The Psychology of IT Service Management

A Heresy: Social Media Ain't Perfect

2012-01-04T21:38:00.001Z

File this one under heresy. Burning at the stake is thankfully consigned to history, but "flaming" is not. The responses to this may therefore be quite interesting. Also this is not actually related to the psychology of IT service management, but rather to the psychology of social media use. It's a departure, I know, but hopefully an entertaining and thought provoking one...

The process of changing one's perceptions can begin in the most inauspicious of moments. I've already alluded to this in previous blog entries by way of the manner in which my older views towards radical feminism and operatic music were changed during chance encounters.

I had another such damoclean conversion recently. At the time I thought very little of the sentence that prompted the change; I considered it another fashionable utterance designed to make an impression. The time and place was the Sheffield DocFest early in 2011 and the catalyst was a talk given by the filmmaker Adam Curtis (All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace). What he said was this: "Twitter is a self-aggrandising, smug pressure group, that's all it is". I enjoyed the quote and watched it reverberate around the blogosphere for a couple of days.

A rather more profound reverberation was taking place in my mind however. Up until then I had been an enthusiastic if somewhat late-adopting user of Twitter. Furthermore Facebook was - and still is - an integral component of my social life. Indeed after hearing Adam Curtis' talk I still continued in this fashion; tweeting and sending out my status updates on the livre de visage. However I soon began to analyse this behaviour. Was Mr. Curtis correct? The media had told us that these new, "democratic" tools had helped societies to break free of oppressive regimes. They had given a voice to the faceless millions, who now only needed a net connection to be heard.

I thought back to my early adoption of web 1.0 back in 1994. I created my first (and long defunct) website in that year (Brighton Clubland). The internet had not at that point been colonised by the masses or the corporates at that point. Indeed this was around the time when William Gates was still dismissing WWW as a fad. The early web was shaped by those of us who created content. It was inventive and radical, websites had to be hand-coded in HTML, if there was something you needed to say, your best bet was to create the platform for it. The limitations of the technology (bandwidth etc.) meant that content was truly king - i.e. what you wrote was as important as how it looked. With 56kbps access for most users, only lo-res images could be used, and certainly no video.

Web 2.0 has brought much "progress". Broadband access means that high-def images and video are ubiquitous. Ajax and other technologies mean that web applications of a high level of complexity can be created. The corporates have moved in and their might has obliterated the true pluralism that the internet once offered. What sites do we visit most these days? YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, BBC. Sites like Brighton Clubland created and maintained by someone on an equal footing to the readership are rarer in the modern web.

For many users then, self-expression is only possible via the large sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The other thing about these corporate websites is that as delivered applications, they of course create restrictions upon the possible actions that a user (or should that be consumer?) can perform. On Twitter one is limited to 140 characters per update (yeah, I know that's the whole point) or via links. On Facebook users are restricted to short status updates or the posting of photographs, events videos links and notes. You may think that this is sufficient, however you are acting in accordance with what Mark Zuckenberg and his team deem appropriate, at least in Web 1.0 you chose what you disseminated and how you put it out there.

These websites may also be continuing the trend of encouraging a reduction in our attention span. Are we heading to a point where we respond less to complex argument and more to flashy, splashy updates on the internet? Of greater concern is that many users of these media (Facebook especially) tend to post mainly positive updates. I mean you're less likely to tell the world that you have "been sacked for persistent bullying of other employees" rather than posting pictures of you on your luxury holiday or at a cool party. It seems to me that there is a general trend (for my "friends" at least) to post updates about how great one's life is.

Thus my concern is based upon the idea that these updates may create dissatisfaction in other readers. Manna to advertisers and marketers one might think because as is well known, creating dissatisfaction is the first step in their efforts to sell us stuff. For example there are no end of adverts telling us how big a problem sensitive teeth are. These commercials then go on to offer us the solution - Sensodyne toothpaste. However, humankind seemed to function perfectly happily prior to the introduction of this particular brand into the marketplace. Furthermore this dissatisfaction created on Facebook is focused on those related to the poster, i.e. friends, relatives and acquaintances. Unlike traditional advertising where materials are based around unrelated models or famous faces the effect may well be even more acute. Check out the social psychological theory of social representations for an academic basis of how this may work

So the point is that the danger of the "self-aggrandising" nature of FB, Twitter and their like is not merely a faint annoyance at having to put up with others bigging themselves up, rather it is that these social applications may drive us - like sheep following each other - ever deeper in consumerist and materialistic habits. Far from being the democratic tools of freedom, social media may be another circle of enslavement being spun around us by those who seek to make their fortune from the masses. The last word then to Radhakrishnan (1948):

"The value of sciences, especially their practical applications ... are important for ... the comfort of citizens. The relation of sciences to humanities may be stated roughly to be one of means to ends. In our enthusiasm for means we should not overlook the ends..."

Climate Change

2011-07-22T10:44:00.002+01:00

I'm heading down to the Languedoc in southwest France later today. I planned this trip some time ago and the idea is to enjoy the cultural and culinary delights of the region and to write a lot (not blogs, I'm working on a book). In addition, I was also looking forward to having a real summer and topping up those vitamin D levels. The last time I visited that region (in 2007), the temperature was regularly in the mid-thirties, and even in the dead of the night it was very hot. I've been keeping a close eye on the weather in recent weeks, and those who watch Le Tour de France will have also noticed that there has been a lot of rain in southern France this year. The Languedoc, a normally sun-pounded setting, is a little less so this year, leading folk to talk about climate change.

Thus I segue into the topic of organisation climate and the changing thereof. In my most recent blog entry (below), I briefly summarised the conceptual and practical difficulties surrounding organisational cultural change. "Change the culture" remains an oft-repeated cry in the ITSM world, especially around CSI initiatives. However, some have argued that the idea of big cultural change in organisations is more of a management fad rather than a practical way to improve outcomes. I was also impressed by some of the things Rob England mentioned in his recent blog entry about human-sized organisational change.

For me, organisational climate is the thing to change. It's human-sized, measurable (there are validated and reliable psychometric instruments available that can measure the climate for service, innovation and safety), and research has shown that where companies measure highly on the climate for service instrument, for example, customers report higher levels of satisfaction. Read Schneider, Gunnarson & Niles-Jolly (1994) for a more detailed outline. Climate is defined as employees' perceptions of practices at an organisation. The concept emerged from gestalt psychology, and from the idea that people build a mental model of their environment based on what they observe and experience. This idea also suggests that people will act in ways consistent with the mental model they have built.

