International Process and Performance Institute

While I'm as excited about the potential that cloud computing may provide, I'm concerned that it may be one more thing encouraging us to take our eye off what really matters --- customers. The attraction of 'cloud computing' may be driven -- at least in part -- by a desire to take runaway complexity and place it in someone else's hands.

The importance of understanding your business process dependencies is likely to increase as we seek cloud computing, regardless of whether your direction is public, private or a hybrid approach.

One of the things I like about the Outside-In thinking and/or the Customer Expectation Management Method is how we can establish business process dependencies based on how they serve external customers. I think this is useful in may ways.

Level 1 processes --- those that encapsulate the entire customer experience --- provide a basis for establishing priority, uniformity of purpose and innovation. They are key to achieving and maintaining an 'outside-in' focus.

Level 2 processes --- those that have at least one Moment of Truth (direct customer interaction) but do not encapsulate the entire customer experience --- support Level 1 processes. Similarly, Level 3 processes -- which do not have any Moments of Truth but do link to at least one Level 2 process --- are supportive of Level 2 processes.

Many in the IT world are discussing this concept of dependency management. In fact, I like to mention this quote in many of my ITIL classes:

"The central challenge of IT governance is the simple dependency: application depends on database, database depends on server, server depends on switch, application depends on application and so forth. IT organizations deal with this critical data on a daily basis and treat it shamefully - essentially as a disposable commodity."

Architecture & Governance Magazine - Volume 1, Issue 1
The Last Word: Dependency Management: A Fundamental Challenge of IT Governance
By Charlie Betz, Author and Enterprise Architect

This quote could easily apply to the business as well.

Failure to understand and document critical business process dependencies, and how they serve the customer, is a fundamental business responsibility. Unfortunately, businesses are just as likely to treat this dependency data as shamefully as IT treats technical dependency information.

It is also just as common for business units to define processes from a functional, internal perspective. But external customers do not want to see 'business units' any more than than the business wants to deal with individual technology domains.

In fact, if business process dependencies are not understood based on how they serve external customers all the efforts IT makes on the business' behalf can in vain. It is not enough to know which applications may be suitable for cloud computing based on their characteristics, business process dependencies must be understood as well.

Proper design, ongoing governance, and managing IT for value depend on understanding customers and markets --- with or without 'clouds'. An outside-in understanding of business process dependencies is essential to this effort.

As an ITIL© consultant and trainer, I've used words like: Top-Down...End-to-End... Outside-In... and I'm afraid that adding this jargon to the jumble of ITIL terms may be resulting in clients getting a picture that looks something like M.C. Escher's Relativity. 

More often than not, Service Catalogs represent IT's view of the world and are nothing more than Technical Catalogs that mean very little to the business (and even less to the business' customers).

This reality simply must change if the vision for ITSM is to be realized. Nowhere is this more exposed than when we instrument IT services for 'end-to-end' monitoring. Everything's relative.

So I thought I'd put some of these terms in perspective to highlight why this matters when defining IT services.

Outside-In, End-to-End, Top-Down .... just what are we talking about?

The term Outside-In is not new. In fact its roots trace back to Peter Drucker's work in the 1950's:

“It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance—especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers ‘value’ is decisive—it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper. The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment.”

GE drank this Kool-Aid long ago too:

“Quality requires us to look at our business from the customer's perspective, not ours. In other words, we must look at our processes from the outside-in. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer's needs and processes, we can discover what they are seeing and feeling. With this knowledge, we can identify areas where we can add significant value or improvement from their perspective.”

 

 

 

If IT seeks alignment with the business then the best way to achieve this is to align with the business' External Customers. ITIL©'s Service Design (figure 3.10, page 41) shows 'Integrated business-driven technology management' and states:

“[ ...it is vital that the management architecture is developed from the business and service perspective (i.e. 'top down').]”

