ITSM: Don't Pave the Virtual Cowpath

ITSM: Don't Pave the Virtual Cowpath

If you've visited Boston, you've seen the seemingly random tangle of streets that wind through the center of the city down to the Common. At a time when owning a cow in Boston made sense, the daily trip down to the Common to graze was, to some extent, determined by the cows themselves. After the cows were gone but before the arrival of urban planners, the paths evolved into paved roads. 

The cowpath analogy is particularly relevant in the area of ITSM intitiatives. There can be strong pressures to migrate existing or legacy business processes and tool customizations to a new ITSM platform:

• Time - concern over meeting an external deadline specified by stakeholders
• Cost - perceived expense to evaluate and/or rewrite processes, retrain, retool
• Political pressure - lack of alignment and commitment within the management structure related to the need for ITSM changes
• Lack of internal skills - for revisions to process, procedure, taxonomy and tool configuration
• Perceived complexity - related to changing ITSM approach

However, we have observed that ITSM projects that favor direct migration over thoughtful implementation have a number of serious drawbacks that warrant discussion:

1. Breaks the tool: A hastily-assembled team which is given orders to port the existing system is likely to overlook key features of the new system that should be respected. This results in broken dependencies between applications, awkward workflows that don't leverage platform functionality, and poor user experience in the interface.
    
2. Locks you in: This type of migration can result in non-maintainable code which also makes system upgrades difficult. If you support multiple domains, it would be hard to revisit this later with your users. And, at then end of the migration project, revising the approach would be another project to be approved and funded.
3. Results in over-customization: While the intent of direct migration may have been to reduce overall effort, it is likely to result in customized code and modifications to replicate the old tool. Most organizations prefer to keep the level of customization for a new system within bounds; a modern ITSM platform provides a solid basis for process enablement with limited changes. In addition, organizations with high turnover related to project-specific teams or outsourcing should keep the implementation as simple as possible, while providing needed functions.
    
4. Process decay: Over time, business processes should evolve and grow with the organization. Old processes are unlikely to accurately depict current practices, and migrating them without review can result in numerous manual workarounds, and "bake in" known errors. The new ITSM tool's automation may no longer resemble the underlying processes, leading to confusion.
5. Out of the mainstream: Staying with the legacy approach in a new system distances your organization from current best practices and the community of people dedicated to advancing the state of the art for ITSM. If you are hiring in-house for maintenance of the new system, you may encounter difficulty attracting the best candidates.
6. Ultimately more costly: In addition to the reasons above related to cost, maintainance of the new system may be more difficult and labor-intensive than anticipated. Significantly, any integrations with external systems or ebonding with the same platform in another organization will be considerably more difficult and time consuming on both sides. The realities of ongoing cost may work against adoption and acceptance of the system, resulting in ultimate rejection.

How to avoid the cowpath project?

• Before any new ITSM initiative, conduct an ITSM process maturity assessment. We have found that this gives clarity and perspective to the current situation, and has credence with executive sponsors. If your organization needs work on the process side, make that part of the project, and use the ITSM tool as the expression of your invigorated processes.
• Select a great ITSM platform and commit to the effort of implementing it both effectively and with consideration of best practices. Consider providing an ITIL overview workshop for your users, targeted at the important use cases they will encounter in their work.
• Hire a skilled and experienced team that is familiar with the scenario your organization is presenting. Our team has seen it from both sides, and has brought value as customer Director-level management leading ServiceNow implementation projects, and as highly-skilled ITIL and ITSM SMEs, leading the client engagement. We would greatly appreciate the opportunity to discuss your current or proposed implementation.