For example a man sees a dog for the first time, and it is growling at a child. The next time he sees a dog it's chasing a postman, and his third canine experience is of a police dog barking ferociously at a wrongdoer. That individual may build a model that says dogs are scary and dangerous. It is then very unlikely that you will see that person approaching a dog to cuddle and pet it. Therefore behaviour is consistent with model. In terms of organisational climate, employees build a model based on the practices that get rewarded in an organisation. The key point is it's not what managers say it's what they do. Therefore they might suggest that service is important, but if they regularly cull service desk tickets to make the stats look good, then there will not be a strong climate for service. Staff behaviour will then reflect this.

Due to the fact that climate can be measured, it's easier to change than some other organisational constructs I could mention. When your managers change their words and actions, and staff begin to perceive that, for example, service really does matter in your organisation, then scores on service climate measures will increase. This will be a good thing, because it's a reliable finding that customer satisfaction will also increase.

Now if only there was an easy way to change the climate down in southwest France. Oh well, better pack the brolly!

Refs:

Schneider, B., Gunnarson, S. K., & Niles-Jolly, K. (1994) Creating the climate and culture of success. Organizational Dynamics, 23, p 17-29

Benjamin Schneider has been the foremost researcher on the subject of organisational climate over the last 30 years.

#ClimateNotCulture

2011-06-23T22:30:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd take some time out from some rather serious and quite involved writing that I'm doing to exorcise (exercise?) a minor obsession of mine.

Organisational culture seems to be a buzzword in ITSM circles at the moment, and for good reason. I think its becoming clear to most that the laudable aims of our discipline cannot be achieved without paying attention to the people who work within the sector. Good old homo sapiens, were not like microprocessors; we don't execute a JP NZ 4000H command if certain conditions are met or not met. So the question appears to be, how do we align the mindset of those working in the ITSM enterprise with its stated goals.

The answer to most is simple. Get the culture right.

And here's the big however, however. Culture is a very slippery concept; both in terms of its definition and operationally. Its appearance as a management buzzword seemed to coincide with the rise of the Asian tiger economies of the late eighties onwards. Management theorists marveled at the successful way in which these organisations operated and concluded that it had something to do with organisational culture and we in the West should try to emulate it.

Some decades on, a lot of research time has expended on the concept, and many of the the leading theorists are still in disagreement about exactly what organisational culture is. Some say it is the shared understandings present in an organisation, others say it's the unique way of doing things in any particular work environment. What do you think? Regardless of your answer, spend some time on these two points:

How do you measure or determine a culture at any organisation?
Where's the evidence to show that any particular cultural configuration is related to the outcomes you desire?

Some leading theorists suggest that culture is a deep construct, composed of hidden, underlying assumptions which drive the next level of culture, the values of the organisation. This model suggests that the outward appearances of culture that you and I experience are only a manifestation of the other two less visible phenomena. These theorists suggest that to understand culture one needs to perform detailed ethnographic analyses of the organisation, otherwise one only examines surface level displays which are not helpful for understanding, or in order to facilitate change.

Other leading theorists suggest that the history of cultural research reveals three ideas of culture. Firstly the traditional one which assumes that culture is shared across the organisation. A second, the 'differentiation' perspective, describes not single cultures but multiple subcultures in an organisation - for example by hierarchical level (managers versus workers), department (sales versus technical), job role (programmers versus support) gender, or age, or length of industry tenure. I could go on. The third cultural perspective is 'fragmentation' which would have that there is no permanent consensus, rather shared values that are based upon individual issues that particular individuals may agree or disagree on.

Also, is culture unique to an organisation? Some argue that there are elements of shared understandings that are industry wide, and in a sector such as ours with contractors and high turnover in certain roles, the correct level of cultural analysis should be the industry and not the organisation. Tell that to your consultant who is trying to sell your organisation a cultural change programme.

So even if you've managed to negotiate the above concepts with your view of organisational culture still intact, let's return to the idea of measuring culture and setting a target of some destination culture that you know will deliver those valuable outcomes. As one theorist suggested, organisations are complex social systems and managers can never be in control of all the spurious interactions that occur. He suggested that 'tinkering' with culture is dangerous. Anyway, I think that some of you say culture when what you mean is climate. And if there's one thing that ITIL has taught us, it's to use the terminology correctly.

As for climate, I like it as a construct because it's measurable and particular climates have been repeatedly shown to be related to valuable outcomes like customer satisfaction. I guess you all want to know what climate is? Well at the risk of sounding like a spammer, you can either listen to the BrightTalk webinar that I gave on the topic or wait until my next blog entry where I shall reveal all.

Out of contract

2011-05-31T19:09:00.006+01:00

It's been an intense year of analysing ITSM data for a large fast-growing enterprise, but the contract is over, the Fairday Research Ltd coffers are suitably replenished and I'm back to exploring people and organisational issues within the ITSM field. In fact, during the course of this contract I sketched the outline of an idea which I look forward to sharing with readers here. It draws upon the previous foci of this blog (culture, motivation, autonomy etc.), but also introduces some new theoretical ideas into the mix. The work pressures during the contract were such that I had a very limited amount of time in which to develop the concept so I have much research and fleshing out to do. As of today (Tuesday) I'm still in post-contract chill mode, but from Thursday I'll be surrounding myself with books and journals in Sheffield University's Western Bank Library (pictured), where hopefully I'll begin tying all the threads together.

As for the contract, it had its pros and cons, much like every other ITSM assignment I've ever taken on, with the additional stress of a 250 mile round-trip commute! There were extremely demanding directors on both the business and the IT sides of the fence. So demanding were they in fact (for statistics, analyses, reports, new initiatives, new processes) that it seemed to me that the organisation had evolved a structure geared in large part to meet those demands rather than using the considerable abilities of the workers to create increased value (via efficiencies, automation etc) and deliver great service. Such an approach is predicated on the idea that the ten people at the top are better placed to innovate than the 500 specialists 'below' them. Such organisational toxicity ultimately helps no one; neither the customers nor the staff, nor ironically the top brass themselves. What CIOs want isn't always what they need...

One for the Work Psychs.... Opportunities in Disguise.

2011-02-13T18:19:00.003Z

As a member of the British Psychological Society, a copy of The Psychologist lands on my doormat every month. My current IT service management (ITSM) assignment contains little in the way the of formal work psychology (although informally I draw on much of the knowledge regularly), so the publication is a welcome method of staying connected to the last research findings and trends. A recent issue contained a debate about the future of occupational psychology, and while there were many interesting views expressed, Professor Rob Briner's honest and critical appraisal of the discipline chimed with me the most. He argued that practice can be compromised through too close an association with those who pay (the management), and that the practice of work psychology is often indistinct from the work of management consultants, despite being supposedly grounded in scientific method. In reality, he suggested that work psychology has only really made a lasting impact in the area of psychometric assessment.