So Top-Down suggests we should be focusing design efforts on understanding requirements (duh) and then proceeding to Bottoms-Up implementation (i.e., monitoring instrumentation) efforts. OK, so what about 'End-to-End'? As best I can tell this started as one of the design principals of the Internet; my simple mind translates this into every layer (i.e., the ISO 7-Layer Model) of every component (i.e., Configuration Item) of an IT service ---- and therein lies the rub.

Why Outside-In (read External Customer) Perspective Matters

How we define services is as fundamental to IT service management as a CMDB, Service Catalog or any  IT process. Most would agree that limiting service definition to a Technical Catalog of services is not adequate, which is why we have a Business Catalog of services as well.

However, even when we view The Business as our (IT's) customer we can be off the mark when it comes to defining services. The silos that exist in IT also exist in the business, and it is common for organizations to take a functional (inward) view of business processes.

So we wind up with Finance, Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing etc. processes that make good sense to the business (but may not make very good sense to external customers). The processes customers 'see' often cross functional boundaries, and in many cases supplier boundaries as well. This complexity of customer/supplier relationships, coupled with an inward view of business processes, can spell trouble for an organization. In a world of increased outsourcing and cloud computing, this is of paramount importance. 

When the term End-to-End is used, we must ask the question from whose perspective? Ask a functional unit like manufacturing or finance and you're likely to get a systems oriented view of their processes;

“[ ...The great shortcoming of the input-process-output paradigm is that it leads to a focus on the internal workings of a system so intense that the external world is sometimes ignored or overlooked. .... Nickols 2003]”

Perhaps more importantly, Outside-In thinking is an organizing principal. It provides a uniformity of purpose that all functional units in the organization can relate to. This is critical to obtaining acceptance and keeping people pulling the rope in the same direction. It also establishes the boundaries essential for defining what 'End-to-End' means.

So, when the Good Books say define VALUE as part of Strategy, be careful to simply view 'the business' as IT's customer; it's the External Customers of the business that really matter.

Outside-In and Service Monitoring Intelligence

While there can be some benefits associated with service monitoring intelligence even when true End-to-End services are not defined from the eyes of external customers, the value of monitoring intelligence increases when we get closer to an external customer perspective of End-to-End services.

Of course simply instrumenting individual silos (network, Web, App, DB, et al) is not close to 'End-to-End'. However, even if we instrument infrastructure 'End-to-End' (meaning we've included all infrastructure components) it offers minimal benefit. The reason is that the applications that ride on top of that infrastructure are closer to the business.

But even when we instrument both infrastructure and applications, we can still miss the mark. The most obvious example of this is when key transactions are not identified or instrumented for monitoring. To quote Nickols again, “[ ...the external world is a vital factor in the performance of all systems. The relationship between an organization and its external world is characterized by transactions -- by the exchange of outputs for inputs."]

Another benefit of taking the time to understand high level business processes from external customer perspectives is that it clarifies what monitoring views are appropriate for the organization. This has everything to do with the cross functional nature of business processes and establishing boundaries essential to understand what End-to-End really means. This is a Top-Down design activity that requires adequate time be spent up front.

Finally (and perhaps most importantly), cycles of monitoring instrumentation are improvement cycles. When we target monitoring instrumentation without the unifying thread of external customers, we can wreak havoc on the organization. For example, services are targeted where parts of the infrastructure are undergoing a server refresh or applications are under extreme pressure for a new release. When this happens, the monitoring instrumentation cycle is at odds with the organization.

So call it what you want.... Top Down, End-to-End or Outside-In. 

Perspective matters. 

Having spent most of the past 30 years in information technology, I've tended to assume that business folks are highly focused on the business' customers. They bring in the money, right?

But it is increasingly apparent that in many organizations they've lost sight of them, and even when the business is still customer-focused the IT organization is often so far removed from these external customers that they really have no idea how technology underpins the business.

So, we have IT service management guidance (i.e., ITIL©, etc.) that suggests we create IT Service Catalogs to help with this alignment issue. Easy, right? Well not really.

