Identifying the barriers to implementation within organizations, whether real or perceived, can lead to refinement of service improvement scope and specification statements. It will permit a better identification of contingency and/or strategies for removing or neutralizing/mitigating the impediment's effects. Some of these barriers may be beyond the organization's control (eg. regulatory and statutory requirements), but others may reside within the organization's culture - deep-rooted, even intractable but not unmanageable. This section addresses these impediments and possibilities for their removal or management.

The discussion is conducted by grouping issues into four categories reflective of the kinds of gaps which organizations will typically encounter between existing and desired states. Any one of the four types can be a major impediment to proper implementation, operational or improvement undertakings. The types often interact in ways which reinforce tendencies to back-slide to previous, more comfortable methods and procedures.

In January 2005, IT Republic published an article on the results of research into over 200 ITIL implementation^N. It's findings were:

The preamble to the article concludes by stating - 'One immediate challenge for IT professionals is to convince key decision-makers of the value of ITIL adoption for their enterprise by increasing awareness, buy-in, and process ownership within the enterprise."^R.

The original hype has been subjected to greater internal scrutiny as organizations have been increasingly asked to verify performance improvements. The ability to properly engage in this kind of verification requires an organization with some level 4 CMMI capabilities - ie. quantitatively managed - often presenting the organization with the sobering realization that there are many other management practices (ie. enablers) that need to be improved as either pre-requisites or co-requisite to ITIL best practices.

Moreover, organization will also come to the realization that implementing the best practices of other organizations has its' own unique set of problems. Every enterprise has a unique combination of competition, regulations and culture which requires the "tailoring" of practices to individual characteristics.

Consider the following commentaries:

Gap Analysis - What Prevents Service Improvement

Best Practices such as ITIL allow the organization to describe the TO-BE process by adopting or adapting processes, principles and practices used by what are considered to be "successful" enterprises. The key to a successful grafting lies in the distinction between "adopting" and "adapting". The former implies a largely wholesale use of described principles and practices while the latter implies a "tailoring" of the processes to organizational size, capabilities and cultural influences. Successful "adapting" challenges the organization to thoroughly understand the state of its' internal processes and the constraints they place upon the organization. They can lead to one or more of four fundamental service "gaps" which the organization should either remove or mitigate their adverse impacts.

The Expectations Gap

• Elicitation, analysis, validation, and communication of customer needs, expectations, and constraints to obtain customer requirements that constitute an understanding of what will satisfy stakeholders;
• Collection and coordination of stakeholder needs;
• Development of the life-cycle requirements of the product;
• Establishment of the customer requirements;
• Establishment of initial product and product-component requirements consistent with customer requirements.

The service improvement initiative must acknowledge these these needs or an Expectations Gap can arise. This gap reflects the difference between the service expected by customers and lines of business and the service vision of the Service Provider. This situation isn't necessarily the result of any disconnect between the Provider and Client groups. IT Service providers are constantly under pressure to provide service to additional customers as the organization assumes new systems and services. These service extensions often occur without sufficient additional resources. The result is often capacity pressures - a decreasing ability to maintain service levels in the face of mounting capacity pressures. The Provider experiences increasing difficulties in maintaining levels of performance. Customers continue to expect the same service but the organization cannot deliver it without additional resources.

The problem is most acute when it comes to support costs. The introduction of new systems is usually accompanied by analyses of new server and equipment requirements. Estimates of these can usually be determined during stress testing of an application. More problematic are the support requirements - the resources needed to maintain high availability or the resources required to restore the application when something goes awry. These are either ignored, downplayed or the IT organization is instructed to absorb the costs. The continual absorption of these costs can quickly place the IT department in an untenable position. Reginald Tomas Yu-Lee comments on the organization's inability to adequately conceptualize capacity.

ITIL recognizes the need for the IT organization to acknowledge customer expectations.

In the ITIL framework, customer expectations are addressed through Service Level Management.

The Service Level Agreement is the negotiated document wherein performance is described and tracked. It establishes a direct relationship between performance metrics and the resources necessary to achieve those levels - Service Level Management allows the IT department to meet business expectations and opens a dialog to confirm these expectations^R. Service Level Management is, thus, an important element in mitigating or avoiding and Expectations Gap.

