The Psychology of Service Data...

For the next six months or so there will be a reduction in my activity in the blogosphere as I'm diving deep into the world of service management data for a large international organisation. Of course ITSM data, service improvement and organisational factors all should exist cheek by jowl in the the IT service space.

Data gives you the understanding (or knowledge and "wisdom" as ITIL would have it) of your situation, and if staff are any good with regression lines and multivariate modelling you may even be able to predict likely future outcomes. Thankfully I spent a few years getting to know Excel in some considerable depth and I'm also pretty handy with the Microsoft SQL Server suite (the recent Integration, Reporting and Analysis Services packages are excellent). I'm also adept with the reporting application that is used with many service management packages such as Remedy - Business Objects.

So probably like a few of you out there, using these tools I can extract and transform service management data. I can also present the output in nice dashboards allowing senior management to understand what is taking place in the organisation. I'm also lucky in that I have knowledge of statistics so I can fire up Analysis Services, R, or SPSS and do a mean correlation and regression (be that multiple or linear). Furthermore, factor and reliability analyses don't phase me and I'm very happy to have a bash at multilevel modelling. These can help predict what's going to happen in the future based on what has gone before.

So what's the goal of all of this data collection and analysis? Well what's the goal of any business? To succeed! All of this data will obviously indicate your performance against targets. If you're failing them, it should help you to pinpoint factors in the failure (your teams? suppliers? processes?). If you're meeting your targets it can help you identify inefficiencies (for example if you're running a 24 hour shift system, but very little activity occurs overnight, are your staffing levels excessive?). It can tell you other things too - give an indication of levels of process compliance and governance and perhaps the factors that influence these outcomes. Thus are understanding knowledge and "wisdom" all present in your data.

Here's a story. I worked for a guy who quite a few years ago set up a data analysis firm for retail suppliers. He pulled together various data from supermarket EPOS and stock systems. The data contained information about when products were out of stock on the shelves (supermarkets scan shelves every 3 hours or so). From the sales data he was able to determine the average rate of sale of any product at any store. Using these analyses he was able to say to prospective clients "I can save you half a million a year". Using a calculation that multiplied the amount of time a product was out of stock, by the rate of sale of the product, he was able to estimate how much the supplier could save if the product was always stocked on the shelves. Or something like that.

But anyway, this is where the organisational stuff comes in. The retail firms used his software to analyse their data in this way, but then they needed to get their account managers to stay on top of store stock levels. This activity was often a new focus for these staff, and one that was not intrinsically enjoyable, so firms needed to deeply integrate the 'out-of-stock-is-bad' mentality into the account teams. I'm sure you've all had situations in the ITSM world where staff were required to do new things. It's not always as easy as "just telling them to", because sometimes you're trying to change behaviour that they've got used to over the course of their career. That's why the psychology of organisations is important. Action without data and understanding is blind and a bit stupid, but understanding without action is equally unlikely to lead you to the sunlit uplands of service excellence.

Hopefully I'll have the time to write more of these during my new assignment but if not see you later in the year!

ITIL: Sweet F.A.?

Here's a hypothesis: many in IT are lazy about areas of work that do not involve their principal area of interest. In other words, technologists' core interest in their work is proportional to how technological that work is. Amongst the real tech-heads that I know, point and click IT is anathema. For many of these individuals, command-line operation, configuration and installation is enjoyable and demonstrates true expertise. Yes it requires thinking through at every step, but this is considered an intellectual challenge and therefore fun. Yet for other activities such as service support processes and governance, the same individuals simply do what is necessary to acheive the standard required of them.

Here's a second related hypothesis: As these techies grow older and are promoted, perhaps these instincts remain. The individuals will still be deeply concerned about the technology that the organisation delivers but will experience a temptation to take shortcuts when it comes to delivering the other stuff required by the organisation. To paraphrase George Orwell: 'Technology good - other stuff important but boring'. In such a mindset, shortcutting may become rife. By shortcutting, I mean the equivalent of point and click for aspects of the working environment. Need to create a support structure? Point and click on ITIL. Need to improve processes? Point and click at 6 Sigma. I'm not making judgments here - human information processing has natural limits and we all use cognitive shortcuts of one type or another to help us navigate the world in an efficient manner. 

