The changing business and IT landscapes bring increased demand for IT (or IT services) AND increasing complexity. The slide below (a tweaked version of a genuine Glenn O’Donnell original) paints a picture of increasing complexity and an impending capability gulf; if it isn’t already here.

So can IT organizations cope by increasing their manual ability, usually by employing or buying in more people resource?

Even if they could get suitable resource (availability and recruitment can be issues), could the parent business afford the jump in labor costs as these continue to be a highly-visible element of overall IT service delivery costs? Adding more people doesn’t necessarily fit in with the now oft-quoted mantra of “do (or deliver) more with less.”

A recent webinar with ServiceNow looked at drivers for and opportunities from automation, and how to approach building the business case for service management AND automation. Where Forrester defines automation as:

“Tools that perform functions otherwise done by humans.”

If you want to cut to the chase (i.e. don’t want to read the blog) …

… Then the on demand webinar can be found here: http://info.servicenow.com/LP=1021 (sign up required)

OK, it really should be the “500 shards of ITIL” but it just didn’t sound as sexy.

“ITIL is sexy?” I hear you cry. Maybe not for most, but IT service management (ITSM) is something many of us are passionate about. Or, to be more precise, the delivery of high-quality, business-centric IT services is something many of us are passionate about – with ITSM purely the means to that end.

Anyway I wander from my point . . . the “500 shards of ITIL” I refer to are the 500 extremely granular, ITIL-espoused capability points that far too many organizations commonly use as the basis for new ITSM tool selection. As I wrote in a recent blog for the ITSM Review: “the current method of creating RFPs (request for proposal documents) and selecting vendors based on a cut-and-paste, ask-for-everything-possible-mentality is so, so flawed.”

In a soon-to-be-released market overview of SaaS ITSM tools I add that “Customers often ask the wrong questions during product evaluations and therefore don’t get the answers they need.” Think about it – multiple choice is far easier to pass than an essay-style exam, and do you really need that infrequently adopted ITIL-espoused capability? If you don’t, why on earth are you asking for it?

“Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.”