I've created my own bubble at the intersection of ITSM and work psychology so my views will always be at the edge of the debate (in both fields, actually). I've learnt first hand that whilst ITSM managers enjoy listening to the ideas and results thrown up by workplace psychology research, very few are willing to risk departing from their well-tried paradigms to see whether doing things differently (indeed even using evidence-based approaches) will improve areas like service, efficiency and motivation.Workplace psychology is, of course, a social science and is not as cut-and-dried as the physical sciences. So when a study suggests that an effect is statistically significant (e.g. that greater autonomy leads to greater motivation) critics can often argue reasons why this evidence may not be applicable to any particular workplace or industry. The results can even be argued to have been influenced by experimenter bias, or disregarded altogether if the critic is a relativist rather than a subscriber to the epistemology of logical positivism! Perhaps the ITSM managers that I speak to are instinctively aware of all of this and are afraid of putting hard-won reputations on the line by trying something radical, new and often unproven.

However, in recent years and certainly in the UK, work psychologists appear to have found many practice opportunities in the public sector. Without getting too political about it, it could be argued that these organisations found it easier in recent decades to spend money on workplace psychology research and practice. I find it regrettable that many psychs didn't appear to question this, and to try to build some kind of proposition that was saleable to the rather more brutal private sector. Indeed it could be argued that this state of affairs made the discipline a little flabby and unfocused. After all, if government was providing work a-plenty, then complacency was always a danger.

A number of the classic work-psych studies have their roots in manufacturing; for example socio-technical systems theory. While I am a huge fan of Albert Cherns' nine principles (and to a lesser extents Chris Clegg's twenty-one updated ones), coal mining and heavy industry are no longer at the cutting edge of industry and commerce. The studies of call centres that proliferated in the nineties were an interesting investigation of Nu-Dickensian working practices, but similarly this was not the work that was driving the future. To find what was and is changing the workplace and the world, look no further than the devices that most psychs use to write their academic papers, to calculate their multivariate statistical results on and to communicate with each other: computer and electronic communications technology.

The technology industry is huge and many of the commercial giants of today have emerged from this sector: Apple, Google, Microsoft. Cisco. Moreover, every other major enterprise will have technology departments of a considerable size dealing with all aspects of the operations. Millions of people work in this field: web designers, developers, customer support staff, technical support staff, networking specialists, security specialists, process designers, business analysts (I could go on). It astounds me that in a time of immense technological and workplace change (between the 1960s and now) work-psychologists have not produced a wealth of literature exploring the working practices within these industries. During my studies I often searched fruitlessly for research conducted within the technology sector - I found numerous heavy engineering classics, many examinations of call centre or health care environments, but comparitively few from the game-changing technology industry.

Aside from two brief stints working within local authorities (both of which shocked me with the laxity of the procedures that I encountered) I have always worked in the private sector. Furthermore I have also (nearly) always worked in the field of computer technology (across various industries: banking, communication, retail - even management consultancy). In these environments return on investment (ROI) is king. Offering managers in these environments workplace psychology projects that lack proven benefit rarely bears economic fruit. In the light of the austerity cuts to come in the UK, the work psychologist's easy public sector option may be much reduced. This then may be the opportunity in disguise. Perhaps work psychs will be encouraged to undertake research in the industries that are of relevance to the twenty first century and which will only grow in importance. Such research would surely increase the likelihood that practice paradigms of value to these multi-billion pound corporations and those who work within them would emerge.

The successors to Professor Rob Briner would hopefully then have much more to celebrate in mid twenty-first century editions of The Psychologist.

The Psychology of Service Data...

2010-04-28T08:57:00.000+01:00

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.?

2010-04-06T16:35:00.002+01:00

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?

2010-03-24T11:59:00.004Z

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

2010-03-17T10:20:00.001Z

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 its 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

2010-03-15T17:40:00.003Z

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:

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?
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

2010-02-16T19:01:00.006Z

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

2010-02-10T13:38:00.002Z

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.

Optimism:Pessimism

2010-02-02T10:06:00.002Z

An associate of mine is planning his wedding. He's of Indian heritage, and his frequent worries over the complexity and the cost of the arrangements leads me to the conclusion that it may be a large, lavish affair. I wish I were invited.

It was a slightly inopportune time then for him to be told that his contract was being terminated. Not through any fault of his own mind, company restructuring and cutbacks. Needless to say he was a bit concerned about how he would continue to fund his big summer cermony.

He needn't have worried really, he's a very able and hard working chap and I knew that he would be snapped up; happily it transpired that even before his notice period had expired he had secured himself another position.

Like me he works in the ITSM industry and I observed with particular interest his optimism about this new contract. I'm getting kinda long in the tooth and I must say, I've seen it many times. It goes something like this:

Individual departs from contract bemoaning political and organisational factors that prevent ITSM or ITIL from being implemented in the correct way.
Individual looks forward to the new contract having been sold the dream of how service management is to be implemented properly at the new organisation, and how the individual will play a key part in making that happen.
Wait a year or so.
Go to (1.)

The fallacy is the thinking that ITIL is the thing that will change service management for the better*. This approach simply views the organisational stuff as an obstacle that gets in the way. I think that it's the other way around. The organisation is the thing. Get that right and ITIL (or anything else that you're trying to do) will follow.

*Don't get me wrong ITIL is extremely useful; it's a great tool. But a Mont Blanc fountain pen won't enable you to write like Graham Greene

Principles of IT leadership

2010-01-18T12:18:00.001Z

Another wow! moment. This time courtesy of a certain Dr Sebastian Hallensleben, who has elegantly articulated much of what I've been trying to do and say in my career in 10 succinct principles.

These are principles that all IT managers should understand and act upon. It chimes with a lot of the research and theory that I have encountered.

Read Dr Hallensleben's article now. It'll be time well spent.

Futures 1: Women In IT

2009-12-31T16:17:00.012Z

We're on the cusp of a new decade. I've been allowing myself to think creatively about the ways in which people aspects of ITSM may change in the coming years. This is important, because as alluded to in some of my earlier blog entries below, the direction in which we are heading (values, principles etc.) is equally as important as the everyday tools, processes and technology that we use to do our jobs. I hope this stimulates thought and discussion. Oh and Happy New Decade!

Peter

I often sing the praises of the multi-disciplinary education that I received at the University of Sussex in the early 1990s. I 'majored' in Social Psychology but was required to take extra courses based on the focus of the faculty that ran the major. I was located in the School of Social Sciences, therefore I was offered and took 'minor' units in politics, history and sociology amongst others. All of these courses were interesting, but the work that I was most proud of was an essay examining eating disorders. As this issue affected (and still affects) mainly women it opened up a whole new literature for me: feminism. I read Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue (which I didn't really take to) and countless other feminist critiques of male society which I found myself fascinated by.

