Why enterprise service management?

This is primarily because the incident is not only visible to the customer but to key stakeholders of the enterprise as well. The relationships and processes that worked so well when the demarcation lines were clear, no longer apply in today's new business world.

We are well aware of three primary components in business: the customers, the practices and processes that support those customers and the infrastructure (IT and other) that supports the business.

Over the last 20 years, the lines between these three components have merged so that there are no longer clear demarcation lines between them. In the early days, IT was a back-office function that primarily supported financial and HR systems. Eventually, it supported the front-office, providing critical business processes such as flight scheduling.

Today, IT provides a direct sales channel to the customer via the Internet, introducing a variety of new challenges. The relationships and processes that worked so well when the demarcation lines were clear, no longer apply in the new business of today. For example, in the past, it was highly unlikely that a customer would know of an IT failure. However, in today's 24X7 world, the possibility of a customer knowing of an IT failure is extremely high.

It's clear that today's business world does not accept IT problems or failures as easily as was the case in the past. Today, if an e-commerce Web site fails, the ability to completely recover from the incident is much more difficult. This is primarily because the incident is not only visible to the customer but to key stakeholders of the enterprise as well.

For example, if a company has a successful virtual store on the Web and its site is down for hours, it will not only be noticed by its customers, but also by the company's senior leaders who will be quickly asking some very pointed and difficult questions with regard to the facts surrounding the incident. This scenario epitomises the need to re-evaluate the way the IT department performs its practices and processes and how they fit in today's business infrastructure.

Today, many companies closely integrate their business practices and processes to the point that they can no longer be performed in isolation from IT. For example, when companies undergo a change management campaign, it must take long established practices and processes and apply them on an enterprise-wide basis.

This includes touching specific areas in an organization such as service desk, incident management, change management, problem (root cause analysis) management, release management and service management. The enterprise also needs to place less focus on pure performance metrics and think more about quality metrics because performance metrics can be misleading.

For example, the number of calls to a help desk can be significantly reduced through employee self-help, but then the nature of calls made could change and be more complex, resulting in increased average call lengths and lower percentage of "first call close".

Lastly, organizations must perform these functions at a high standard, which is why it is important for companies to seek out and adopt best practices. Over the last few years, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has emerged as the most popular best practices method due to its to its proven track record and its public domain. But regardless of what practice is chosen, it must be flexible and capable of working on an enterprise level.

In today's business environment, the overall objective for IT is to contribute toward creating a 'frictionless business' environment so that the enterprise can be productive proactively rather than reactively driven.

Only by adopting a best practice and an enterprise approach can IT hope to fully contribute towards a business that has removed frictional processes or is in the desired state of 'frictionless business'.