I’ve spoken often about the promise of Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise (and society in general) and the potential of rich collaboration that these technologies facilitate. Recently, I’ve been working on a concept that applies a social networking layer on top of ITIL processes. Let me elaborate on that a bit.
If we look at say, ITIL Service Management, we can see a multitude of interfaces between the process framework itself, and the IT organization and the Business. These interfaces represent points of communication. In some cases, these interface points represent rather simple communications- access to content, a simple query, delivery of content, and so on. In other cases, the interface point can represent a dialogue. These dialogues can be rich and complex (though to date they rarely have been). Other points too are interfaces that in practice represent fairly shallow communications, but are however opportunities to be accelerants under the proper conditions.
I think that V3 of ITIL has made such opportunities even more pronounced. V3 has taken activities that in V2 were assigned to separate roles and has mashed them up into a fewer number of roles.
If we agree that ITIL Service Management gives us an engagement model between IT and the Business, then there’s a real opportunity to be realized if the richness of the communication interfaces can be amplified. There’s an opportunity to improve the efficiency of Services Delivery. There’s an opportunity to improve alignment of services with the needs of the Business by introducing collaboration. There’s an opportunity to elevate the competency of the IT staff by increasing the awareness of factors critical to the Business. There’s an opportunity to create the linkages that will serve to pull the IT organization further up the maturity model ladder. Many have commented on their doubts about “the wisdom of crowds,” but most business leaders now recognize the value of customer collaboration. This is no different in that regard.
In later posts, I’ll describe in more detail what these Web 2.0 technology components are that will comprise this social layer applied to ITIL processes.
1 response so far ↓
1 Vaughan Merlyn // Jun 20, 2008 at 8:29 pm
You are really onto something here, IMHO! Another dimension of this, and a reason I like it so much is the impact on organizational change management. Traditional approaches to implementing approaches such as ITIL follows a “push” type change management approach. (i.e., “I’m the manager, and I will tell you what we are trying to do, why we are doing it, and why and how you must change!”) Push approaches don’t work very well. As the cliche goes, it’s not that people don’t like change, but they don’t like being changed! By coming at ITIL through a Web 2.0 layer, I believe you can manage change from a “pull” approach - collaborative, emergent and organic, as opposed from managed, structured and pre-designed.
I look forward to seeing your evolving thinking on this!
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