The IT organization is the ‘Operating System’ your business runs on – was it designed like one?

Go to Wikipedia or just about any search engine and search on "operating system" and you get a description or link   “…an operating system is a set of computer programs…”.  This is obviously an indicator of the technologist’s view of the world.  But that aside, a computer operating system is a well-defined set of operating functions working in coordination that software applications run ‘on top’ of.  So it is no surprise that computer operating systems use terms such as a “processes” (Linux/Unix uses) and “services” (Windows), to describe these functions and their interactions.

If you understand the ITIL practices, that is essentially what it advocates.  The difference is that the ITIL takes a far broader scope to include people, process, technology, and management all working together in a well-defined, designed, and planned manner.

Does this mean we could be heading toward ‘versioning’ our organization themselves -   ABC Co. Version 2.1?  If we look far enough out, it is not unthinkable.  Comprehensive and clearly defined processes and services, well-understood and defined job roles, appropriately applied skills, and organizational performance management are some of the key components that will need to be in place and an uber controlled operation could itself be version controlled…! 

You may be saying to yourself ‘we already do those things’.  Indeed, but consider this – if you view your organization holistically (people, process, technology, management) as an operating system, what level of quality of an operating system would it be?    Note - there is a marked difference between a designed operation and an operation that has organically adapted based intuition.

“Help Wanted: Operations Architects”

Like most IT organizations, does your architecture team primarily focus on technology-related responsibility?  If so, then who has the responsibility of looking at your IT organization as an operating system and what are their skills?  Perhaps you have process owners or process managers.  While these roles are necessary, a common gap in many IT organizations is an ‘Operations Architecting’ function.  Frequently the function is fragmented across many different roles in a passive and disconnected fashion.

Operations architecting is responsible for designing/defining the processes, skills, technologies and automation, policies, agreements, measurements, etc.  This will take a new set of architecture skills than what exist in most organizations today.  While there are some of these skills in the market, they are largely rare and highly sought after and come mostly via consultants.  These offerings are some of the highest valued IT business services.  I should point out, just because someone is ITIL Service Manager certified, does not make them capable of architecting IT operations.  Many other skills are required.

Many companies have started on their IT improvement programs and have identified one or more processes to start on.  Whether you have started or not, it is worth taking time to ask the question “What would a successful operating system look like to our business?”  A good architect or more realistically, an architecture team, would be able to capture the requirements, and design the to-be operating system, and plans to get there.   When answering the question, a good architect also always keeps in mind the various interests involved – customers, employees, the business, investors, regulators, etc.

Okay, so what if during the design you determined outsourcing was a requirement in your plan?  Particularly important in multi-sourcing arrangements where there are multiple service providers, is the need for Operations Architecting.  To help answering the questions such as “Exactly how will the DBA outsourcing provider know not to respond to that alarm at 2am when it is just a scheduled change outage by the application outsourcing provider?”  As you can see, these processes will need to be designed accordingly, the people, processes, policies, etc. all need to be considered and accounted for.

I hope this view of looking at IT operations more holistically helps put a frame around your improvement program efforts and highlights some of the critical skills that you’ll want to employ. 

In the next entry, we’ll talk about the various BSM starting points and why.   We’ll discuss some real-world projects and I think you’ll find the decisions to start in one area versus another quite interesting.