A particular sentence that I read for this essay left a lasting impression upon me. Frustratingly, the author and title of the book eludes me. I've even retrieved the old essay and can't find the reference, I can only guess that it was a quote contained within Chernin (1986), Orbach (1979;1984) or perhaps Fallon, Katzman & Wooley (1994). This sentiments initially irritated me but I subsequently came to realise that it was in fact brave, hopeful and futuristic. The female writer said something like: 'why should we aim for mere equality with men, we can be so much better than that'.

I eventually understood this to mean that the way society has been organised (let's face it by blokes) has left a great deal of room for improvement. Therefore, perhaps a new female-inspired approach to organising life, society or even the workplace may offer an alternative and even improved paradigm through which to create the future. This, I thought, was pretty wow. During the related seminars I attempted to create an analogy between this futuristic feminism and my analysis of the history of jazz which was something that I felt that I understood. In my view they both describe how novel and perhaps desirable alternatives to the status quo can be created by subjugated sections of society who are forced to develop new ideas due to exclusions from the dominant discourse.

Yes of course I shall explain.

Some have said that the only original artform that has come out of America is Jazz. While that statement is open to dispute, the fact that it's a novel and critically appreciated recent form is undeniable. So how did jazz come about? Well there was a sub-section of society in the US (blacks) who in the 19th and early 20th century were mainly excluded from the mainstream, and their musical contributions generally thought to be of lesser worth when assessed from the viewpoint of the dominant paradigm. However one of the advantages of this state of affairs was that this situation allowed them the freedom to develop a unique artform as they were not encumbered by the need to appeal or conform to the dominant or the mainstream ideas (Hobsbawn, 1990). By the time mainstream America discovered jazz it was a fully developed, novel and exciting new form that was embraced with gusto.

Feminist thinking - certainly in the 1970s and 1980s - created a discourse of an alternative. It may be less so today but women were for many years excluded from the power kabals that ran organisations and society. Many demanded equality and sought to ape male methods in order to gain a share of that power. Others (for example the unidentified female author of the quote I offered in the first paragraph) called for a feminism that sought to be better than the flawed male structures that were percieved to exist. This feminist call for better may also offer an opportunity to create a new and better paradigm for workplaces - and perhaps particularly ITSM workplaces. Why?

Firstly, because IT is still a very male dominated industry, a recent e-Skills survey indicated the male to female ratio was in the region of 88% to 12% (e-Skills, 2008); and thus unlike other industries where women have already formed considerable fractures in the glass ceiling (e.g. media, publishing, arts) there may still be much scope for gender-driven change in IT. Secondly, technology is no longer the preserve of the male, anorak-wearing geek. The internet, iPods and mobile devices mean that females are now equal in their enthusiasm for technology use as males (I live with a 16 year-old stepdaughter; I see what happens when the internet is down or the mobile telephone has been lost). Thus this may reduce cultural barriers to greater numbers of women entering the industry. Finally there is evidence of (perhaps socially constructed) gender differences in approaches to management, service and process. This could be the 'better' that female paradigms might bring to service management leadership.

There is always a fly in the ointment, grit in the machine or urine on the bonfire. One worry is that it's too late; that there is no longer a separate feminist alternative. The dream of a better tomorrow through a new female paradigm may have faded into a demand for the 'mere equality' that the feminist author spoke disparagingly of. Furthermore it may be that many of those women seeking equality may be trying to crack the glass canopy with male tools. Indeed some imply that women who adopt the masculine approaches to management do so with greater gusto than many men; the Margaret Thatcher effect. If this conjecture is accurate, then an influx of female leaders into ITSM may be more problematic than helpful to the cultural outcomes of interest here. Yes we'll be closer to gender equality, but for those on the ground (both female and male) it will mean more of the same. I mean is there still a separate female culture and identity?

However, recent qualitative work such as that described by Learmonth (2009), seem to indicate that something about the historically or socially constructed norms of women is still different and therefore may be able to help us create that alternative. Situations such as that recounted in Learmonth's paper allow the hope to persist that the coming decades could bring a gender-inspired challenge to the 'big man' leadership in IT, and may begin to spell the end of the mindset which blinds us from valuing leaders who aren't cut from the masculine / sporting hero / military background cloth. Selection is one of the key factors that influences culture, therefore a different type of leader may help produce a different type of culture. And with the numbers of IT people I've heard calling for 'culture change' recently then I'm sure that you'll agree that this is a good thing.

If I may be honest I don't get too exercised about differences between people be they socially constructed, biological or otherwise. However I find feminism exciting in this context because a differntiated female culture may well exist and may be immediately available in our workforce. This is exciting because it could offer workers in ITSM a Tom Peters-style bold-stroke of a change that may lead to staff perceiving a greater sense of well-being, autonomy and vision in their work, and which would help to move IT away from the taint of 'dysfunctional outsiders' that still hangs around us,. So regardless of whether you are male or female, that's got to be a good thing. Right?

References

Chernin, K. (1986) The Hungry Self: Women, Eating & Identity.

e-skills UK (2008) Technology Counts - IT & Telecoms Insights 2008. London: e-skills UK. Retrieved July 21, 2009, from the e-skills UK web site: http://www.e-skills.com/Research-and-policy/Insights-2008/2179

Fallon, P., Katzman, M. A., & Wooley, S. C. (1994) Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders

Hobsbawn, E. (1990). The Jazz Scene [First published under the pseudonym F. Newton in 1963]

Learmonth, M. (2009). 'Girls' working together without 'teams': How to avoid the colonization of management language. Human Relations, 62, p1887-1906

Orbach, S. (1979) Fat is a Feminist Issue

Orbach, S. (1984) Fat is a Feminist Issue 2

Other useful resources

Women In Technology (UK website)
O'Reilly books' Women in Technology microsite
BBC R4 Woman's Hour 30 Dec 2009: Women and technology in the Noughties

The Beginning Of Great Things

2009-12-11T18:11:00.001Z

It's been a tiring week. Firstly I had to brush up on my PHP and Javasript knowledge in order to create an online dashboard for a client. I finished the task and I'm quite pleased - it captures important information about all of their KPIs on one screen. Then it was time to do the company accounts and chase payments (shudder) - no intrinsic motivation to be found there! I then had to present to a gathering of IT folk about the (neglected) people aspects of this industry. Then it was my birthday: cue late nights, imbibing, weekend breaks etc. So while the wife sleeps off the excess, I'm using the wonderful computing facilities provided by the hotel to blog. A bit cheeky really seeing as the sleeping Mrs is the one paying for the break, so if this entry ends abruptly it means that she's woken up and ordered me off the computer.

On the way up to Leeds I was musing on what it would take to make IT leaders seriously consider different approaches to the people side of their organisations. Such musings were triggered by the response to my midweek presentation. There is no doubt that people were interested; the discussion after my speech was longer than that prompted by the previous two speakers combined. However despite the interest, I'm not sure that people get what a couple of academically trained psychologists can do to help.

