ABC of ICT stands for the Attitude, Behaviour and Culture within ICT organizations. ABC is like an iceberg, much of it hidden beneath the surface, yet capable of inflicting enormous damage to your ITSM initiative, or more importantly to your business. 

As an IT manager you are faced with a continuing need to bring IT under control. Deliver value to the business and manage risks to business operations caused by IT. Many IT managers are struggling to bring IT under control, despite all the frameworks and books of best practice advice and guidance. Why is this? What can you do to ensure YOUR IT Service Management (ITSM) improvement initiatives pay off?

In this article we will publish the findings of our ABC round table surveys. These are results of more than 30 international roundtable workshops, using the ABC of ICT card set. These findings finally explain why it is that ITSM improvement initiatives fail to realize hoped for results and why it is the business is still not satisfied with our performance as IT organizations. The results of the surveys will help give you insight into what YOU need to do to ensure your ITSM initiatives are successful. 

The ABC card set is an awareness and assessment instrument designed to help organizations identify, recognize and address ABC issues. The set contains 57 industry recognized ‘worst practice’ cartoons and is aimed at creating dialogue and discussion so that these ABC issues can be brought out into the open. Once they are brought out into the open and recognized action can be taken to address them. So long as they remain hidden and so long as we avoid to talk about them or discuss them, they will remain a danger, A danger that may turn into resistance and undesirable behaviour that threatens YOUR business. Behaviour that will prevent your organization from achieving success, and as a result pose a risk to the business. 

We gave our first ABC worst practice presentations more than 10 years ago. People nodded their heads in recognition and said “that is what we do in our organization!...’. Ten years later we gave the exact same presentation and received exactly the same response. In the meantime we have had ITIL V2, CoBIT, MOF, ISO20000 and now ITIL V3. Despite all of these ‘Best practice frameworks’ there are some fundamental Worst practices that remain hidden or avoided. The top 10 list reveals what these are.  The most shocking finding from the results show why we keep coming back every 10 years and why we IT’ers still fail to realize the value from frameworks such as ITIL. 

I want to now share with you the top 10 worst practices chosen from these workshops. These are the results of sessions held in Canada and the US, Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland and Poland. These results represent the finding of more than 1000 workshop delegates. 

These are the top 10 worst practices captured so far.

What do these results tell us? If we break ITSM improvement initiatives into 2 distinct questions “why are we doing it” and “how do we improve”. We see the following emerge. 

“Why are we doing IT?”

The top chosen card is ‘It has too little understanding of Business impact and priority’. If this is so then what are all these ITIL improvement programs supposed to be realizing?!! ‘Everything has the highest priority according to the users’ scores number 2. Is this any surprise if we are ‘internally focused’ and ‘do not understand business impact and priority’. To summarize. It would appear that all of these ITSM improvement initiatives have too little relationship to business needs. This is also confirmed by the number 10 in the list ‘IT thinks it doesn’ t need to understand the business to make a business case’. 

This is one of the reasons Grab @ Pizza the new business and IT alignment simulation was developed to allow both business and IT managers to play the simulation together to help address these top worst practices.  If you don’t believe the results of our survey a recent report by Forrestor on Business and IT alignment also revealed major mismatches in the Business & IT alignment area.

“How do we improve?”

If we then look at how we deploy ITSM the results are equally shocking. ‘Throwing solutions over the wall and hoping people will accept them!” is the top worst practice associated with ITSM improvement programs. ‘Process managers without authority’ and an approach of ‘Plan, Do, Stop....No real Continual improvement focus”. Is it any wonder that a Forrestor report revealed the top reason for failing ITSM improvement initiatives is 52% - resistance to change. 

Why do these worst practices persist? Look at number 3 in the list ‘Not my responsibility”, nobody seems to feel the ownership and responsibility for breaking down these ABC barriers. Until this happens I am sure we will be back in ten years time giving the same ABC presentations.

Should we worry?

Lets go back to the question :”why are we doing all these ITIL improvements?”

ITIL V3 definition of a Service: ‘A Service is a means of delivering Value to the business in terms of outcomes they want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

We asked participants in the workshops to discuss and agree the impact of these worst practices. “What is the negative impact on business value? What outcomes are we failing to achieve? What wasted costs do we cause for the business?What risks do these worst practices pose?

These are the overall results captured so far.

As can be seen these worst practices cause wasted costs, risks and prevent the business realizing the value and the desired outcomes they need. If this isn’t a ‘sense of urgency’ for addressing ABC  then I don’t know what is!. The question is, will the people reading this article feel responsible for doing something about what they have just read? Or will they say it is not my responsibility and blame somebody else?

Back ground

The ABC of ICT is explained, along with case studies and advice on how to solve them in the book ABC of ICT – An introduction. Many of the ITIL authors as well as other industry recognized leaders provided cases, as well as practical advice, in this book. If you want to see a summary of what the experts suggest for solving these then see the article ‘what the experts say’ on our website. The book is accompanied by the ABC of ICT card set and an exercise book that explains how to perform exercises using the cards. Exin, together with GamingWorks the developers of the ABC of ICT material are developing an accreditation program for the ABC of ICT. There is an ‘ABC of ICT Fundamentals’ 1 day training course in which delegates can also learn how to use the ABC cards in their organizations.

A number of members of the itSMF USA board participated in a small Train-The-Trainer session to learn how to use the ABC card set and to determine if ABC of ICT had any Value for itSMF members. Their conclusions were: ‘This is exactly what is needed.....”, “...our members need to understand this is what it is all about”. The board members are hoping to roll the workshops out across the LIG communities.