The success rate of your ITFM program increases with broad user adoption. This can be a challenge for many reasons but there are things that you can do to ensure success! Three of the most important are:
Communicate Clearly and Often
Having the right communication plan and change management processes in place is often overlooked and undervalued. When you embark on your ITFM journey, identify the various groups that will be impacted – whether as information contributors or information users.
Utilize change management communication tools such has newsletters, brown bag lunch and learns, and smaller group presentations to inform audiences and collect feedback. Have the one on one conversations with Executive Leadership to ensure that they support the initiative and communicate the value to their organizations.
Ensure that you have effective ways for users to ask questions, provide feedback and share any concerns or ideas. Involving various stakeholders in the process is necessary to get buy-in early-on in the journey.
Know your Audiences
There are several and they all have different needs! Understand those needs so that you are able to produce meaningful, actionable data for those audiences.
Service Owners
- This group is accountable for Total Cost of IT Services and Unit Costs of IT Services
- Ensure they buy in to the methodology used for calculating the IT Cost (but resist making changes that increase complexity without value!)
- Ensure they buy in to the methodology and metrics for distributing IT Service Costs to End Users and Applications
- Design your ITFM Process to provide:
- Insight into the true drivers of cost
- Unit Cost information with analysis regarding fixed versus variable expense impacts
- Metrics and Data that support various initiatives surrounding a particular IT Service Offering such as Tech Refresh, Virtualization, Cloud
Application Owners
- This group is accountable for Total Cost of an Application including Hardware, Software & Labor
- Ensure they buy in to the Allocation metric that will be used to charge costs to Consumers
- Design your ITFM Process to provide:
- Insight into the true drivers of cost
- Notification about renewal dates with enough lead time for making decisions about changing direction
- Metrics and Data that supports various initiatives surrounding Applications such as Re-Platforming, App Rationalization, Sourcing
Consumers
- Ensure they buy in to the Data sources and metrics that will be used to charge various IT Services and Applications
- Design your ITFM Process to provide:
- IT Costs supporting various Business Services
- Cost of Applications and the value the business is receiving
- Business decisions and options that can drive utilization of IT services
Take it in Phases
It is very tempting to want to get from A to Z immediately. There is value in where you are going and it makes sense that you want to get there quickly, however, it can be beneficial to phase your implementation-especially if you are starting from scratch.
- An initial phase could involve sharing preliminary numbers with IT partners to engage them and encourage data quality and completeness
- Don’t automate all data sources and reporting immediately. As you begin to use reports, questions will inevitably arise that may cause changes to metrics and/or methodologies.
- Have a base set of reports in the initial phase then get feedback from data owners and consumers on what additional reporting would be useful.
- As you move along the ITFM maturity continuum, you will go from providing transparency to providing insight and context. As much as we want it to be like flipping a switch, it can take some time to get all the way there.
