Risk of Not Establishing ITIL4, IT Service Management (ITSM)

Risk is one of the things that keeps me up at night, it may well be at the forefront. A lot of it is based on the fact that I don't know what I do not know and that is a huge risk of managing any aspect of IT or a business. So, what do I consider necessary to address these risks? I could just list out all possible risks to the business including that to IT and hope all bases are covered but is that really practical? Many clients do just that and managing risks without data is, in my humble opinion, very myopic. How should we then manage risks? We should utilise data to manage risks and help us with key decisions to mitigate these risks.?

Risk of selecting the wrong hardware? By collating your incidents based on configuration items (CIs) to understand the MTBF of what you have selected be they your PCs, Laptops, Servers, Network Devices. As long as you have logged all issues as incidents and tied them to their respective CIs, you can make data-driven decisions on what may or may not present as risks.?

What about risks from changes? You've seen a lot of high-profile outages from financial institutions, in Singapore no less, many can be attributed by preventable changes, where are the lapses? Change management is just that, it manages changes by inspecting the associated risks. Low impact changes that are historically completed without issue can be categorised as standard changes which can be pushed through with lesser scrutiny and higher impact changes should be studied with a fine-tooth comb. How do you then decide the impact levels? This is where establishing policies and practices comes into play, all such definitions and terms that are significant to the business should be assessed and defined clearly.?

When issues keep recurring? What then? Well, that is where Problem Management Practice comes into play. Unless the issue is critical, you would only want to resolve it such that productivity levels are returned to baseline or at least close to it, but you should not be fixated at getting the root cause identified if the impact is greater when the outage is still on. Problem management is after the fact where you would investigate further into the root cause and work with engineering teams to resolve it at that. This typically takes much longer and, by nature, would require some levels of negotiating with software principal engineering teams to resolve it at that level.??

What about ignoring this and just running your IT on the fly as with many SMEs? Imagine the repercussions such as inefficiencies in resolving issues – different IT techs will have their own means of resolving issues and this can lead to possibly vastly different quality of service. Imagine having feedback from a business user that she was serviced by IT tech Tony, and he did a very quick job on sorting it out vs the next time with a similar issue but IT tech Steven took much longer. Not a good experience. Imagine the productivity hours saved if everyone followed IT tech Tony's troubleshooting steps that were logged into your ITSM system. This and more are what you're seeking to achieve with an established ITSM and that these are the risks that present when you do not seek to establish these. What about more impactful issues like those affecting services? What are the repercussions of not dealing with these along with the risks??

As you've observed by now, ITIL4's endeavour to map and corelate all these practices to help with any organisation's IT service management is not something that is without thought. The resulting advantages are insurmountable. Want to understand further? DM me for a no-obligation assessment to see if I can help you with taking your organisation to the next level with one of the most established ITSM practice with ITIL4. As an ITIL Ambassador with years of experience with Singapore Government, Defence as well as P&G IT outsourcing, I can partner you for the journey there.?

#ITIL #ITIL4 #ITSM #ServiceNow #fwsg #OCM #ChangeManagement #DigitalTransformation??