Straits of IT: Excellence Needs Building Blocks and Blueprints
Growing Pains
Imagine you run a gas station that is really successful. People come from far and wide to fill up and to take advantage of your world famous homemade pastries. Everyone agrees that your coffee somehow makes the day just a bit better than the coffee from the service station right across the street. Naturally, you decide to expand - you have been doing everything by yourself but scale requires delegation. So you hire new employees, sketch out the need to add more pumps to the lot and even start looking for locations 2 and 3.
Now imagine your new employees pull up in trucks and cars filled with parts. Keypads, cables, screens, pumps, valves switches, pump housings, raw ingredients for pastries, and a 2 year old can of Folgers from home. Would you let them just put together all these parts into whatever they wanted to build? Serve their leftover coffee from their cupboard? Mess with the recipe that made you famous? Every CEO wants employees with initiative, but not at the price of what makes them competitive to begin with, and yet a variation of that same thing happens everyday in companies all over.
Initiative without access to the right information and strategy can contribute to chaos more than it does to improving the bottom line.
Building Blocks
To grow every business needs to keep track of the things that make them valuable to their customers, the things that keep the lights on, and the things that enable innovation. They need to know how they are related and who is using them. In modern enterprises this is often referred to as a configuration management database, (CMDB). Creating and maintaining the CMDB is not glorious work, and it is demanding work but it’s critical work.
The CMDB is a directory of your service delivery components, known as configuration items (CI), and more importantly how they are related to each other. In the gas station analogy each gas pump could be a CI, generally made of one or more CI’s such as touchscreens, card readers, and such. There is a critical distinction every part of the pump is not a CI - a common mistake is to automatically add everything you can see into the CMDB as a CI. Individual interchangeable screws that you can pick up anywhere? Not a CI and no need to track in the CMDB, that’s an asset (something you bought, and honestly unless you need an inventory of screws for frequent repairs you probably don’t have to worry about the accuracy too much - this is a consumable or disposable asset.) A one of a kind screw that requires six months to manufacture, that holds a mission critical role - that might be something that deserves a record in the CMDB - but not automatically.
The hard work of building and maintaining a CMDB comes from making those kind of decisions. It is just as important that you decide what does not need to be tracked as it is deciding what does need to be tracked. A good rule of thumb - if it is critical to delivering goods or services, you probably need to know what it depends on, what depends on it, who owns it / manages it/who supports it, where its used, and you should consider keeping track of it in the CMDB. A fully functioning gas station with full tanks is useless if someone unplugs a critical box that connects to all pumps preventing authorizations. Items like that that, those with critical relationships, need their records maintained so anyone taking initiative has a clear system of record that allows them to easily assess the impact their initiative may have.
Blueprints
Having the building blocks is a great start but it is not enough. The business needs a way to see how the building blocks it invests in is driving the success of the organization. The gas station has a primary success criteria - can it deliver fuel to customers reliably and safely. Then it has secondary success criteria things that get customers to pick their gas station, and things that add value to customers. To do this they need a value blueprint that show how the pieces should fit together in relation to driving those success factors. This is not just a lego instruction booklet, these are dynamic value blueprints.
What they need is a value map that starts with the customer and moves backwards more granularly in conjunction with the CMDB. This value map can even tie non-CI items like assets to show how they fit into the value delivery mechanism. This value map should include CI’s and may also include assets, in other words we may not need to keep a list of all of the screws in a pump and their relationships (such as numbering each screw and keeping track of where they are in each pump) but we can know that each pump is going to need screws, hoses, touchscreens, nozzles, buttons etc. If any one of those components is missing the ability to deliver fuel could be impacted.
The ServiceNow solution is called Common Service Data Model or CSDM. This model is not the only way to accomplish the value blueprint goal, but ServiceNow is an industry leader. Building and maintaining a CSDM is like the CMDB - not glamorous but if you want an accurate dashboard reflecting your ability to deliver value to customers it is a must. Like the CMDB the difficult part is determining what to track and what not to track in each path. A good rule of thumb here is start with the customer and work back, add deeper levels only after your ability to maintain the accuracy of the broader level has matured. For example don’t start with cataloging all of the screws in a pump in the CSDM start with the big parts - the part closest to the customer is the nozzle, if everything before that exists and is in great condition but the last customer drove off with it - you cannot deliver service. Once that layer is solid move back - a nozzle has to have a hose, the hose has to connect to the pump, and so forth.
Wrapping Up
Moving an IT organization makes from chaotic to proactive and then to intuitive or anticipatory is enabled by these concepts. The organization must have some form of architecture review that enables speed through architectural guidance, catalog of capabilities, fast review for standard requests, and deliberate review of novel requests. To be successful in this the ARB must help to develop the blueprints that connect the business value drivers to the technology that enables them, and they must keep track of all the items that influence traffic in the CMDB. With these things in place the IT department becomes strategic pathway to value instead of a chokepoint.
There is, however, one final ingredient, senior leadership support for the effort. Senior leaders are the only ones that stop the whiplash and pave the way for the success of these efforts.
Next Up
The next series will explore AI, trust, governance, and maintaining significance in this brave new world.