The Awareness Gap

The organization needs to realize when it has succeeded - and this includes customers and stakeholders. Well implemented processes may not achieve their objectives if their existence and operation is not properly communicated to the consumers of the services. Although the vision is a powerful tool in helping guide and coordinate Change, the real power is unleashed when the vision is effectively communicated to the stakeholders. ... Typically, their interest stems from the fact that they are investing time, energy, attention, money, and/or other resources with the expectation that they will achieve some form of return on their investment. The sense of urgency ('What if we do nothing?') and the vision ('What's in it for me?') should form the basis of all communication to the stakeholders involved in or impacted by the CSIP. These messages should be aimed at motivating, inspiring and creating the necessary energy and commitment to buy-in to the Change Programmed. The question 'What's in it for me?' can be answered by the vision statement ... for various stakeholders. CCTA - Planning to Implement Service Management

An Awareness Gap often exists around IT services that have low day-to-day visibility with the customer and stakeholders. Typically, service continuity and capacity management issues are "low" on the horizon with line of business customers. Service Improvements in these areas often go unnoticed by business customers. The IT Provider may establish initial communications channels but fail to maintain them with fresh material over the life of the implementation effort. The result is the initial enthusiasm is soon replaced with complacency, and, generalized message content may not address the specific needs and wants of a target group.

Service Design Gap

• Manage requirements so as to identify inconsistencies between them and work products;
• Produce and analyze customer, product, and product-component requirements;
• Design, develop, and implement solutions to requirements;
• Assemble the product from the product components, ensure that the product, as integrated, functions properly, and deliver the product;
• Ensure that selected work products meet their specified requirements; and,
• Demonstrate that a product or product component fulfills its intended use when placed in its intended environment.

If these practices are not done well there will be gaps between the requirements of the customer for a service and the manner in which the service is envisioned. In ITIL the definition of services is defined through the establishment of "Service Level Requirements". ITIL comments on the difficulties which can be encountered in doing this. "It can be difficult to draw out requirements, as the business may not know what they want - especially if not asked before and they may need help in understanding and defining their needs. Be aware that the requirements initially expressed may not be those ultimately agreed - they are more likely to change where charging is in place. Several iterations of negotiations may be required before an affordable balance is struck between what is sought and what is achievable and affordable" ITIL Service Management, Service Level Management, Chapter 4.4.4

Most organizations don't devote sufficient time to requirements definition. The Standish Group cited "incomplete requirements" as the prime reason why projects failed.^R. This lack of rigor in original definition becomes increasingly manifest in IT-Business misalignment as the goals and objectives inherent in ongoing service and system support fail to align perfectly with business goals and objectives.

Ralph Young echoes the findings of the Standish Group in Effective Requirements Practices^R. He suggests that "Poor requirements are a major, though not exclusive, contributor to poor technical solutions" - ie., the service design. A poor design can also result from:

• Incomplete review and analysis of alternative designs so that the selected design may not be the best one
• The design is imperfect in one or more phases of the product lifecycle
• There are distinctions between the environment wherein the design was selected (eg., test or QAT environments) and its' intended (ie. live) environment.

Mr. Young provides some recommendations to "facilitate getting to the real requirements":

Best Practices as Representing "TO-BE" Descriptions

The organization must "adapt" rather than "adopt" best practices. The former implies "tailoring" of the best practices to the unique characteristics of the organization and to the current situation. The "adaption" requires...

• an understanding of what distinguishes an organization undertaking IT service improvement from those organizations used to collect and describe "best" practices. Note that ITIL, as an open, widely available description of techniques, differs from offerings such as Gartner's TCO studies. The latter provide more extensive breakdowns (including an organization's type - financial, government, etc) of the factors influencing the cost of IT services.
• an internal culture conducive to implementing change. Adopting new procedures without experiencing the pain associated with poor or failed processes will often result in lack of internal support for the so called "best practices". Bernard Boar comments on this aspect of change:

  "It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle or more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Their support is lukewarm partly from fear of their adversaries; who have the existing laws on their side, and partly because men are incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience." Bernard Boar, The Art of Strategic Planning for Information Technology, Wiley, 1993, ISBN: 0-471-59918-2, p. 332.N

• the sophistication of internal strategic planning processes - what COBIT refers to under the general heading of "Planning and Organization" and cites the following supporting activities:
  • Information Technology as Part of the Organization's Long- and Short-Range Plan
  • Information Technology Long-Range Plan
  • Information Technology Long Range Plan Changes
  • Short Range Planning for the Information Services Function
  • Assessment of Existing Systems. ^N

  The intent of these strategic activities is to align IT with the business goals and objectives of the organization so that it makes a direct contribution to their fulfillment.