I think that the folk I present to want easy answers; a framework. That if they do X and Y, they will enable outcome Z. But as my erstwhile colleague Ariel Becker is fond of saying "it depends". To elucidate - and as I describe in my presentation - social psychology and (indeed any other social science, including economics) do not work to hard and fast rules. Humans are fuzzy, nebulous and difficult to predict. Much depends on the context or on factors suurounding the phenomena and outcomes of interest. IT folk seem to be arguing that because it's so complex and contingent, it can't be of any use to their enterprise. However the studies and pronouncements of economists are of great importance to any organisation concerned with money (which is nearly all). Therefore why are the studies of work psychologists of less importance to organisations concerned with people (which is nearly all)?

To finish up, one of the delegates sat looking a bit bewildered after I'd argued for the benefits of utilising the reseearch of Locke & Latham (1990), Kirkpatrick (1959) and Ryan & Deci (2000) in their organisations. I presented a slide which illustrated many of the links between the various theories. "Where do we start?" he asked. Well try this, little 3-step model of my own:

You need to want to, or believe that you can improve the bottom line through people aspects of your organisation
You eschew the quick fix and commission the research to understand what's really going on in people areas that affect the outcomes are important to you.
You are brave enough to to implement the changes that are recommended. Be aware that it may require a significant departure from the way things are currently done.

That's it. To paraphrase the words of one of my favourite writers "Everyday of your corporate life can be the beginning of great things".

Plus Ca Change...?

2009-12-01T21:38:00.006Z

Change.

Obama liked it, and the IT service management community like it too. It seems that change really was the hot topic of 2009. Of course we're not talking political change or RFC-type technology change - it's organisational change that is the new revelation in our industry. Of course it may have something to do with the V3 Service Transition volume introducing models such as Kotter's eight-stage process for change into the ITIL framework. However, irrespective of the forces that have construed to make this such an important area all of a sudden, the ITSM community may need to stop and think about this for a bit.

Everyone's asking the question "how do you make change stick?". Yes, of course successful organisational change is important, but it's not an end in itself; it's a method. It's a means to an end. Of paramount importance is the endpoint itself. So ask yourself, where do you want to go? I hear culture change mentioned often and I would respond thus: define culture. Measure it. Prove that it exists. Empirically demonstrate positive outcomes associated with it. Now one could provide you with a team of ethnographers and qualitative researchers who would perhaps be able to assess your dominant culture. They may even detect the existence of sub-cultures whose orientation is diametrically opposed to your dominant culture. Do you want to change all of those? I'm not saying culture change is impossible, just that it's probably a lot trickier and riskier than you think.

Now if you're talking to me about some kind of climate, for example your climate for service, we could be on to something manageable. I could perhaps whip out an established psychometric measure to help understand your people's perceptions of the practices in your organisation that relate to service. We could then create a change program that seeks to address some of the deficiencies highlighted by the measurements - and then we'll have an end. After the change intervention we could then evaluate your people again to see if the climate for service has improved. (Be very aware that sometimes the uplift is only temporary, for example due to the social effects of the change programme itself, and we'd take steps to combat that).

So cards on the table time: I think that for many IT service management environments change programmes that have some kind of measurable goal is preferable to the nebulous transformation efforts that often seem to be a little unfocussed. Perhaps in the jargon, I adhere to the 'long-march' kind of emergent change in these contexts (read Kanter to understand more). But let us return to the "ends" of change programmes. Work psychology researchers have found factors which if included in the design of work in organisations lead to desirable outcomes such as motivation, satisfaction, proactivity, better performance at heuristic tasks etc. So the goal of your change programme could also be to promote these factors within your organisation. You could justify this by pointing decision makers to the supporting empirical evidence.

Why not therefore change your organisation to one where workers are set and are committed to challenging goals? One where staff are able to easily gain access to knowledge of the results of their work (i.e. feedback)? An organisation where the autonomy of individuals is supported, and where managers have a facilitating and enabling role rather than a command and control one? There's a lot of studies that suggest that such a transformed organisation may deliver a proactive, change receptive, motivated, high performing workforce. Throw in the service climate stuff mentioned earlier and you have the beginnings of a high performing service organisation.

Now that's a change worth making.

The Tyranny Of Freedom?

2009-11-19T22:46:00.006Z

The long months of sitting in a dusty library for twelve hours a day reading for my dissertation (topic: autonomous motivation in an IT service management organisation) had taken their toll. Actually I’m doing a huge disservice to Sheffield University’s library (or to use its correct title Information Commons): it’s not dusty in the slightest, it’s a sparkling new, modern construction designed for the 21st century. The building is environmentally friendly, spacious and light and is packed with nifty little Sun Ray kiosk workstations alongside normal PCs. It has even won awards for being such a cool construction.

Anyway, the point is that I had spent a great deal of time inactive and sedentary - sitting on my gluteus maximus if you like. The pounds were piling up and I was feeling decidedly unhealthy so I joined a gym. This too is a nice 21st century affair – I love the way all the cardio-vascular machines have LCD monitors on the top so that while I’m cross-training I can flick between the cricket and football (sorry, that’s soccer for you guys across the Atlantic). I also rather ashamedly spend a lot of time watching pop videos and am amazed by the awfulness of many (Calvin Harris and a few others excepted).

One of the channels features an advert that is run regularly. It is also shown on terrestrial TV - you may have even seen it. The advert promotes an LG product, and begins with the assertion “the day you were born was the last day that you were truly free”. The piece then goes on to intimate that at school, work and in various other contexts one is “boxed in and constrained”. It ends with images of shiny happy people being free and enjoying life. As you would expect, these closing frames link the portrayed elysian state of being with LG’s own products. It can be likened to a prosaic and rather unflattering pastiche of Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, but it was useful in that it prompted thoughts about autonomy in the workplace.

As you may be aware I’m a huge advocate of increasing autonomy – or freedom – in the workplace. A lot of research indicates that autonomy provides employees with the freedom to innovate, to deal with issues as they arise, to help drive change. It’s the antithesis to centralised command and control systems and top heavy hierarchies, which result in sluggish change-resistant cultures. Management approaches including systems thinking, socio-technical systems and complexity theory all suggest beneficial outcomes of autonomy. In the work psychology literature there has been a major focus on autonomy since Herzberg in the 1950s, and also Turner and Lawrence in the 1960s. For example studies of the hugely influential Job Characteristics Model found a reliable relationship between autonomy and job satisfaction. Similarly, research into Karasek’s Demand-Control-Strain thesis indicated links between (a lack of) autonomy and stress. There are very many more studies, with outcomes including proactivity, receptivity to change and entrepreneurial activity to name but a few.

