ISO 20000: A strange case of new or changed services

20000 squid Nautilus viewbay from Jules Verne masterpiece "20000 Lieues Sous les Mers" at Commons Wikimedia

Back to governance and ISO 20000, a rather different one from the previous Service Management System examples can be found within 5 Planning and implementing new or changed services.

This section marshals top management in to play regarding decision on significant changes to existing services or new ones (the last one truly is strategic thus should not be handled like other Changes are).

The idea behind this higher level process is to address a recurrent issue: the adequate handover of in-house development projects final product to the “other side”, the service management domain.

Although project deliverables are usually formally accepted, their introduction into live environment not always follows a similar clear approval path and neither development management or service management are independent advocates on this.

By making new service approval go through this steps, top management becomes an active decision maker. And service management will know about new services of big service changes way sooner.

Here I think ISO 20000 favors [using Peterson’s approach to governance] a combination of processes, relational mechanisms (promoting collaboration between conflicting departments)  and IT structures (like IT project steering committees and IT strategy committees for communication and participation of all interested parties) that lead to a particular governance model.

Interesting example on how IT structures  can tie to processes at various levels (strategical/tactical/operational).

Governance lurking on ISO 20000

Platanus bark, by Vilseskogen at Flickr - Some rights reserved

There’s some governance on those ISO 20000 clauses.

The most obvious is under Requirements for a management system which features a not-so-subtle first section:

[3.1 Management responsibility]

d) appoint a member of management responsible for the co-ordination and management of all services

Next, the first section of the Deming Cycle has this for the service management plan:

[4.1 Plan service management (Plan)]

d) the framework of management roles and responsibilities, including the senior responsible owner, process owner and management of suppliers

And still within Deming Cycle, for the implementation phase:

[4.2 Implement service management and provide the services (Do)]

b) allocation of roles and responsibilities

[side note: I’ve been at Lynda Cooper’s ISO 20000 Audit training and it has been though provoking. Lynda really gave a crisp distinction between service changes and components changes. More on this in the next post]

ITGI (CobiT, ValIT, Risk IT,…) supports IT Governance (ISO 38500)

Gary Hardy from ITGI wrote the article “ITGI Enables ISO/IEC 38500:2008 Adoption” (available only to ISACA members) putting the case for using mostly CobiT and ValIT from ITGI portfolio in order to enable IT Governance according to ISO 38500 (it goes through all the six principles and three main tasks described on the standard).

[Found it reading the crystal clear and highly recommended “The journey towards enterprise governance of IT” by Geoff Harmer]

Effective Decision – Magic?

Conferring after the call -by Jean-François Chénier, Some Rights Reserved - Attribution, Non-commercial

Steve Romero, wrote a comment over a podcasted interview on IT projects and initiatives failure, defending how three orchestrated disciplines can address the core People issue:

• Governance: Making sure the right people are accountable for addressing critical decisions
• Process management: The decision process is feasible and doable
• Organizational change management: Assuring people become comfortable and make their own the organization government processes, support business processes and human behaviour changes in order to make the most of technological solutions

Regarding the latter, Organizational change management, I call magic to the moment during a project when people adopt the subsequent change.