I've already talked on this blog about Marketing Mindsets and Minding the Gap, so I won't repeat this information here. What I'd like to elaborate on is how IPAPI's Certifed Process Professional (CPP) and Certified Process Manager (CPM) classes can help.

The CPP class introduces (or re-introduces) outside-in thinking through the Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO) techniques as well as how to simplify processes. It's focus is on process alignment, optimization and innovation. The CPM class describes a customer-centric enterprise architecture, discusses process strategy and establishing process metrics that are tied to SCOs.

Each of these classes can be very helpful if you are attempting to establish a Business Catalog of IT services. This is an important point, since many IT organizations have wound up with Technical Catalogs that mean much more to IT than to the business. In fact, acheiving the ultimate goal of IT service management (business/IT alignment and integration) wil not happen unless you are successful in creating a Business Catalog of IT services.

This is where the CPP and CPM classes could be very helpful! CPP will establish process analysis techniques that are driven by SCOs; making sure that the business stays focused on external customers (the ones that pay the bills, remember?). CPM will establish a clear understanding of Level 1, 2, 3 and 4 processes based on external customers, which will help identify process boundaries and potential cross-functional conflicts. Using external customers to create uniformity of purpose can keep folks on track. If you have 15 minutes you can hear me talk about how ITSM On-Ramp™ Services leverage IPAPI's methods.

So if you've drank the Service Catalog Kool-Aid, great! Make sure you start at the beginning --- with external customers. Marketing Mindsets and Minding the Gap are essential to a well designed service catalog.

Start the new year off with a marketing mindset and mind the gap between you and your customers, and between your business and IT. IPAPI's CPP and CPM can help.

Monitoring and Event Management automation are major elements of ITSM On-Ramp™ Services, but not the only elements. Service monitoring intelligence can directly address silos and tribal IT cultures, but it requires more than an IT view of services. Establishing a business lane for your ITSM Road Map is a critical (and often missing) element of success.

In a few recent posts on Minding the Gap, I ranted about the Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM), dependency management, and suggested that IT could focus on applications initially but that ultimately an understanding of business processes will be needed to address the Gap.

Different Mindsets

If you were to say the word “segment” to an IT professional, most would quickly think of a Local Area Network. Mention the same word to a business professional and they are likely to think about a customer segment. 

This difference in mindset contributes to the gap between IT and the business, and ITIL©’s Service Strategy does comment on it:

“A clear understanding of what the customer values is called a marketing mindset, compared to a manufacturing mindset. Rather than focusing inward on the production of services, look from the outside in, from the customer’s point of view.”  

- ITIL© Service Strategy, page 85-86

 

Sound familiar? 

Of course having an inward focus is not limited to IT. Many businesses fall into the trap of immersing themselves in ‘the system’ or ‘the application’. In fact, the pressure to integrate IT with the Business can sometimes drive this inward focus. 

However most of the time the business is not involved in the ITIL© Road Map very much, if at all, and this presents major issues for adoption of ITSM and service monitoring automation.

 

Driving into the Ditch

So, you’ve decided to automate Event Management and install a service monitoring automation solution. Congratulations! You have taken an important step towards addressing tribal IT cultures head-on.

Unfortunately, service monitoring automation projects are inherently wicked. IT is very familiar with point products, which provide value to various IT domains and can actually re-enforce tribal values. But of much greater concern is the lack of business involvement.

You’re back to monitoring ‘infrastructure’, applications are left out, and you basically drive yourself into a ditch. You’ve built the foundation, but cannot understand the blueprint for the house. This is the bottom-up approach to defining services, and ITIL© says something about this too:

“Design from the top down”

“Implement from the bottom up”

- ITIL© Service Design, page 41

 

In fact, what often happens is the establishment of a technical catalog of services that makes very good sense to IT but leaves the business yawning in disinterest. You had a manufacturing mindset!

