File under 'thinking out loud'

I thought I'd post on a couple of ideas which occurred to me while sitting though some presentations by an IT services firm (LogicaCMG) on Friday last. The fact that it was Logica and not IBM or HP or anyone else isn't important because what got me thinking wasn't that this vendor necessarily had all the answers, but more importantly, inspired (perhaps) the right questions.

The bits I was able to stick around for covered application and infrastructure management. Nothing spectacular, just a seemingly well organised array of service offerings backed up by a global, blended development and delivery model.

Logica's ITSM set up got me thinking though.

Slideware it was, granted, but my initial reaction was 'that looks like the type of set up an IT manager would give his right arm for' - we should be able to elaborate on this specific topic more in the near future as we're just reaching the end of a pretty big study on current and near future outlooks for the management of technology - which to my mind would be an array of IT management tools from a small number of vendors (one central 'workhorse' and a bunch of more specific tools from the same and a few other vendors) interwoven with ITIL and process and project management methodologies and capabilities.

What it looked like was less the type of unchecked, devolved and fragmented development of an in-house IT management environment that we know is 'doing OK but could be a lot better' in most organisations today, and more like a very careful and deliberate build out of ITSM and infrastructure management capabilities.

OK—so the obvious bit is that well… duh… they have to, because nobody in their right mind would outsource anything to to a services company which was as chaotic internally as the customer's environment. All the SLA promises in the world shouldn't remove the need for some in depth due diligence but I digress…

However, at a time when ITSM and manageability in general is high on the agenda, CMDB appears to be inspiring and frustrating in equal measures, ITIL penetration is rising quickly, and lots of smaller vendors are pulling together once-disparate functionality to push out solutions / applications addressing a combination of ITSM requirements; the question that occurred to me was, as the title of this post suggests:

Would you outsource ITSM if your service provider nailed the joined up management bit before you?

I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this—naturally Logica isn't the only services provider capable of making this offer to the world at large—and indeed someone has naturally asked this question many times before.

The world is a different place this time around though.

ITSM appears to be within grasp for many organisations, and through our research, we'll hopefully be able to work out from a strategic and practical point of view if the effort and cost required to shift mindsets and physical capabilities from the current 'OK but could be better' to business aligned ITSM is achievable for the mainstream or if it's a step too far.

Logica et.al would naturally like to see more of the latter, while several big retail names recently stated they were effectively downgrading their own emphasis on IT after periods of sustained improvement, strengthening the case for outsourcing for sure. At the same time, there are many other vendors out there seeking to wake up / join up / exploit years of legacy investment by organisations in their IT management tools and systems by providing logical and functional overlays to the key ITSM areas—instigating another balancing act between leveraging existing capabilities/creating new ones, and adding yet more IT footprint to an already messy environment.

All very interesting, and lucky for us, research-able as hell :-)