Thus not too long ago my conception of workplace autonomy was as an unmitigated good. The thoughts of management thinkers such as Gerald Fairtlough and Ricardo Semler armed me with the arguments to cement this view. Furthermore commentators influenced by a theory known as complexity were leading me to an almost Darwinian position on this topic. It seemed logical: employees with greater autonomy were happier, more innovative, and weren't hindered by machiavellian (at best), or barely competent (at worst) superiors. The enterprise would learn more (because the individuals themselves would be motivated to learn and apply their learning), and would embrace change via the organic internal culture of the company. Chaos? Anarchy? I suggested such thorny issues could be dealt with through good governance.

The great thing about learning is having your assumptions tested and challenged. 'Wow!' moments occur when you throw away the old paradigm and pick up a new one. It's happened to me many times: in relation to jazz, opera and downtempo electronica for example. My old mindset didn't hold these musical forms in high esteem, but when I finally understood what each of these genres were about, the 'wow!' happened. My view of autonomy was similarly challenged by Barry Schwartz's 2000 paper, the title of which I stole as the headline for this blog entry. What I learnt from Schwartz and others was that freedom isn't bad per se, it's just that the idea of freedom-as-uquestioned-good is prevalent through society and influences everyone, from the person in the street to academics constructing theories.

Thus LG’s advertising agency were more than likely tapping into the ubiquity of western society's views of freedom & autonomy - which I clearly subscribed to back then. But further reading seemed to indicate that constraints and limits are important. Barry Schwartz used the example of language - a highly liberating construct, but it is the constraints - or rules - of language that make communication possible. The scene in the LG ad where the bored kid is sat in a classroom is supposed to be a bad thing - but its a great thing! Sure our natural inclination is to frolic in the sun, but being made to sit and learn about art or history or even psychology is a more lasting pleasure. The former is immediate gratification - the latter is a deeper kind of inner happiness.

A chap called Czikszentmihalyi named this state flow, and his 1989 research found it happened more often at work than during lesiure time. Interesting, isn't it? I remain strongly wedded to my view that autonomy is of vital importance in contemporary, knowledge-based industries. So ensure that your work environment is designed so that your employees have the greatest amount of choice about how they go about and schedule their work. Minimise hierarchy and reduce the influence of self-serving and/or obsolete superiors. Allow staff the freedom to learn, innovate and create. But don't forget the constraints: goals, standards, vision, responsibility - for these are the glue that makes it all work.

How To Motivate (#1 in a series of 4)

2009-11-03T08:33:00.002Z

Make things fun:

The technical term is intrinsic motivation. This is motivation that is based on the sheer enjoyment of performing the task. A large body of interesting research exists which suggests factors that diminish and sustain this type of motivation (e.g. Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999).

Clearly this type of motivation is relatively easy to generate. Someone loves coding? They're gonna be motivated to do it (see open source projects). Of course is isn't always that simple. What if there's an activity that people find boring? For example some convoluted, tedious process activity. Well (to paraphrase Apple), there's a technique for that.

However you'll have to wait for number 2 in the series...

Culture, (Vultures), Values & Ethics

2009-11-02T09:13:00.002Z

If I had a pound for every time I’ve read the word “culture” in relation to ITSM I’d probably have no need to set up Fairday Research Limited; I’d have bought myself a villa somewhere tropical and picturesque and would be having a very nice time thank you very much. OK, clearly I’m exaggerating. Organisational culture is talked about a great deal but I certainly haven’t read a million articles on the subject; probably not even ten thousand - and there are very few (i.e. zero) luxury villas on available in the ten-thousand pound price range. Right; I’ll try to keep my tangential meanderings to a minimum this time out; the point is that ITSM ‘thought leaders’ and others do bang on about ‘culture’ and ‘culture change’ quite a bit.

I often ask myself, do these people ever stop to ask themselves what it is that they mean by ‘culture’? And if they’re so keen to change it how do they measure it before and afterwards to ensure that their intervention has been successful? Edgar Schein, professor at MIT and a greater mind than many who have mused on this topic (Joanne Martin excepted), outlined in a 1990 paper the difficulties of measuring and even understanding culture. His view of organisational culture was almost Freudian in that he suggested three layers to this phenomenon: 1. the outer, observable artifacts 2. the values and 3. the underlying assumptions that formed the core of any particular culture. He warns (as do other commentators) of the risks of messing with culture because the surface outcomes may not always be what you expect.

Many therefore prefer to talk about and measure climate. I often suspect that this is what many of the ITSM commentators actually mean when they talk about ‘culture’. Climate is the observable surface-level stuff. For example the proclivity of managers in organisation X not to expound a vision to staff, rather to simply issue edicts via email. Or the cynicism of technical employees in organisation Y who are change averse and believe that customer interaction is for service desk staff only.

Schein’s and others’ warnings about messing with organisational culture make sense, but that is not to say that culture doesn’t exist – it does. However I agree wholeheartedly with the professor about the difficulties of understanding any organisational culture but this doesn’t make it any less real. Incidentally Schein's preferred approach to measuring and understanding culture involved using ‘thick’, qualitative methods, for example ethnographic studies, or detailed structured interviewing of members of an organisation.

Would you believe that the above is the preamble? If you’ve stayed with me this far you’ll now be treated to the main course. I’m actually less interested in discussing the measurement of culture. What is causing me to take fingers to keyboard is Schein’s ephemeral inner layers; those underlying values and assumptions. Organisational culture doesn’t exist in its own bubble, cut off from the rest of society. It exchanges assumptions and values with the world beyond the organisation. I’m no sociologist or anthropologist but perhaps many of you will agree with my conjecture that one of the powerful values in our contemporary society is the need to accumulate wealth.

“I mean, d'oh!” some of you may be saying, “that’s capitalism innit?”. Yes of course the aim of companies in our market economy is to maximise shareholder return (I’m no economist either so my grasp of such stuff is pretty elementary). However there have been organisations that have tempered this basic tenet of the market economy with ethical values and concerns. For example the Quaker chocolate manufacturers Rowntree and Cadburys believed in looking after their workers in the 19th century. For these companies the underlying value was not simply profit at the expense of everything else. Moreover in the contemporary era organisations such as the Cooperative bank appear to follow a similar model. I have two friends who work in service delivery positions in this organisation and by all accounts it’s quite a nice place to spend one's working day.

In my experience - and perhaps in yours too - ITSM organisations are ostensibly driven by cost concerns: i.e. outsourcing, and job simplification via increasingly directive processes. The trend appears to be to treat workers in an ever more mechanistic fashion. These human resources often appear to be regarded as an annoying and profit-sapping necessity to be jettisoned at the earliest opportunity. Even one respected commentator and IT head-honcho whose blog I admire, recently gleefully outlined a future where IT staff in countries such as the UK may cease to exist; made obsolete by a combination of “free” web/cloud services and outsourcing.