 

Establishing a Marketing Mindset

IPAPI’s Outside-in Perspective and Successful Customer Outcomes leverage techniques that can establish a marketing mindset for both IT and the business. 

What is needed by IT is a clear definition and understanding of critical business processes. What are needed by the business are improved customer focus, optimized business processes and innovation.

The IPAPI and ITIL© training standalone quite well; but together they provide an opportunity to mind the gap and move much closer to a marketing mindset for both. It’s important to understand that paving a business lane for your ITIL© Road Map does not force you to merge both efforts into joint meetings, duplicate efforts and lots of cross-training. 

Of course IT will still need a technical catalog of services, and application monitoring will still move you closer to the business. But achieving a marketing mindset in the context of IT service management absolutely requires an understanding of business processes by both IT and the business.

The IPAPI Process Management Framework is perfectly suited as a business lane for your ITIL© Road Map. Top down design of management architectures require an understanding of business needs --- a marketing mindset.

Getting business people engaged and involved through the IPAPI Process Management Framework can help increase their understanding of critical business processes, keep them focused on external customers, and broadens the level of sponsorship for service monitoring automation (and ITSM adoption) programs --- critically needed for these Wicked projects!

Moving from an installation of service monitoring software, to an implementation of Event Management and ITSM, requires a program of services tailored to both business and IT interests. This can help foster a marketing mindset, and is part of the Right Road to ITSM Excellence.

 

What the customer values is frequently different from what the IT organizaiton believes it provides. Mind the Gap.

- ITIL Service Strategy, pg 31

A good place for IT to start identifying with the business is the application, since it is closer to the business than 'infrastruture' which to most business people (and some in IT) is a confusing mess. However, even if we succeed in understanding the applications and their associated interdependencies --- which for most organizations would be a giant leap forward --- it may not link precisely with key business processes. Worse, these business processes may not align well with external customers and can negatively impact the effectiveness of managing a portfolio of services.

In order to truly understand the value of a service portolio you will need to understand the business processes they support. More importantly, these business processes should be defined and optimized from a customer point of view. If either or both of these conditions do not exist, then managing the service portfolio for business value may be fundamentally flawed.

Moving up the food chain from infrastructure (think technical service catalogs) to applications (think business service catalogs) will eventually require an understanding of key business processes. The systems orientation of limiting service definiton to applications is just that; internally focused and often excluding the outside world (where your customers are).

I continue to read an article by Fred Nickols called, The Difficult Process of Identifying Processes; why it isn't as easy as everyone makes it sound. In it, the author describes how transactions are often a more effective indicator of business processes, which flow across functional boundaries (just like ITIL processes do). The establishment of boundaries between these flows of activity is something that requires the business to define, not IT. Without it your definition of 'end-to-end' may be very different than the the business'. The CPP (Customer Expectation Management Method) is ideally suited to helping solve this dilemma and establishing a business-driven definition of 'end-to-end', and one that does not exclude your external customers.

Mind the Gap.

 

The Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM) and the Certified Process Professional (CPP) class is an ideal way to help establish a business lane for your ITSM Road Map.

Two of the dependencies that IT organizations must try and define when building Configuration Management Data Bases (CMDBs) are

     End-to-end dependencies - These often represent logical topologies of a service target

     Bottom-to-top dependencies - These are the dependencies within a particular component which map roughly to the ISO 7 layer stack; each layer is dependent on the layer underneath it (i.e, network depends on hardware, etc.)

It is extremely common for many IT organizations to take a bottoms-up approach to identifying these relationships. I often refer to this quote from Pink Elephant's Defining IT Success through the Service Catalog:

"The logical place to start this [ITSM] journey is first to understand the business processes that IT services support. Without this core understanding IT tends to try and define services from the bottom up instead of the top down. This technique is doomed to frustration and must be reversed."

Much of the discussion in ITIL's Service Strategy publication about minding the gap, marketing mindsets, and value point to a need for customer-centric enterprise architecture. IT talks about the Business as its customer, but it is the external customer that really matters, for if the Business is not properly aligned with their customers IT is moot.