Thus the real techies are willing to go to the nth degree to deeply understand the technology and to innovate. These are the people who have performed the paradigm-free thinking that has recently delivered NoSQL, and earlier created technologies such as PERL and Linux. In the ten years between 1995 and 2005 technologists from myriad organisations took internet technology from HTML 2.0 to Ajax. Away from hardware & software, ITIL recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. In that time the OGC have worked hard to improve the framework. However the passive adoption of this tool by technology organisations and the slow development of the framework has been in marked contrast to the way in which they use and adapt available technologies. To return to my hypotheses, IT people are lazy about non-technology and are not motivated to perform independent thinking on the same scale as they do with the technology.

There are some exceptions and here I need to mention the IT Skeptic once again. Furthermore in the comments attached to my last blog entry Carol Hibbard asked why IT people need a framework to "define common-sense business acumen" and perhaps herein lies the answer. People in IT don't want to do the equivalent of a command-line installation of their support structure. They want to point and click, and that's why they love (or perhaps loved?) ITIL. It was the shortcut, the silver bullet which could be used to organise the non-technological, service facing aspects of the organisation. Keep in mind that I do like ITIL, but like many in the industry I have realised / am realising that there's much more to great service than just ITIL. There's some low-level, formatting and command line stuff that also needs to be dealt with.

With this realisation in mind, if I was starting a new service management company, I'd draw on complexity theory. I'd hire the best, create a great new culture, and allow staff lots of autonomy within that to create their own structures. Sure the people there would use ITIL, but they'll probably draw on other stuff too: sociotechnical systems theory, social network analysis, service climate studies, ACT for the stressful times.

The point is is, there's no framework for "great". The people in this organisation would have to think things through in some detail. But they'd create something that works for the organisation, and not imposed from outside. To be fair ITIL always insisted that we shouldn't mould the organisation to the shape of ITIL, rather we should do things the other way around. This however was lost in the sound of all the shortcutting and accreditation.

What I'm trying to say is that the monopoly of ideas on how how to run a good service organisation did not begin and end in the UK Office of Government Commerce between 1989 and 2009. There were successful companies before ITIL and there will be others afterwards (for those of us that do not believe that ITIL will last forever). So therefore I'm proposing myself Framework Agnostic (F.A.). I'm a huge fan of ITIL in the same way that I'm a fan of Albert Cherns' Nine Principles Of Socio-Technical Design or Edwin Locke's Goal Setting Theory of Work Motivation. I don't believe that any one of these contains the complete specification for delivering great service in any organisation, but they are each important. ITIL is technology-specific but (certainly in V3) steps on the toes of organisational science.

I concede that techies may not wish to get too involved in the organisational/process stuff, but those of us who are educated in, or motivated to study these areas should help disseminate the message that no one book (or set of books), theory, framework or approach is likely to have the monopoly on right. Furthermore, like our technology-focused colleagues we should continue challenging, extending and integrating approaches in the continual pursuit of better. We can do this on a local level in our organisations or on a macro level (the whole ITSM debate that I hope this blog is contributing to). It is framework agnosticism and not fundamentalism that will help us to do that.

The Slow Death Of ITIL?

Nothing lasts for ever. In the heady fin-de-siecle period that we've recently passed through when dotcoms were a-booming and bugs of the millenium were being predicted, I became an ardent fan of a genre of music that came to be known as chillout. It was electronica with overt nods to hip-hop, dub and orchestral forms. It was slow and very, very lush. With each new album released by the likes of Zero 7, Sven Van Hees and Nitin Sawnhey (or the Cafe Del Mar, Om Lounge, or Luftkastellet compilations) I grew ever more enchanted. However even then I sensed somehow that this form would at some point become unfashionable and I would have to move on with the times. I'd invested a great deal of time and money into learning about (and purchasing) music within this genre. I was entrenched - Kuhnian-style - within this paradigm (see earlier blog entry). However I was determinded to avoid the fate of those aging rock 'n' rollers that I remembered seeing around in the nineteen seventies. They were still decked out in their drainpipes and crepe shoes, refusing to let go of a brilliant but outmoded form from twenty years earlier.

Needless to say chillout, after a desperate but ultimately futile rebranding as downtempo died out somewhere around 2005.

