Service Delivery

Service Delivery is the basis of judgment in any IT department.  Accepting the concept of proactive services when it comes to IT has some serious advantages. Instead of solely concentrating on monitoring and managing each component, we would be spending our time and effort on making sure that everything works harmoniously to provide a valuable and suitable service to the user.

Users are really always having been interested and concerned with what they are able to do; which is the end point of the Service Delivery Chain.  To a user, it does not really matter why the system is slow or not operating at 100%.  They are not interested in your explanations of things that have gone wrong with third party suppliers.  They just want you, to make the problem go away.

When you adopt an IT delivery system that is more service-centric, you are then starting to take control. You realize that no matter how good your IT department looks internally, you are only judged on the basis of what is delivered to the user. Once you start defining and managing your commitments and expectations in this manner, business-life becomes easier, seeing that you dodge all the issues that are caused by users defining what is acceptable, subjectively and unilaterally.

In summary, IT from the business and user perspective is all about service usage, whether anyone refers to it formally or plainly in this manner or not. We do not need to take on a major project to improve the IT service delivery.  Sometimes just a simple change of mindset is the most important thing. A few probable practices worth mentioning are in cross evaluation and training:

Make sure you have a few of your staff trained on ITIL specifically focusing on service design and transition.  This way they would be able to design an IT service that is both fitting the purpose and use.

Try rotating your IT development team and your operational roles once in a while, to give them a perspective on poor service design experience and consequences. Or send your front line operations to the business side for better comprehension of poor service operation.

Do a full process analysis to identify the areas which cause the most pain, and will provide you the highest relief if improved. 

 

Hope this tidbit has been of use.