In fact, it is interesting that the dependencies we seek in IT are ultimately dependent on the Business. The bottoms-up approach often taken by many IT organizations is simply a reflection of the Business not being part of the ITSM program.

While many of the technical dependencies are 'bottoms-up' -- à la the ISO 7-layer stack -- business process dependencies are essentially top-down:

Level/Layer 1 processes - Those processes that include all (external) customer interactions; what we call Moments of Truth. These processes are defined from the external customer's perspective.

Level/Layer 2 processes - These are one degree removed from Layer 1, and have at least one Moment of Truth, but they never encapsulate the entire external customer experience.

Level/Layer 3 processes - Two degrees removed form Layer 1, these processes never have a Moment of Truth, and always have a direct connection to at least one Level 2 process.

Level/Layer 4 processes - These processes have no direct connection to Level 1, 2 or 3 processes.

For Level/Layer 2 and 3 processes, they are dependent on the Level/Layer above it. All the work in the world won't fix Level/Layer 2 or 3 processes if the Level/Layer 1 process is broken.

The Business has a responsibility to ensure that the upper Level/Layer processes are well defined and aligned with the goals of the organization (and hopefully the external customer!)

If you are being asked to perform process analysis at lower levels/layers of a business process, it is worth asking to see the higher level/layer process models. In fact, it may be difficult to establish the end-to-end dependency data without this understanding since the end-to-end dependencies we really seek are transactions (particularly externally customer focused transactions).

Minding the Gap is about establishing two lanes for your ITSM Road Map, and one had better be a Business lane.

 

 

The Customer Expectation Management Method CEMM and the Certified Process Professional (CPP) training offer an easy, effective way to document business processes in a way that avoids 'process reengineering' and stays focused on what really matters.

The customer.

NOTE: The term 'Level' in this context is not about process capability or maturity, which is why I added the work 'Layer'.

* The CEMM approach is used as part of ITSM On-Ramp Services to establish a Business Lane for ITSM Road Maps. Watch for the second edition of Establishing a Business Lane for your ITIL® Road Map - A Pocket Guide to CEMM for ITIL®

Having recently taught a Certified Process Professional (CPP) class based on IPAPI's Customer Expectation Management Methodology (CEMM) I wanted to log some thoughts on the experience. Since I also teach ITIL® V3 Foundation and Intermediate classes, there were some observations I thought I'd share.

Day 1 Process Optimization

Any class that discusses 'process' is likely to mention people like Deming,  Juran, and Normann and this class was no different in that respect. The ITIL® publications also mention these process legends, including Deming's 'white space', Juran's work on 'fit for use' and Normann's 'value creation'. However I don't recall hearing DaVinci and Einstein mentioned in ITIL®:

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo DaVinci
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Albert Einstein

In an world of never-ending complexity, this should appeal to IT.

(Note to self:  remember to talk more about CEMM's use of pattern recognition in the next class. When I first heard this I admit I kind of rolled my eyes, but the methodology's use of these techniques is much more apparent to me now. It is very easy for processes to get so complex they become a blur; the new templates really helped to visualize the patterns of diagnostics in the process landscape. It's easy for those new to the methodology to miss this.)

In an increasingly complex IT world, simplicity should be a welcome improvement and I will point this out more in future classes.

The second thing that struck a chord was the focus on eliminating the causes of work and/or customer dissatisfaction rather than the effects. Having background in root-cause technologies this naturally appealed to me. Think about it --- does fixing the effects really simplify things?

The last thing about the introduction that was very welcome --- and in fact was specifically requested as an objective for the class by the attendees --- was the prescriptive nature of CEMM. It is a methodology; ITIL® is not prescriptive and is simply 'guidance'. Another welcome improvement!

During the review and case studies for Optimization, there were several observations and comments.