Look, there are a whole lot of bloggers who are far more knowledgable about ITIL than I am, and have better things to say on the subject than me (stand up Rob England a.k.a The IT Skeptic), but I've noticed something recently. It's this: perhaps ITIL has passed its Peak Oil moment. And you know what, maybe many people have noticed this and I'm just slow. Or it could be that I've just up and blurted out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes when you all knew it anyway but just didn't want to say. I mean, look at the anecdotal stuff - there used to so many vacancies for incident and problem managers on Jobserve and the other boards. Now there are hardly any. To coroborate this unscientific observation I went and had a look at the IT Job Stats website which offered me the demand graph above for jobs asking for ITIL Certification. Ouch. The IT Jobs Watch site offers a similarly depressing scenario for those who have wedded their career to ITIL; both the contract and permanent markets are showing a scary fall in advertised positions. Yet demand for some generic roles such as business analyst is still holding up in both the contract and permanent sectors.

The whole ITIL-in-decline thing is just a bit of a hunch and I'm interested to understand what others out there are thinking about this subject. Also, it's not just the job stats, I've noticed that some respected commentators are moving away from aligning themselves too closely to ITIL as they once did, and are starting to blog about ISO/IEC 20000 or CoBIT, or IT governance in general. These are people who are thought leaders worth following. I'll add to this stuff that Rob England has been saying for years about the lack of proven ROI as regards ITIL. I've heard it said on good authority by a senior mover in industry that while ITIL is recognised as having descriptive and conceptual benefits, the lack of proven ROI mean that leaders have already abandoned the idea that it is a tool that can help deliver a competitive advantage. He quoted the words of the CIO of a large firm "ITIL is just common terminology and a thing of the past. It’s only remaining value is that it makes it easier to engage outsourcers that support ITIL".

Here's some more numbers. Google Trends appears to suggest that searches for ITIL seem to be on a downward trajectory both in the United Kingdom and worldwide.

There are many reasons why this hunch may be wrong. The economic situation may be causing a contraction of the demand for ITIL staff or perhaps knowledge of ITIL has become widely embedded and people have less of a need to search for it on Google to find out what it's all about. Let's hope so. However, I do kinda have faith in my hunches. Especially this one. Humans seek novelty, it's one of our defining characteristics. If that wasn't the case we'd still be listening to doo-wop and rock and roll instead of the industrial, gabber and noizecore genres that youngsters are getting off on. Apparently. And chillout is still kicking around - there's an internet radio station in the mountains of Ouray, Colorado that continues to play the very best examples of the genre. The vast majority of the rest of us have moved on to new things. Perhaps then a view of the future of ITIL.

A little bit of self-congratulation

I was watching the movie The Hudsucker Proxy last weekend and found it a fascinating recreation of how business operated in the nineteen fifties; i.e. before the information technology revolution. Messages were sent using rolled up paper inserted into vacuum tubes, or on the memo trolley. There were huge typist pools whose job it was to create letters. The stock price was relayed to a few senior individuals via a ticker tape machine in the boardroom.

It made me think of all those people who suggest that IT is an expensive cost centre and seek to denigrate it's achievements. In that I include the many knockers of the government's NHS Connecting For Health project. Yes information technology is costly, is often not delivered on time, and doesn't always meet requirements, but it changes things for the better in a huge way. In 20 years time perhaps paper patient records will seem as quaint as the vacuum memo system in the movie.

So to all those in IT who are feeling pressured by the business or who are made to feel their achievements are lacking somehow - chin up! You've transformed business over the last half-century and I'm pretty sure you'll continue to do so in the next. Yes I know there are many issues to be resolved - one of the great things about this industry is that we're always pushing on - but just stop for a moment to think about what we've done so far.

A little bit of self-congratulation, and self-assertiveness now and then is no bad thing.

Social Network Analysis

Have you read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions? It's appeared on lists of the most influential books of the last century; it would certainly sit near - if not on - the summit of my top ten. Here comes the 'in a nutshell bit'. Pay attention. 

Kuhn said that science isn't this objective, rational pursuit that many like to think it is. He argues that scientists are subject to the same social forces that affect the rest of us and this colours their practice. Thus they work within an accepted framework (or 'paradigm') and ignore anomalous information that's occurring outside the paradigm. For example when scientists working in the framework of Newtonian physics found anomalous results (curvature of spacetime) they put it down to measurement error. He suggests that it takes a great deal of social pressure to get scientists to adopt a new paradigm (after all they've invested so much in the old one). He termed this framework transition a 'paradigm shift'.