Consider this: the blind rush for profit led to the banking crisis and the near-depression that we are inching our way out of. Positive values and ethics, far from being problematic to these organisations may have saved the skin of some those who fell. Thus I would say to short-term thinkers and those driven solely by costs/profits in our industry: when our data centres have all been moved to ‘cheaper’ developing economies, what are you going to do in 15 years time when those countries start charging top dollar for their services? If the dreams of some are realised and the IT workforce in the UK has been decimated by the offshoring mania we’ll be in a similar situation to that which our energy industry finds itself. ‘Energy security’ is a recent but worrisome term – someway down the line it’s possible that a similar fate may await our technical industries if the vultures’ agenda prevails.

However that’s all economics and politics, I hold no particular expertise in either field - the above is my opinion. My main point is about organisational culture. Perhaps this is pipe-dream territory but I think that it would be nice if some ITSM organisations introduced values and ethics beyond that of the balance sheet into the workplace. George Cadbury and Seebohm Rowntree managed just that in the highly-competitive 19th century and the enterprises that they ran are still going strong today. Ricardo Semler, Gore, and Google have all demonstrated the success that can be achieved when employees are not treated as units, and are given the freedom to think, innovate and perform. But it’s not just about profit, let’s bring some positive human values back into the IT workplace.

I mean, can we please have some real cultural change.

Power To The People?

2009-10-20T12:42:00.004+01:00

OK, I'll admit it. I'm only just now getting up to speed on ITIL V3. Yes, of course I've had a good awareness of it, and understood the 5 elements of the lifecycle and the superior integration with business outcomes that this version describes. However right now I'm starting to dig deeper into the detail. This laggardness is mainly because I now have some free time; last year my head was firmly stuck in academic papers contrasting the various approaches to topics including allocation of function, workplace well-being and power and politics in organisations.

And it's power and politics that I wish to discuss in today's sermon - I mean blog entry. A couple of things are prompting this outpouring. Firstly, I've been struck by how (in the UK at least) a considerable slice of the leaders in the IT domain have very - shall we say - competitive histories. The number of ex-military senior managers is surprising (I've seen ex-officers and even one who graced the special forces). There are also those who have excelled in the sporting domain too: karate champions and all sorts. The other factor which has prompted me to discuss power & politics is the focus on organisational change that I've noticed in ITSM communities recently. Now of course this makes sense, for sometimes these IT programmes that we are service managing are agents for some higher business or organisational change. Furthermore, to develop a service mindset in organisations that have historically been technology-focused requires more than a few encouraging emails from managers. So great; one has no problem at all with the use of organisation change theories being used in our field.

However there has been a great deal of scholarly and other work in this area; and the conclusions are certainly not straightforward. I'm going to be talking about this at the itSMF conference in the UK next month so I won't say too much here, but you've got your Lewinistic Planned Change approach, and the Organizational Development movement (big in the US apparently) that sprung from it. There's also Emergent Change including forms described from the Processual perspective as well as approaches described by the likes of Kotter and Kanter, for example Long March and Bold Stroke. More? O.K. there's also the Japanese Kaizen methods as well as the good old Tayloristic focus on tasks and procedures. (If any of you have read Burnes, [2000] you realise that much of the above is derived on his excellent analysis of this area).

What I'm trying to say is analysts who haven't studied this area in detail talk about organisation change as if it is straightforward - it's not. The transformation of your organisation may be impelled or impeded by choice of the right or wrong approach for your organisation and circumstances. Moreover (and to get to the point), the one thing that most of the post-Lewinistic researchers of this topic agree on is that power and politics play a considerable role in the change outcomes. Therefore it may be understandable that some implementations of ITSM and the accompanying change programmes still lean towards fixed, pre-determined and systemic forms. Perhaps - and this is pure conjecture - some of these guys with a forces background who are leading ITSM units may possibly prefer hierarchical and more tightly-ordered organisations.

Leaders have the power, thus they control the discourse and resources. Therefore the softer, flexible, autonomous and emergent ITSM that various commentators are advocating (and for that read me) may find fewer advocates amongst these (mainly transactional?) leaders than the Tayloristic forms that in my experience seem to predominate. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing against process frameworks or governance - in fact I am a fervent believer. A lack of direction, goals and standards is a pretty good way to impair performance, as numerous studies show. Moreover, Schwartz's (2000) paper arguing against 'the tyranny of freedom' puts the case eloquently. However the socio-technical theorists that emerged in the aftermath of WWII captured the subtlety of the approach that I lean towards. They suggest that only the minimum and the critical should be specified when designing work. This leaves room for individual decision lattitude.

Those who sign up to the prevailing discourse would probably counter that such an approach means that it is difficult to simplify job roles to such an extent that they could be easily automated or outsourced. The best retort is to once again post one of my favourite Dilbert strips:

Who would you rather have supporting your systems - chickens or intelligent and qualified techs? The writings of these socio-technical theorists and others suggest that these empowered intelligent techs can deal with the unexpected, are more receptive to change and indeed will even drive change from the bottom up. Would you rather have 100 techs feeding their learning into the organisation or just three execs passing on their wisdom downwards through the chain of command? It may be good wisdom, but will it be as broad and perhaps as innovative as that from the techs?

To be honest, I certainly don't feel that I have all the answers, but to descend into Perl-speak: TMTOWTDI; i.e. ever greater amounts of process and job simplification isn't the only way forward.

Automate, Automate!

2009-10-19T09:21:00.003+01:00

Last week I was having a conversation with a colleague about SaaS, mobile computing, and monopolies. As is usual with conversations in which I am involved we got to musing about people aspects of working in this industry. Now my colleague is a young rising star and is a proper tech-head. He's heavily into home automation and sees the future of computing as being mobile and XaaS-driven - which looks about right at this moment in time. However his response to my people angle was a pretty blunt "good idea and it's probably relevant now but soon it won't be 'cause companies won't need so many people to do this sort of thing" (he drew an arc to indicate the workers in the large operations centre that we were sat in). I wondered what he meant. Did he see the future of ITSM as being an automated one? That SaaS scaling would reduce the size of our industry and introduce much more self-service? Technology that repaired and configured itself? He also suggested that much of the manual work will be outsourced.

I've never been that good at predicting the technological future (although I was mightily impressed by the potential of global data networks in the late eighties and early nineties), but even if my young colleague's predictions come true - and as I said to him at the time - people are always going to be involved. From the support staff at the outsourcing organisations, to the service designers, architects and application developers - psychology matters. If organisation A is staffed with unmotivated, inflexible and unsatisfied workers it'll lose out to organisation B stuffed to the gills with proactive, innovative, change-receptive and happy people. I mean, this young gun was brought on board via the company's exhaustive recruitment scheme; assesment centres, structured interviews, that's all occupational psychology! And it's not all about recruitment. Once people are in-situ you need to do what's necessary to keep them motivated and sharp. So yes, I'm loving the future visions, but people aren't about to become obsolete... just yet.