Understanding what we mean by a Moment of Truth is critically important, and reading Jan Carlson's book is highly recommended. It's actually a simple, short read, would help students be prepared, and I was able to get it from my library (no cost).

The last observation I had was the use of Process Actors as an aid in mapping IT systems to business processes. This is not only useful for linking technical and business service catalogs, but the optimization method seeks to simplify and remove unnecessary 'touch points' that only complicate an already complicated IT service infrastructure.

Day 2 Process Alignment

When people involved in ITSM/ITIL® projects hear words like 'alignment' and 'customer' they are often thinking of aligning IT with their (internal) business customers. While the techniques used in CEMM apply to both internal and external processes, its real power comes from 'outside-in' thinking; its focus on the external customer.

Not surprisingly, there an abundance of common ground here with ITIL®, particularly the new Version 3 guidance. Take the Service Strategy publication as an example:

"Customer outcomes, rather than specifications, are the genesis of services." page 4

"Value is defined not only strictly in terms of the customer's business outcomes; it is also highly dependent on customer's perceptions. ... Perceptions of value are influenced by expectations. ... What the customer values is frequently different from what the IT organization (or business) believes it provides. Mind the gap." page 31

Most, if not all, ITSM/ITIL® adoption programs I've seen are IT driven initiatives. Drawing the business' attention inward to 'the system' or 'the process' can increase the natural tendency to have an inward view.

The use of Moments of Truth and Successful Customer Outcomes is fundamental to the CEMM approach. The use of simple formulas to weight these customer 'touch points' is easy to understand and keeps things centered on the customer. This drives "outside-in" thinking throughout any element of the methodology.

This can be used by IT to get focused on their internal (business) customers, but doing so before the business has engaged the methodology to ensure they are focused on external customers simply does not make sense to me.

The Business Lane must start at Level 1 (top-down) business processes and drive optimization, alignment and innovation activities from that point. The CEMM approach is ideally suited for this. It gets the business involved at a strategic planning level and leaves the details to the appropriate IT and business staff.

Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Successful Customer Outcomes is also an important element of the method, and is consistent with other alignment techniques, such as Cobit and ITIL®. In fact, use of CEMM can help ensure that controls are 'customer aligned' and not inadvertently creating more work or risk to the customer.

At this point we also introduced Process Activity List Modeling, which is pleasantly different than establishing a detailed "As-Is" process model. A great way to keep it simple and get consensus on 'the process' so we can move on to optimization, alignment or innovation as required.

Identification of process risk was also simple and centered on the external customer, quickly identifying potential areas that may warrant further controls or inspection.

 
Day 3 Process Innovation

The last day went by quickly. The way we stated our Moments of Truth suddenly became very apparent. It is likely (and recommended) that an initial optimization and alignment 'pass' be taken prior to an innovation workshop; this enables greater understanding of the process landscape and should bring greater clarity on SCO statements and Moments of Truth.

However, it's easy to see that once an organization has committed to CEMM that an innovation workshop could be conducted anytime. This can help facilitate strategic planning and Service Portfolio Management.

Conclusions

The use of simple worksheets and action plans was extremely effective, and provides simple tools that can be used to facilitate the methodology. The action plans provide a basis for developing a very well targeted business case for improvement, quickly and with laser focus on the external customer.

CEMM is extremely well suited as a simple, effective planning tool for optimizing, aligning and innovating business processes. It could easily be used for internal processes as well, however it seems to me that the business should align with the external customer before too much internal process improvement begins. Otherwise you risk staying mired in an 'inside-out' paradigm.

Services must be defined from the top down. This demands that there be a Business Lane for your ITSM/ITIL® Road Map. For me, the CPP classes and the CEMM approach is that road.

A 'second edition' of the Establishing a Business Lane for your ITIL® Road Map pocket guide is already in the works, and another NY training class is planned for later this year.

I the meantime, any questions or comments about CEMM as it relates to ITSM and ITIL® are more than welcome.

