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Organizations embarking on a service-orientation journey have a tendency to view it as a series of tacticalprogrammes. Armed with a conceptual understanding of services, organizations frequently rush to industrialize service outcomes. The impulse is to launch initiatives in organizational change or process redesign. While these are important fulfilment elements, there is an order worth noting.
While this order is not absolute it does serve two purposes. First, it warns against missteps such as performing organizational design before knowing what services to offer, or performing a tool selection before optimizing processes. Second, it signals the early need for a Service Portfolio, one of the most vital yet often missing constructs for driving service strategies and managing service investments.
Financial managers tailor a portfolio of investments based on their customer’s risk and reward profile. Regardless of the profile, the objective is the same: maximize return at an acceptable risk level. When conditions change, appropriate changes are made to the portfolio. There is a need for applying comparable practices when managing a portfolio of services. The value of a Service Portfolio strategy is demonstrated through the ability to anticipate change while maintaining traceability to strategy and planning.
Service portfolio management is a dynamic method for governing investments in service management across the enterprise and managing them for value.
The operative word is method. Often the term portfolio is marginalized to a list of services, applications, assets or projects. A portfolio is essentially a group of investments that share similar characteristics. They are grouped by size, discipline or strategic value. There are few fundamental differences between IT portfolio management, project portfolio management and SPM. All are enabling techniques for governance. The difference is in the implementation details.
5.3.1 Business service and IT Service
A business process can be distributed across technologies and applications, span geographies, have many users, and yet still reside in one place: the data centre. To integrate business process, IT frequently employs bottom-up integration, stitching together a patchwork of technology and application components that were never designed to interact at the business process layer. What began as an elegant top-down business design frequently deteriorates into a disjointed and inflexible IT solution, disconnected from the goals of the business.
An improved strategy for engaging at the business process layer is focusing on modelled abstractions of business activities. These focal points, called business services, represent business activities with varying degrees of granularity and functionality. A business process, for example, may be represented as a single business service or a collection of business services (Figure 5.11). A business service can represent a composite application or a discrete application function. It may represent a discrete transaction or a collection of supporting fulfilment elements. In all cases, it exists in the domain of the business.
Figure 5.11 Business service and IT Service
A business service is defined by the business. If IT provides a service to the business, but the business does not think of the service in any business context or semantics, then it is an IT Service. By considering services as a system for creating and capturing value, regardless of sourcing or underpinnings, the line between IT Services and business services begins to blur. Instead, each can be thought of as different perspectives across a spectrum. Again, the decision to adopt a business or IT perspective depends on the context of the customer. When this notion is combined with other seemingly unrelated service-oriented technologies and concepts, their relationships can be illustrated in the chart shown in Figure 5.12.
Figure 5.12 Service perspectives
Figure 5.12 states that all services, whether they are IT Services, business services or services based on Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), are members of the same family. They may differ by granularity (fine versus coarse) or by context (technology versus business). They each provide a basis for value and require governance, delivery and support. ITSM and BSM are each perspectives on the same concept: service management.
5.3.1.1 IT Service Management
The organization chart shown in Figure 5.13 is a collection of functional boxes representing vertical tiers of reporting relationships.
Figure 5.13 Simplified vertical view of an IT organization
While the organization chart is a useful administrative tool, it is missing key components. It is missing the customers. It is missing the services provided to the customers. And it is missing the workflow through which those services are provided. In other words, the organizational chart does not show what the organization does, how it does it and for whom it does it.
Goal setting and reporting are done in silos. The criteria for employees are based on expertise for a specific technology or role, rather than competencies in strategicplanning, business expertise, forecasting, or managing metrics. Each technology or functional manager perceives the other as a competitor rather than a partner; positioning themselves for priority, resources, budget and advancement.
This approach prevents cross-silo issues from being resolved at low levels. Instead, the issues are escalated to functional managers who then address the issues with other functional managers. The result is then communicated downward, at which point the real work presumably begins. In other words, managers are continually forced to resolve low-level issues, taking time away from high-level customer issues. Low-level contributors, rather than resolving these issues, then see themselves as passive implementers, merely taking orders and providing technical information. Cross-functional issues frequently do not get addressed, often falling through the organizational cracks.
The opportunity for improving an organization often lies in these cracks: the white space of the organization chart. (The ‘white space’ of the organization chart is examined in Rummler.26) It is the points at which the boxes interface and pass information. While an organizational chart does fulfil an important administrative purpose, it should not be confused with the organization itself. This confusion may lead managers to manage the organization chart, rather than the organization. Rather, they should overcome inter-silo problems by conceptualizing and managing complete processes (Figure 5.14).