The difference between where we are (current status) and where we want to be (vision and goals) is what we do (target objectives and action plans). Each improvement project must have objectives which explain this alignment. The objectives for the project must cascade to other business objectives which further the organization's goals, mandate and vision. Goals are simply a clearer statement of the visions, specifying the accomplishments to be achieved if the vision is to become real. The target objectives are clearer statements of the specific activities required to achieve the goals, starting from the current status.

Service Delivery Gap

When requirements expand (as depicted in the graphic by the demands upon the previous solution - the bridge) new capacity and performance is expected. Achieving the benefits of ITIL service delivery processes such as Availability and Capacity Management assume a recognition of a shift in organizational focus from technology-based organizational units (eg. network, application, desktop) to a more goal-direct focus (eg. availability, capacity). This shift implies that there are greater benefits in considering network and database availability together (eg., in an availability plan or in incident procedures) than considering each of network restoration, availability, capacity as independent entities. There is, of course, no correct exclusive view, but ITIL suggests that a re-focusing to a more functional perspective (including amassing needed subject matter skill-sets) will usually produce efficiencies. This shift from a product to functional focus will challenge organizations lacking experience and support structures in inter-unit cooperation.

The organization may not be able to bridge the gap between AS-IS and TO-BE processes for a several broad reasons:

1. Immature Workforce Practices

2. Ineffective Governance

"Silos" result from introducing governance mechanisms piecemeal in order to address specific needs (for example, architecture problems or overspending or duplication). Patching up these problems as they arise limits opportunities for the IT provider to make a more strategic impact on business. Instead, management should actively design IT governance around the enterprise's objectives and performance goals. Actively designing governance involves senior executives taking the lead and allocating resources, attention, and support to the process. For some enterprises, this will be the first time IT governance is explicitly designed. Often there are mature business governance processes to use as a starting point.^R.

Governance determines who make what decisions. This has vertical implications for most appropriate organizational structure to promote the desired service improvement goals and horizontal significance for placing decisions at the right level in the organizations. Two key elements in designing a governance framework are:

• Clarify the exception-handling process - exceptions challenge the status quo, particularly the IT architecture and infrastructure. Some requests for exceptions are frivolous, but most come from a true desire to meet business needs
• Provide the right incentives - a common problem is the misalignment of incentive and reward systems with the behaviors the IT governance arrangements were designed to encourage
• Assign ownership and accountability for IT governance - Like any major organizational initiatives, IT governance must have an owner and accountabilities. Ultimately, the board is responsible for all governance, but the board will expect or delegate an individual (probably the CEO or CIO) or group to be accountable for IT governance design, implementation, and performance

3. IT Department Scale

4. Support Sustainability

The result is that the organization will slip back into the old ways of doing things (the "natural" way) and the ITIL initiatives will become "another management flavour of the day". In truth, organizations reliant upon "champions" (ie., individuals) for the continuing support of projects will have archives full of unfulfilled efforts and the organization may approach the next one with an air of defeatism. Such histories provide a challenging hurdle for generating team and stakeholder enthusiasm for new projects.

Even if the organization achieves some tentative gains it may not be able to sustain them because it has not internalized the necessary administrative and management supports. Without the supporting processes the organization will slip into the old ways of doing things (largely because they are "natural") and ultimately view the recent gains as "just another management initiative". Reversion to previous methods often have one of two primary root causes...

1. the preparatory work outlining the financial benefits and costs to implement ITIL were not adequately done so that there is no compelling rationale which can withstand the absence of initial ITIL champions (eg. original sponsors assume other roles in the organization)
2. There are practically no "big-bang" ITIL implementations (ie. all processes implemented simultaneously). The "natural" state of ITIL implementation is continuous. It must continue to evolve and momentum must be maintained. The transition must be accompanied by a shift in organizational values...

   Old Attitude	New Attitude
   Clients are Users	Clients are Customers
   Inward looking	Outward looking
   Technology focus	Process focus
   Ad hoc processes	Streamlined, focused processes
   Best Efforts	Measured, accountable processes
   Entirely in-house	balanced in-house and outsourced
   Organization is fragmented with silos	Integrated end-to-end
   Reactive	Proactive
   Operations Management	Service Management
   System skills	Listening skills
   The HP Service Management Reference Model White paper

These gains will most likely require the organization to achieve greater maturity in it's supporting personnel, administrative and management approaches. A continuous improvement program will challenge the organization to continually monitor and report upon process results. Organizations which approach results reporting as ad hoc, periodic activities are not likely to inculcate the result-oriented perspective necessary to achieve sustained momentum.

Process Modeling

Project Strategies