 

This is another one of those late-night rambles that began this Monday with the intent of being a blog on the Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM), in anticipation of the NY area class scheduled for March 2-4.

 

The post took a dangerous turn on Tuesday, after I drove to the bank , which I will describe in detail. Let's hope as I finish it this evening I won't be driving off a cliff screaming in horror.

 

Monday - Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM)

 

You see, one of the critical concepts in CEMM (and ITSM/ITIL for that matter) is the Successful Customer Outcome (SCO). In ITIL version 3, 'an outcome-based definition of services ensures that managers plan and execute all aspects of service management entirely from the perspective of what is valuable to the customer' (see Service Strategy, page 67).

 

IT naturally views the business as its customer. CEMM is oriented towards the business, and attempts to have the business take an 'outside-in' perspective of the customer (which in this case study is me). 

Successful customer outcome (SCO) - The resulting outcome, and the "process" experienced by the customer behind that outcome in toto, that the customer would define as making their lives simpler, easier and more successful.

- International Process and Performance Institute

The CEMM approach uses a unique SCO mind-mapping technique to get to the true nature of SCO, from the customer's perspective (i.e., 'outside-in'). Of course if the business does not have this expectation set properly, then all the technology integration in the world will not make a difference.

 

Tuesday - Bad Trip to the Bankster

 

This story is true.

 

When I opened a business account with my bank some time ago, they ran a promotion for a free line of credit. While I didn't need it, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth so I accepted the offer which waived the $250 fee.

 

Of course a year passed and I received a statement which indicated they were planning on charging me a $250 annual fee to continue the credit line. When I called to let them know I really didn't need the credit line, they said I had to come down to the branch and sign some paperwork to cancel the agreement.

 

So I took a trip to the bank and here's what happened.

 

My banker (a nice guy) said he hated to see me cancel this credit line, since once I did it might be almost impossible to reinstate it since the bank was not issuing any new lines of credit. He said that if I opened an additional business account with $500 in new funds he could give me a $200 Reward (for opening the new checking account), get the branch manager to adjust the Credit Line fee by $50, and give me another $50 in Cash Bonuses (for completing an Account Review and purchasing a new product).

 

To make it easy for me he said I could get the $500 from the ATM, so I walked outside to the ATM (which is near the drive-up window) and withdrew $500. I gave him the money and he did about 20-30 minutes of paperwork.

 

When I told him I really didn't want a second checking account, he said that I could cancel it within the first 90 days and transfer the funds back to my original checking account.

 

So I now have my Line of Credit and a second business checking account (neither of which I really wanted). Of course I also had an extra $50 in cash, but I'll have to watch for the funds to appear in my (two) accounts and remind myself to cancel the second account sometime early next year.

 

Today - We need some serious Cultural Change

 

You don't have to know the intimate details of CEMM to understand there's plenty of non value-added work in the above example. True, I did get a line of credit and 50 bucks, but that's not really what I wanted. In fact, the thought of using that credit line just makes me even more uncomfortable.

 

To make matters worse, while surfing the web for this posting I came across the usual horror stories about banksters and bailouts. I originally saw the name 'Banksters' from an article by Michael Hudson at:

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10279

 

From what I can tell, Time Magazine coined the term Banksters back in 1930. A combination of Banker and Gangster... 

 

Moving Mountains with CEMM

 

The Customer Expectation Management Method (CEMM) looks at 3 things that help us identify causes of work, in an effort to remove non value-added work:

• Moments of Truth
• Break Points
• Business Rules

Moments of Truth exist any time a customer touches a process or a process touches a customer. Break Points occur anywhere a hand-off of any kind occurs in a process and Business Rules are the explicit and implied rules of the process that form or influence the behavior of the process.

 

Outside-in thinking brings our customers into the 1st person perspective as our primary motivator. We may still keep the needs and concerns of the organization in the 1st person as well. This creates a powerful balance where we serve our needs within the bigger picture of serving our customers' needs.

