[...]... a new maturity Here in the UK, the once-defunct helpdesk show in London was reborn and took the theme of ‘all roads lead to the helpdesk’ This was an industry-wide recognition of the view of the helpdesk as the point of access for all IT services within the corporation The service culture, once the premise of the helpdesk alone, had spread across the whole of IT Many companies had seen it coming I... that the computer press was carrying ever fewer want ads for the position of ‘helpdesk manager’ In effect, the job was being downgraded to a supervisory position In its place, the new rank of IT services manager’ appeared The service culture, invented by the helpdesk, was now being institutionally inculcated into other processes and functions, such as procurement, 1 Managing the IT Services Process. .. you had the time – namely to document the whole of the process and its functions in one place Use it to contrast with your own structure and services – see if you got the same results I did The scope of this book is limited to services provided by IT – namely the IT operations and provisions that keep the company going – as opposed to development, which plans and implements the company’s future IT This... parameters surrounding it and associated limitations of authority of the service operative, all of these have to be as well-defined as the product itself In other words, the ‘customer service’ element must be a defined and inextricable part of the process of delivery itself So just like the product, just like the process, it has to be designed, not just left to the staff in the vain hope that their ‘niceness’... decrease in the financial status of the IT services department will equate to a service or a service level The position we need to be in is not that the business decides to spend less on IT services, but the 13 Managing the IT Services Process and em nd th i Growth w Gro fing wth Gro Figure 2.2 Reactive recruiting es urc taf in s so d re an Time business decides which services it can do without or what... commercial enterprises and some of them feel, as I do, that ITIL is a mechanism, not a mindset ITIL tells the IT department what to do – but it cannot, nor should it, tell the manager how to do it So we have: G G G the spread of service mentality across IT the integration of IT services under one management structure the professionalization of that process 1.2 Purpose and scope The chances are that as a reader... bells ringing for me They often suggest that the service ethos exists only in the smiles of the front-line staff and not in the production process 10 Identifying IT services 2.2 Who is responsible? So we end up with the following steps: G G G G G G G Acknowledge the fact that for whatever IT services provides, competitors exist This competition gives the user what he perceives either as a potential... position to make declarations others may fear to make Somebody who can back up those declarations with both the political clout to deal with peer detractors and the authority to implement policies and designs to turn vision into reality In other words, the most senior person in the IT services department The one who must be the most dispassionate and clearest of thought is also the one who must, for the. .. services 2 2.1 The service culture IT services as a technology group On the face of it, the IT department is a section of the corporation serving the information and communication needs of the business Its primary focus is technology, its people are largely engineers This is one way of looking at IT But it is one-sided and divisive It is the view from outside IT Technology? Engineers? These are simplistic... its entirety, and they allow for the organization to tailor the implementation to suit policies and culture This means that there may be as many interpretations of ITIL as there are companies adopting it, and this is of course the antithesis of a standard ITIL is scant in how it deals with customer relationships, which should in my view be at the heart of any services- based function It is also indecisive . class="bi x0 y0 w0 h1" alt="" Managing the IT Services Process This page intentionally left blank Managing the IT Services Process Noel Bruton AMSTERDAM. 88 5.4 IT structure – the present–future split 91 5.5 The ITSC – The core of IT management 95 Contents vi 5.6 Functions in the IT department 96 5.7 IT development