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New to Process Management? Try ITPM
By Jim Sinur | December 19, 2007
Sometimes it is difficult to find the right place to start your BPM efforts because there may not be the right business visionary on board at your organization that is infected with the process bug.
This is frustrating because many organizations are riding the BPM wave and you might be watching from the shore. One suggestion is to start in the Information Technology arena and glean savings while improving the IT image through excellent and consistent service.
This is what I term IT Process Management (ITPM). There are two major ways to approach IT processes.
The Architectural View:
Architects generally look at processes for a holistic and/or top down perspective. Interestingly, architects have coalesced around ITIL and it’s definition of process areas. ITIL is a framework of Best Practice guidance for IT Service Management.
Since its creation, ITIL has grown to become the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world.
I’ve included a list of IT service management areas, from ITIL, that directly relate to the production of processes for your convenience:
Access Management
Availability Management
Capacity Management
Change Management
Demand Management
Evaluation
Event Management
Financial Management
Incident Management
Information Security Management
IT Service Continuity Management
Knowledge Management
Problem Management
Release and Deployment Management
Request Fulfillment
Service Asset and Configuration Mgmt
Service Catalogue Management
Service Level Management
Service Measurement
Service Portfolio Management
Service Reporting
Service Validation and Testing
Strategy Generation
Supplier Management
Transition Planning and Support
One can only imagine the number of support processes needed to support these large grained functions that are performed inside of IT. Change management, for example, would contain promotion and back-out processes. Imagine the number of process opportunities in incident management. There are good starting points that can be derived and attempted from the above list. Processes around service requests are certainly rife with opportunity.
ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark, of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and is registered in the US Patent and Trade Mark Office.
The Pragmatist View:
There is also a bottom-up approach that looks for hot buttons that involve potential BPM activities. One only needs to ask people what drives them nuts in terms of response time, visibility and cost issues.
Examples might include getting security authorizations, ordering hardware/software, project set up/project management. One does not have to look far to find opportunities in IT. The issue with this approach is that it might be hard to justify the cost of BPM technology on such a localized problem, but if you could tie the process to the above ITIL list, you may win the hearts and minds of the management levels in IT.
This is certainly worth a shot to get started. Once momentum occurs and you get rave reviews from process participants and the recipients of the process benefits, more opportunities will present themselves. In rare instances, some of these new processes could be recognized by the business folks and lead to a business focused process.
Bottom Line:
It doesn’t matter how you approach ITPM. What matters is that you are building process skills that will endure until the business is ready. Along the way you can better IT functions. Sounds like a “win-win” to me.
Topics: BPM |
December 20th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
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