I take my hat off to process

2009-10-14T09:01:00.003+01:00

Recently there has been an increasing number of commentators who are giving mucho lip service to the people aspects of IT service management. Yet some of these bloggers do nothing short of flaming those who won't follow what they consider to be the correct processes. Right intention - wrong method!

There's theory and empirical evidence behind this, but its like the old childrens' story about the North Wind and the Sun. They both have a contest to see who can get an old man to take his hat off. The North Wind huffs and puffs and blows up a gale, but the old man just pulls his hat harder down on his head. The sun gives him some warmth and loveliness and the old man does a "phew it's hot today" and off comes the titfer.

In business it's all about achieving the ends (or ensuring that the critical processes are followed), and sometimes salving a manager's (or consultant's) ego can make it more difficult for these ends to be met.

Taylorism and ITSM's Obsession With Process

2009-10-12T18:00:00.006+01:00

Many recent theories and studies within occupational psychology have been positive about the role that autonomy plays in achieving beneficial workplace outcomes. By ‘beneficial outcomes’ I’m referring to stuff like motivation, performance, innovation, job satisfaction, well-being, receptivity to change, and proactivity to name a few. There are some however, who argue that the field’s preoccupation with autonomy is a reaction to Fredrick W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. It’s a pretty famous book which influenced millions of working lives (probably including yours). It was published in 1911 and contained the then new technique of time-and-motion studies, and an approach that argued for a reducition in worker decision latitude, and work variety. In total this constituted a major restriction on the freedoms that workers enjoyed at the time. Taylor argued that his approach resulted in increased efficiency from the enterprise point of view, and greater pay (due to greater output) for the employee. The philosophy was based upon the idea that the role of managers is to understand the most efficient method (best practice – sounds familiar?) of achieving a task, and to then to exercise control over the workers to ensure that the task is subsequently performed in this manner. His ideas caught on spectacularly and remained popular throughout the twentieth century. Scientific management is epitomised in the production line that the Ford Motor Company introduced and which we are all familiar with today.

While this mechanistic approach to work did demonstrate some efficiency gains, the criticisms of Taylorism (as scientific management is often described) are legion. Staff satisfaction takes a massive hit as does innovation and receptivity to change, in the view of some writers. It has also been suggested that in circumstances where there is much turbulence in the commercial environment, or where staff have greater knowledge than managers, performance may suffer. You want more? Well, complexity theorists and other relativists argue that managers’ attempts to step outside an organisation and to design a system ‘objectively’ are doomed to failure because managers are also part of the system and cannot separate themselves from it. Indeed long before complexity theory was conceived - in 1939 - the Hawthorne researchers found this out the hard way. The results of Hawthorne indicated that performance in a department improved simply through the observation of the staff by researchers. This was explained thus: the workers were made to feel special and important by the presence of the academic team.

Hawthorne neatly indicated that human issues are not straightforward or manipulable by process or technology. Perhaps this is why work psychologists often prove useful in organisations. Such knowledge may be especially pertinent for the ITSM field which has perhaps ignored these subtle yet profound human effects for far too long. Indeed the fetishisation of process through frameworks such as ITIL and CoBIT, is indicative of this in my view. Note that I wish to make it clear at this point that I am certainly not suggesting that these frameworks are without merit. I’m long enough in the tooth to have been around before the common language and the efficient methods of ITIL were introduced. And yes, I was a fan when I first encountered ITIL and I still am. However it is when I see organisations revering process (be it ITIL or anything else) as the only non-technological lever with which to drive great service that I click on the ‘create new blog’ button.

So back to autonomy and Taylorism; although scientific management is nearly at its centenary, many of the ideas are still firmly entrenched in our organisations. Some would argue that much of the best-practice / process discourse could have been lifted directly out of the pages of Taylor’s 1911 tome. Indeed in a large well known technology PLC, managers recently instigated a time-and-motion study of some of their ITSM procedures which felt a bit like being in a time warp. Also Taylor was an engineer. Like many of his IT antecedents he believed that applying epistemologies that have been successful in the sciences of the inanimate, to the animate (i.e. people) would yield great results for organisations. The flaws in Taylor’s approach signpost the failings of the obsession with process in the ITSM industry. Furthermore many companies in the post-modern era that have departed form the Tayloristic method have seen great success (e.g. Google, GoreTex, Semco). I am firmly of the belief that this is where differentiation and competitive advantage within the ITSM domain now lies. Companies that are brave enough to move beyond the accepted script and to implement a new paradigm may experience a quantum leap of progress over their rivals

For me this paradigm revolves around autonomy, and a theory that emerged from the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s. However this blog entry is far too long as it is. More about these next time (maybe)!

First post

2009-10-07T11:44:00.003+01:00

In the last two years I have been seriously considering the synergies between the science of occupational psychology and the practice of IT service management. I think the germ of the idea was nourished by a number of different 'nutrients' during my IT career:

experiences at companies who were struggling to develop a service mindset
experiences at organisations where the management practices were poor
my excellent undergraduate education (B.A. Social Psychology at the University of Sussex, 1993 - 1996)
reading Rob England, the IT Skeptic's blogs in 2007
talking to colleagues and customers

On that last point, during 2007 I asked a contractor colleague who had many years experience at organisations large and small (including Microsoft) about his view of ITIL and implementations thereof. He talked about a large public sector body which he had recently left who had spent vast amounts implementing ITIL to the letter but where seervice was still poor. I quizzed him incessantly to get to what he thought was the root cause; "the culture" he eventually said. "ITIL offers a process framework, but it can't change the culture".

Thus began an excellent journey to explore the science of people in organisations. It's known as Occupational Psychology or, if you live in the USA it's known as Industrial/Organizational Psychology. In other parts of the world you may hear it referred to as simply Work Psychology. Serendipitously my psychology background allowed me to sign up to the prestigious M.Sc. course at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield. There I explored the theoretical and empirical studies of concepts including motivation, organisational change (not ITIL Change!), culture, climate, goal setting, job design, creativity & innovation, training, well being, human-computer interaction, social networks, selection techniques, career development (I could go on). I soon realised that most if not all of these can be of benefit to service management organisations.

Specifically, SM organisations require particular behaviours, knowledge, skills and attitudes from their staff. There are many opinions and systems within these organisations about the best way to acheive these ends. The advantage of using occupational psychologists in such scenarios is that their solutions will (should!) be based on empirical evidence; up to a century of research that provides a basis for determining what is likely to work and what is not.. For example, how do you increase staff motivation for tasks which are not in themselves pleasant or enjoyable? For example some arduous process task which is critical to your operation? There's a great new theory with considerable empircal support which describes just that.

So I'm looking forward to exploring these issues in much more depth here. Follow me!