 

The IPAPI CEM Method™ uses outside-in thinking to align processes to our customers by articulating what our customers would see as a successful customer outcome (SCO) from our processes. We also capture a good deal of context to help us get the SCO right with SCO Mind Mapping.

 

People want money. They do NOT want loans, and granting them a loan they cannot afford to pay is even worse. I remember thinking of Bankers as people you trusted to give you conservative financial advice... "a penny saved is a penny earned", remember?

 

My experience with the Bank is a reflection of a larger, cultural defect in our financial system. While I don't expect CEMM to remedy THAT, I can say with certainty that organizations looking to integrate technology into the business via ITSM/ITIL had better make sure the business really understands the customers expectations.

 

If that does not happen, you'll simply reach the edge of the cliff faster.

 

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

- Confucius

 

 

 

 

For those business people who may be unfamiliar with the concept of IT Service Management, (often called ITIL®) let's start with a very brief explanation.

As information technology increasingly underpins key business processes, sometimes actually becoming the company's product, the way technology is managed has come under fire. It is no longer adequate to manage 'infrastructure' --- individual servers, routers, applications and so on --- the organization must take a holistic, end-to-end view of technology from the context of critical business processes.

For this reason there are a number of frameworks that IT is looking to for guidance on establishing internal processes to effectively and efficiently manage technology from this new paradigm, the most popular of which is the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL®.

What is essential for successful adoption of ITIL®  and/or IT service management within an organization is active participation from the business. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons why it is common for the business side of the house to not be involved in these quality improvement programs. 

In some cases IT does not seek to engage the business as a result of fear due to poor working relationships with the business. In others, the business is well aware of the need to make difficult decisions and trade-offs that they are not currently being held accountable for and therefore avoid participation.

When the business finally gets involved, it is easy to get intoxicated with work flow automation and technology, (which is also right in IT's comfort zone). The focus on the customer and business process improvement is lost.

Customer Expectation Management: Minding the Gap

One simply has to read the guidance to see the relationship between Customer Expectation Management (CEM) and ITIL®:

"Perceptions of value are influenced by expectations.  ... What the customer values is frequently different from what the IT organization believes it provides. Mind the gap."                                            - ITIL® Service Strategy, Section 3.1 - Value Creation

More specifically, there are some important areas that IPAPI CEM Method™ can help with ITSM adoption.

First, getting the business to define business processes from the customer perspective (not 'the system') is an obvious benefit. Without this orientation by the business it is likely that key business processes will not be defined from the outside-in, resulting in investments in automation that are not truly customer-aligned. Indeed, if we successfully achieve technology integration with the business the risks associated with a lack of customer focus could increase significantly.

The increasing pace of technological change brings more complexity to IT infrastructures. In many cases the IT organization is drowning in an n-tier, virtualized and distributed technology infrastructure. The IPAPI CEM Method™ seeks to reduce the complexity of business processes precisely at a time when complexity is an increasing burden on the IT staff.

The IPAPI CEM Method™ also offers an approach that is based on simple process activity modeling (via the Process Activity List) that can help both IT and the business avoid detailed workflows when that is not what is needed.

This approach can provide the IT organization with a simple and quick way of validating key business processes, limiting time consuming re-engineering and analysis to areas that have high customer value.

Business & IT: Two Lanes on the Same Highway

Making sure your ITSM road map has a business lane is fundamental to success, and managing customer expectations applies to both internal and external customers.

The IPAPI CEM Method™ and ITIL®'s Service Strategy share common principles that can be used effectively in both BPM and ITSM initiatives. Make sure your road map has both an IT and a business lane that share a common vision of where you're going.

I believe that incorporating the CEM Method™ as part of your ITSM improvement program can help you mind those gaps, but I'd be interested to know:

If you are on a journey to ITSM, how involved is your business?

How are you documenting key business processes for the IT organization to map technology to?

What challenges are you facing?