When you plug the stereo into the wall, you expect to hear music. A lot goes into generating the electricity, getting it into your home, through the walls, and into that plug, but you don’t have to care about that. The electricity is there when you need it, you get exactly the amount you need, and you can reasonably account for the cost of using it.

It is precisely because these things are true that we are able to make use of electricity in order to get work done. Because the electrical service is available in the right quantities at the right time and at a predictable cost, we can use it to do all kinds of interesting things. The technology behind it is necessary, but the service is the point.

Still, many businesses operate their I.T. organizations as technology providers, not service providers. The result is that business stakeholders find themselves worrying about servers, routers, and disk arrays, when they really just want things like internet access, email, document management, and secure data. I.T. is reduced to a cost center, and there is little to no understanding of the specific Return on Investment (ROI) for I.T. spending. Technology is great, but does a business really need technology for its own sake? The answer of course is no: technology is beneficial to a business only to the extent that it facilitates delivery of a service. The ROI on a piece of hardware is zero – it is the service or services provided that generate the ROI.

To address these issues, forward looking organizations adopt the IT Service Management (ITSM) approach. ITSM is the subject of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and is supported by the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. ITSM is a different way of thinking about I.T., and it requires both operational and organizational changes.

Philosophically, ITSM looks at end to end delivery of IT services from a customer perspective. Rather than building isolated “silos” based on technical and functional groups within I.T., the approach is as follows:

1. Define the I.T. service needs of the business in terms of content, availability, continuity, etc.;
2. Hire or develop the organizational capacity to deliver and manage the necessary I.T. services;
3. Design processes and procedures aligned with business goals;
4. Implement tools and technology to meet business needs.

The irony is that in any given business, most divisions already operate under a similar paradigm. If you ask someone in sales what their job is, they will probably tell you that they sell products for the business. They won’t tell you that they make cold calls to prospects, maintain a database of contacts, take potential clients to lunch or write proposals. Sure, they do all of that, but the focus is on the end result, not the tasks required to achieve it.

It is time to bring I.T. out of the basement and apply the same principles used to run other divisions. Taking a service focused approach allows businesses to stop focusing on technology and start using I.T. as a powerful tool to get work done. When this happens, I.T. moves from cost center to competitive advantage.

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