Once I'd learnt about Kuhn and paradigm shifts and such (as an undergraduate) I took  to bugging the hell out of my lecturers. I kept challenging them to point to the paradigm shifting work that was occurring in our discipline, for it was here that I considered the exciting stuff existed. Paradigm shift as growth curve, if you like. Here's a more recent example: the internet was a paradigm shift. Good old Bill Gates was stuck in the old manner of thinking when he initially suggested that it wasn't going to amount to much. That was one huge misjudgment, but he's human and subject to the same cognitive processes as the rest of us. 

Just before we get too carried away always remember that a lot of the anomalous stuff will not quite make it to shift status: Google Wave anyone?

So without further ado here's my contribution to the soup of anomalous phenomena that's buzzing around current ITSM thinking: Social Network Analysis.

SNA doesn't relate to the internet-based social networking tools that we're all familiar with (although we can perform analyses on the data that these collect). Rather it's a method of analysing social interactions; for example people that you talk with during the course of your day. Here's what you do:

1. You capture the social interactions of all the people that you're interested in. As I'm blogging about ITSM let's use as an example the IT service support staff in your organisation. You can simply administer a short questionnaire asking them to create an ordered list of the twenty people they interact with most in a week. You could also add to this PABX telephone data which will detail who they talk to on the phone. You can go further and include email sent to and received from headers. Going even further you could use the connection information from your corporate instant messaging application?
2. Now you have the data of who interacts with whom you can then plug this into a social network analysis application such as UCInet. This will do all the complicated maths on the data and determine where you have structural holes and positions of influence and power and similarities. You can even plot a map of the social network so you can get a visual of your organisation.

What will this tell you? Well it will give you a calculated picture of where informational power lies, and perhaps how communication needs to be re-configured to ensure that knowledge is more evenly distributed. And it can do more - research has shown that individuals who occupy similar positions in different parts of a social network tend to have similar views. Crazy but true.

Here's a SNA plot of Incident data that I analysed (at the workgroup level) from a huge service support organisation. The data was simply taken from the service management tool. You will notice two huge bottlenecks. Shortly after this analysis one of those bottlenecks was removed, resulting in a speedier flow around the network. I could go on, but I'll leave you with a few other interesting SNA plots (courtesy of Visual Complexity). So you decide: is SNA a genuine anomaly or the beginnings of a paradigm shift in the methods we use to understand our ITSM organisations?

My Dream IT Workplace

File this one under 'Something to aspire to'.

This is what my dream (evidence-based) ITSM workplace would be like. Cue the sound of harp strings...

Fisrtly (and continuing where I left off in my last post) when hiring or promoting permanent or even contract staff, the recruiter would perform job analyses and create person specs so that they increase their chances of bringing in someone who identifies with their work, and for whom the work has significance. This would mean that we'd be able to give the staff greater autonomy and we'd reap the myriad benefits that this brings (e.g. receptivity to change, motivation, innovation, job satisfaction, well being etc..). We'd also be recruiting individuals who have the values that can shape the organisational culture towards what we wish it to be.

Secondly the organisation would not have a formal hierarchy. If the selection was done correctly staff wouldn't need to be coerced to do their jobs. Authority wouldn't be built-in to the organisational structure rather it would - like natural leadership - wax and wane depending on a particular situation. Here's an example: if a new intranet needed to be built to enhance internal communication and knowledge, this project would be led by a couple of techies who had built excellent Ajax-based systems in their previous jobs or their spare time. Thus these knowledgeable people wouldn't be led by a clueless manager (perhaps who was promoted for all the wrong reasons). They would be appointed to lead the project based perhaps on some kind of internal bid process. Thus the enterprise would be run along the lines of Ricardo Semler's firms and perhaps based on principles of thinkers including Albert Cherns, Gerald Fairtlough and Claus Langfred with a few complexity principles thrown in. Check out these writers - they have lots of great stuff to say.

Thirdly, service and innovation would be promoted and rewarded. The enterprise owners would reward any initiative that resulted in these two outcomes. These values would be reinforced via the simple enterprise goals: "Innovative and exceptional service". This organisation would be closely entwinned with the business(es) it served and all staff would spend time with the customers understanding their issues. They would be positively encouraged to think of innovative service offerings and products to address customer issues and to make their working lives easier. In the world of web 2.0 we can all be doing this. They would also be rewarded for innovations that improved the internal operations of the organisation. And not only rewarded: they will also be given responsibility and autonomy. So if two hypothetical female staff had the idea to use a twitter-like tool to keep staff and customers informed during infrastructure changes, they would become responsible for the training, marketing, documentation and roll out of the utility. If it goes well they'll be recognised by colleagues and customers. If it goes badly... Well it won't. We hire the best remember?

