2020.
New year, new decade. Same old story; I’m sitting in a virtual meeting room, listening, as two tribes go to war.
In the blue corner; the infrastructure peeps, opposing them, across the corporate battle field, in the red corner; the call centre soldiers. Lines draw, they rush forward. War cries fill the air.
The strategic goal was to expand their respective empires. The tactical objective to decide who sets the thresholds for monitoring.
There was a voice missing. Probably the most critical voice. The true owner; the service owner.
Businesses exist to make money. I know I know. Bizarre. They employ people to work out how to make money. These people identify market opportunities and develop strategic plans to exploit that opportunity. The solution will eventually be offered to the market via a route. That whole package, a service, will have an owner who is responsible for it. The service owner will have metrics or performance indicators that will provide insight into the performance of the service. This might be as simple as number of sales, growth of sales over a period of time.
Part of the service, for an IT organisation, will also include things like availability, response times, number of users (different to number of sales), error counts. Various metrics. These are set in a number of ways. From the business, the market, standards, regulations, vendors, best practices. Not the service desk, not the IT team.
The IT organisation of the business is responsible for the running of the IT infrastructure. They also have various performance indicators help them manage the IT infrastructure, but ultimately it has to meet the requirements of the business and support the services of the business.
This means matching the capabilities of the IT infrastructure to the requirements of the various service owners.
So watching two IT organisation teams battle it out for control of who sets the thresholds for the IT infrastructure is missing the point. The thresholds will be be set ultimately by the service owner.
Of course, they can quite happily set lower thresholds, below what the service requires. But alas, this was a compromise too far.
And the meeting. No victor was crowned that day. Their forces will line up again to do battle again at another time and place.
Grab the popcorn. This has more sequels than Star Wars.
Chapter 42 