system administrators (possibly a Unix administrator, Windows Administrator), Middleware Administrator, Storage Administrator, Application Support, Vendor Support, Web Infrastructure Support, etc.

IT Service management sets out to make the IT organization more efficient, provide better quality, and make sure IT is doing the things the business needs them to be doing in the boundaries the business dictates. ITIL focuses on some of the big cross-organizational processes, the integration of those processes, and the management of those processes.

The majority of the actual activities IT performs is technical in nature and arguably forms a significant basis for operational improvement opportunity.

Preventive Maintenance Process

Preventive Maintenance is a boring, old, tired, industrial type term and certainly not as flashy as some of the marketing terms for reactionary activities. Yet it is these very processes that are at the heart for the revenue and productivity to continue flowing for companies.

Having the opportunity to visit with many companies, it is still surprising to find many technology administration teams don't have a documented and rigorous 'Preventive Maintenance' process. They do perform some of these functions, but it is more on an ad-hoc basis or at best on a habitual basis.

And yet these companies are still focusing a lot of resources on break/fix and Incident Management processes...

Duplication

How many times have you seen where a Unix administration team and a Windows administration team do the exact same tasks - file system maintenance, backups, security reviews, etc. etc., yet don't share any of the processes, information, tools/automation with each other? And usually one group is viewed more highly than the other. "Those guys have their stuff together" is a common comment I hear that is a key clue that there are opportunities for quality and efficiency improvements.

What's happening?

These are seemingly intuitive tasks that you would expect any IT organization to be performing, but aren't. But, why aren't they?

In organizations where you do see these processes, you'll find at some point a manager or leader that has had a background in mainframe operations, or has come from a managed services provider, or even has worked in a manufacturing operation. Of course this is not always the case, but it has been a general observation of mine over the years.

Also, the educational system does not provide sufficient 'operational' focus as much as a focus on being a technologist. As such the vast majority of people in IT (including management) are interested and skilled in the technology of IT and not on the operations of IT. Further these tend to typically be the more creative-types and not so much the care-giver or factory types.

The creative types tend to bore quickly with mundane tasks and want to move into the next big project. Sowing their oats is far more interesting to them than being paternal tasks!

It is the responsibility of the managers of the technology administration teams to work to achieve the right balance of creative and care-giver skills within their teams. Today it is clear that in most IT organizations the balance still favors the creative types.

As service quality and efficiency become more important to a company, preventive maintenance processes and care-giver types must become a larger component of your overall service delivery capability.