Figure 5.14 Process as a means for managing the silos of the organization chart
Some processes can be self-contained within a functional area, while others are cross-functional. Some processes manage and produce a product or service received by a customer external to IT. Organizational performance improves as these processes allow. The discipline of these processes is commonly known as IT Service Management (ITSM). ITSM means thinking of IT as a cohesive set of business resources and capabilities. These resources and capabilities are managed through processes and ultimately represented as services.
5.3.1.2 Business Service Management
IT priorities must be clearly aligned with other drivers of business value. In order for IT to organize its activities around business objectives, the organization must link to business processes and services – not just observe them. IT leadership must engage in a meaningful dialogue with line-of-business owners and communicate in terms of desired outcomes.
The transition from managing infrastructures to managing services is marked by a fundamental difference (Figure 5.15). While managing infrastructure requires a focus on componentoperationalavailability, managing services is centred on customer and business needs. Operational information about the infrastructure’s health is a critical foundation but is not enough. IT organizations intuitively recognize the need to link their activities with business objectives but frequently struggle in deciding how far to go in exposing the linkages between business activities and IT execution.
Figure 5.15 The IT management continuum
Organizations are increasingly less focused on IT infrastructure and applications than on coupling applications internally and with business partners in the quest to automate end-to-end business processes and deliver business services. The challenge is to derive operational objectives from business services and to manage accordingly. Business perspectives, however, often do not easily relate to IT infrastructure.
A strategy aimed at this challenge is Business Service Management (BSM). BSM differs from previous strategic methods by offering a holistic top-down approach aimed at aligning the IT infrastructure with the business.
Business Service Management is the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts.
BSM provides the means by which the service provider manages business services. When the provider focuses its operations on business services it is better able to align investments in infrastructure and operational activities with business objectives. BSM sets forth a model for developing business-focused metrics, enabling adaptation to future needs as driven by the business requirements.
The cornerstone to BSM is the ability to link service assets to their higher-level business services. The links are based on causality instead of correlation. The view of IT infrastructure shifts from a topological map to a dependency model (Figure 5.16). This model identifies the asset-to-service linkages, allowing infrastructure events to be tied to corresponding business outcomes.
Figure 5.16 The embedded nature of services
5.4 Service Portfolio Management methods
If we think of SPM as a dynamic and ongoing process set, it should include the following work methods (also shown in Figure 5.17):
Define: inventory services, ensure business cases and validate portfolio data
Analyse: maximize portfolio value, align and prioritize and balance supply and demand
Approve: finalize proposed portfolio, authorize services and resources
Charter: communicate decisions, allocate resources and charter services.
Figure 5.17 Service Portfolio process
5.4.1 Define
Begin with collecting information from all existing services as well as every proposed service. Every proposed service would include those in a conceptual phase. Namely, all services the organization would do if it had unlimited resources, capabilities and time. This documentation exercise is to understand the opportunity costs of the existing portfolio. If a service provider understands what it cannot do, then it is better able to assess if it should keep doing what it is doing or reallocate its resources and capabilities.
The next step in the process set, Analyse, should be well defined prior to beginning this phase. If the organization does not understand what analysis it will perform, it is unlikely to know the right data to collect. Data collection exercises are usually disruptive and should be as streamlined as possible.
The cyclic nature of the SPM process set means that this phase not only creates an initial inventory of services, but also validates the data on a recurring basis. Different portfolios will have different refresh cycles. Some cycles will be triggered by a particular event or business trend. For example, a Merger and Acquisition event triggers a portfolio re-examination.
Every service in the portfolio should include a business case. A business case is a model of what a service is expected to achieve. It is the justification for pursuing a course of action to meet stated organizational goals. As such, it acts as the link back to service strategy and funding. It is the assessment of a service investment in terms of potential benefits and the resources and capabilities required to provision and maintain it.
5.4.1.1 The Option Space Tool
A Service Portfolio is an expression of the provider’s service strategy. Executing a service strategy involves making a sequence of major decisions. Some are made immediately while others are intentionally deferred. Some commitments once made cannot be undone. Providers can only revise their plans for future commitments. SPM sets the framework within which future strategic decisions will be made.
A useful tool for making decisions on the timing and sequencing of investments in a Service Portfolio is called an Option Space (Figure 5.18). An Option Space can guide decisions to invest and, if so, when. (This section draws on Luehrman.27)