Sometimes, to prescribe something that works -- let's say, ITSM -- you include certain things to put in mainly because you've already seen what happens if you leave them out. This notebook is a list of several of those things. Think of it as risk management.

1. Seven ITSM Truths
Made Obvious over 10 Years
by 4 ITSM Vendors and 25 Enterprises
©2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra

2. Keywords
1. Compliance
2. Practice
3. Management
4. Customers
5. Infrastructure
6. Strategy
7. Change

3. There IS such a thing as ITIL compliance, but
here is what that actually means.
• Methods are a combination of ideas that drive decisions, and ideas about how to act on decisions. The sets
of ideas can be prescribed as a package. The study of methods is “methodology”.
• Methodologies are commonly stored as documents in a library.
• An IT infrastructure library would be full of documentation of methodologies regarding IT infrastructure.
• By consensus, multiple providers of methodologies can come to a consensus about what methods to
recommend.
• Recommendations that repeatedly find actual success in use become preferred and are accepted as good
practical advice.
• “Practices” apply sustained explicit attention to collections of actions compared against collections of
recommendations. The comparisons provide awareness of the extent, duration and type of alignment that
actions have to prescriptions believed to drive success. That is, the actuals-vs-recommendeds can be
audited.
• For the above to be meaningful, management actually has to establish a Practice-level of attention.

4. Many organizations try ITSM without a
Practice to govern it. Oh well…
• A Practice is a function of a management organization; it must be designed,
learned and formalized.
• The discipline of a Practice does not form intuitively or organically. Management
actually has to establish a Practice-level of attention, and it will not exist unless it
is literally incorporated in an organizational structure.
• A Practice is an executive-level creation.

5. The point of Service Management is not
Service, but Management.
• Service management is not about what services to use. It is about how to
manage services.
• A service is a model of a relationship between an operation and a demand.
The relationship between an operation and a demand exists whether or
not it is managed; but the concept of a service is a model that is used to
make the relationship manageable.
• Whenever automation increases the ease of exposing operations to
demand, unmanaged relationships are more likely to increase than to
decrease. For that reason, part of managing automation is to proactively
manage that relationship.
• Good service management can improve services, but to improve service
management, you have to improve management.

6. IT Service Management is not customer-centric;
business management is customer-centric.
• IT Service Management is service-centric. (!!)
• IT Service managers are responsible for making services both the
perspective and the point-of-view on the lifecycle of the relationship
between operations and demand.
• Business managers are responsible for making operations and
demand conform as resources for meeting business requirements.
Because of the impact of customers, business managers add, change
and remove operations; business managers also add, change and
remove demand. This affects operations and demand regardless of
whether they are respectively good or bad, and whether they are
service-managed or not.

7. IT Infrastructure management is bigger than
IT service management.
• Doing ITSM without doing IT architecture makes no sense, sooner or
later, probably sooner.
• Doing ITSM without doing IT investing makes no sense, sooner or
later, probably sooner.
• IT Strategy makes ITSM less likely to fail.
• ITSM makes IT strategy more likely to succeed.

8. For most organizations, IT Service Management is
not strategy, but it is strategic.
• From an enterprise perspective, IT Service Management is
fundamentally administrative, while IT management is back office.
• The exception, of course, is for the business called “IT Service Provider”...
where “service” management is the same as “product” management.
• In general, without good administration, business can be quickly
crippled by complexity. Therefore, while administration is not the
same as strategy, administration is strategic.
• An ITSM Practice is created and instituted accordingly.

9. For most organizations, change control is the
decisive problem of ITSM
• Change control is decisive to whether the organization pursues ITSM
from an urgency (continuity) perspective or instead from an
importance (agility) perspective.
• The “urgency” approach relies on automating support processes
asap, allowing a release of resources to the change control effort. ROI
is easier, but smaller, and is based on cost recovery.
• The “importance” approach is to start with change control to
minimize the risks of taking on new demand. This relies on governing
provision processes to prevent rogue activity. ROI is harder, but
bigger, and is based on opportunity cost.