The role of analytics in ITIL 4 Direct, Plan & Improve

ITIL 4 places great emphasis on transferring Service Management into the new world of Agile, Lean and DevOps. But despite the focus on value creation, which is generated iteratively in smaller steps, we need a holistic view of our organization's strategy and how we support it from IT. Direct, Plan and Improve provides us with the basics.

DPI also elegantly brings together the related topics of strategy development, governance and quality management (continuous improvement). The topics have one thing in common: they must be based on robust figures, i.e. indicators and controls. As the father of quality management, William Deming, once said: 'In god we trust, all others bring data'.

Unfortunately, collecting and evaluating data is still a major challenge in many organizations, as the data and tool landscape is very heterogeneous. The aggregation of data from all corners of IT for operational, tactical and strategic insights is still a great challenge, as the following illustration shows by way of example:

Thanks to new technologies such as Big Data and Small Data platforms, new discovery tools such as Splunk or Dynatrace, and integrated analysis capabilities in digital management environments such as ServiceNow, disparate data can be quickly brought together to answer questions from a wide range of stakeholders:

·      IT operations: How can I prevent outages and increase efficiency and productivity?

·      CIO: Do we have the right strategies and innovations to optimally support the business in the long term?

·      HR: Do we have the right tools and solutions to attract and retain talent?

·      Service Management: Do we have the right service portfolio and the right service quality to satisfy customers and partners?

·      IT Security: Can we ensure that our systems and procedures are secure, compliant and auditable?

·      DevOps: How can we make the delivery of new functionality faster and more efficient?

The path to an integrated analysis platform can only be gradual but must be based on a uniform data and operating model from the outset. Afterwards, the data can be collected and aggregated in such a way that the above questions can be answered use case by use case. The four ITIL 4 Managing Professional books as well as IT4IT provide the procedures for building an architecture as shown below:

Conclusion

DPI is a round thing that gives us methods for strategic management and iterative improvement of IT performance. However, these only come into effect with a well thought-out, integrated approach of process and data model realized on a modern analytics platform.

Ultimately, the data obtained in this way should be processed so that it can serve IT as a strategic tool for business-IT alignment, governance and planning discussions, in the simplest sense as shown in the following diagram:

The arrows in both directions suggest that the snapshot is less important than the development direction. As long as we can prove that we are constantly improving, a lot has already been gained!

Or in the context of ITIL 4 DPI, we want to achieve the following benefits:

·      Team Focus

·      Known Expected outcomes

·      Adherence to Guiding Principles

·      Clarity on actions

·      Flexibility for unique contribution

·      Space for creativity

However, data and dashboards should not be a mean to its own end. Aggregating data should always be done following the goals cascade as defined in Cobit – only this way IT can prove value to business.