In general staff would be involved with many aspects of the organisation. This organisation would turn textbook concepts like empowerment into real-life practices that power the organisation into the future. In a knowledge sector like IT why only tap into the learning of a few people at the top when you can use what is in the heads of all two-hundred people in that organisation. They'll have all sorts of tacit and additional knowledge that can help you. One may own a property in Croatia and may have ideas about ways in which you can penetrate the market there. Another may have worked for a medical organisation and sees the perfect application for one of your software products within that domain. If you make it difficult for them to innovate or offer good service they won't.

It sounds so good I wish I was working there now - but it's not pie in the sky. I've worked for some companies that have come close to the above and others who are the diametric opposite. Funnily the fortunes of these organisations tend to mirror the level of maturity of their people policies. Perhaps organisations should do more than just aspire to this. They should make it the reality and not just a reverie.

Inspirations:
Ricardo Semler - Leading by Omission
Good introduction to complexity theory
Innovation & Autonomy at Ideo, California

It starts with selection

I'm a bit of a fan of the nineteen-sixties. For starters there was the music; in the popular context this period saw the arrival of the Beatles, Hendrix and the whole Californian hippy thing. It's easy to forget that the dance music of the time was also awesome, with Motown, Atlantic and even groovy jazz purveyed by the likes of Jimmy Smith still moving feet today. Politically the young were challenging the accepted wisdoms of the day. The French university sit-ins, uprising in the communist bloc and the civil rights and womens liberation movements all demonstrated the mood of change.

Bottom up change you might say.

My interest in this period inevitably led me (partly through a reading of George Harrison's biography) to  the philosophies that underpinned the whole hippy thing. I read some ancient eastern texts - the equivalent to Aristotle or Plato for us in the west - and was suitably inspired. In one of these volumes I encountered the line "the wise man should strive not to discriminate between likes and dislikes" and I thought that sums up selection perfectly.

I'm sure many of you reading this have worked in organisations where people have been hired or assigned to positions of influence based not on merit or ability, but on friendships, connections and networks. The old adage "it's not what you know, it's who you know" is often evoked at times such as these. And while the tendency to hire or promote those you like or who are similar to you is quite understandable, sometimes such a strategy is the invisible rope that restrains the progress of your organisation. 

Selection is an art, but there are techniques and strategies that can make it easier to use your recruitment to help move the business forward. A large part of it is to be open minded and do everything possible to reduce the influence of your own bias. For example (extreme and fictional this) if you are a young black woman recruiting for a position it may be the easiest thing in the world to hire someone who shares your world view and interests (which may be opera and knitting to head off any stereotyping). So when a middle-aged softly spoken white male whose interests are football and real ales applies for the job, it may be the easiest thing to write him off as unsuitable, and to ask him difficult questions at the interview to confirm your own biases.

However that Accrington Stanley-supporting gentleman may have a superb service mentality, and may be incredibly creative. If employed he may use his experience and his gentle persuasiveness to help generate a service culture within your team. He may also be a great source of service innovation as well. Confounding all of this is the fact that you might not have even known that you were looking for this in the first place. Our fictional recruiter may have just wanted a new support analyst to replace someone that had left.

If  an organisation really cares about performance and about striving to be the best at what they do then they will take selection extremely seriously. The tools they will employ will include:

• Job Analysis and Person Specification - to understand what the job is for. It's here that you should identify that service and innovation will be two of the key attributes. You'll also be looking at the sort of person who will be able to deliver and for whom the role has significance. Research has shown the myriad benefits of this
• Use Repertory Grid, Position Analysis or Critical Incident techniques
• Selection Techniques - You know this stuff: assessment centres, semi-structured interviews, work samples. 
• Understand the pros & cons of each, and know the methods that mot accurately assess on-the-job performance.

Google. They take recruitment seriously. They seek the best (and remember you need to carefully define what 'best' is) and hire people for whom the work has significance and who identify with the work. Once you've done this you can - like Google - offer the autonomy that research shows erodes resistance to change, helps innovation and drives a service orientation.

It starts with selection. And ends with success.