Strategy in the IT Support Center Brian Flagg, © 2011 Introduction A sound and well-developed strategy is as important for a support center as any other business. The strategy informs what measures are important and why, steers capital investment towards projects with a needed rate of return, and drives the prioritization of projects competing for fixed resources. A frequent topic I still see in online discussions is that of measurements; what measurements are important and why, and where should the measurement results be. I always provide the same answer. Choosing measurements, justifying the choices, and looking for industry benchmarks to set objectives, is simply the wrong approach or starting point. There should be no mystery as to what measurements are important or why they are important. Measurements must be derived from strategy and the goals for the values driven by strategic choices. Furthermore, strategy becomes a blueprint to guide financial, operational, and organizational decisions, and provide the needed customer focus. Strategy should answer the question, “what do we do next?”
What is not Strategy IT frameworks, such as ITIL and COBIT are not strategic frameworks, they are operational frameworks. Choosing to align to the ITIL framework will give guidance on what operational processes and measurements may be important, and why, for a given organization. ITIL alignment will help provide a common language, helpful for benchmarking purposes. An important point for the IT support contact center is that ITIL is a comprehensive framework, only a portion of which intersects with the operational processes of an IT support contact center. ITIL also leaves out processes that are vital to a large support contact center, the principle ones being contact management and workforce management. Therefore, the operational processes will need to be augmented with these important contact center processes. From a strategy standpoint, I have seen too many IT support centers where the answer to the question, “what is your strategy?” is answered by “we are an ITIL shop”, or “our three-year business plan is to implement ITIL”. As stated previously,
although incomplete, ITIL has its place as an operational framework, and a good one for I/T overall. Furthermore, ITIL is an excellent source of good practice processes that are germane to most I/T support organizations. However, ITIL will not address an organization’s financial objectives, customer satisfaction objectives, or organizational development objectives. COBIT is similar to ITIL, but has its focus on governance and control. The proper use of ITIL and COBIT will be revisited later in this article. Strategy Maps A basic and successful strategy framework was introduced in the Harvard Business Review in the early 1990’s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (Kaplan & Norton, 1992), the Strategy Map and the Balanced Scorecard. Kaplan and Norton describe a framework comprised of four perspectives; financial, customer, operational, and organizational. The principle idea is that an organization’s strategy should be composed of a balance between these four perspectives. A properly balanced focus driven by objectives and measurements in each of these perspectives drives a balanced strategy. Objectives and corresponding measurements within each category will be driven largely by the overall business model of the organization. The financial and customer perspective objectives and measurements will be quite different between a support center serving customer according to a contracted service agreement, and an internal help desk. The former will be focused on margin and perhaps revenue per call, whereas the focus of the internal help desk is typically cost per call. The operational perspective is usually where the operational frameworks, such as ITIL and COBIT, come into play. The focus of ITIL is effective and efficient operational I/T processes, and the focus of COBIT is I/T process control. It is in the operational perspective where CMMI, Lean, and Six Sigma are germane as well, although they are not frameworks but techniques to make operational processes, regardless of what the operation is doing, more effective and efficient. However, I cannot overemphasize the importance of a balanced framework. Too many organizations spend the vast majority of their efforts on the operational perspective, believing that meeting objectives and goals in this perspective alone will drive success in the other three perspectives.
A drive to CMMI Level 4 for the operational processes of an organization cannot be achieved without some level of competence and maturity in the other three perspectives, but at some point the other three must be brought into balance with the operational perspective or gains will simply not be sustainable. The needed balance between the four perspectives is made visible in the Balanced Scorecard. Objectives in each perspective inform the needed measurements for the perspective. The measurements are not independent, and the dependencies must be identified, understood, and documented. These dependencies determine the balancepoint for the organization. Exactly where the balance point resides will depend on the organization. Well established organizations servicing mature products in a mature market may have more of a focus on financial and operational perspectives, whereas a startup with an exciting new product looking to gain market share may have a higher focus on the customer perspective and to a lesser extent on the financial or operational perspectives. Each organization needs to establish its own balance point, which certainly can adjust over time. Organizations that focus solely on one perspective do so at their own peril. The Baldrige National Quality Award Framework Another strategic framework which use, I believe, was lost in the award process, is the Baldrige National Quality Award framework (Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, 2010). I witnessed several large companies attempt to use the framework, but the effort was lost in a bureaucratic exercise of scoring for an award. Too much emphasis was placed on developing a score and then creating mountains of documentation to justify the score. The Baldrige uses seven categories instead of the four of Kaplan’s Strategy Maps. However, Baldrige is just another cut at the strategic landscape, with the categories; Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer Focus, Measurement and Analysis, Workforce Focus, Operations Focus and Results. Baldrige is a comprehensive framework and really geared toward large, multi-functional (for example, contact management, workforce management, knowledge management) organizations. It is simply not applicable to a twelve person help desk. Similar to Strategy Maps, Baldrige includes a treatment of measurements and results, but the treatment is consolidated into a single category. Likewise, leadership is a separate Baldrige
categories, and hence the interdependency of the categories is not as evident as with the Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecard. What Baldrige lacks in integration, it makes up in depth. Within each category, a series of very probing questions are asked, focused on the ‘how’ and the level of integration of the ‘how’ into the fabric of the organization. Being the foundation of a national quality award, Baldrige is very focused on customer and quality, which is a great place to be focused. Baldrige also has its own idea of maturity built-in, a missing component of the Strategy Maps framework. Each Baldrige question has an associated score, based on a subjective response to the question. For example; how do you select, collect, align, and integrate data and information for tracking daily operations and overall organizational performance, including progress relative to strategic objectives and action plans?
I have always found the answering of the Baldrige questions across the seven categories a great learning experience for the entire organization. An approach to the assessment exercise I have used is to assign a category to each manager or key staff member in the organization, and have that manager or key staff member perform the interviewing necessary to respond to the questions in the category, and then present the findings to the broader leadership team for discussion. I would then assign a different leader the responsibility of developing a gap analysis for the category based on the assessment results. Hence, each leader becomes very familiar with two of the categories, and familiar overall with all categories. Following the gap analysis effort, improvement activities are developed and an initial prioritization performed based on closing the largest gaps. For the top improvement activities, business case analysis is done for each, and a final prioritization is done based on required project ROI.
I have always found that to stretch the leadership team, assign categories to leaders that do not have experience or operational responsibility for the functions examined in the category. For example, do not give the measurements and reporting manager the Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
category. If you do, not only will this not enable maximum learning potential, but you will find the leaders with the propensity to answer questions based on what the leader would like to see rather than what is actually occurring.
I was very pleased to see a change in the Baldrige criteria some years ago when the Process category was replaced with a category labeled Operations Focus. This not only better aligned with the Strategy Map, but made it clear that Baldrige is all about process. The questions in the seven categories are focused on the “how”, not just the “what”. And the “how” focus is not simply on the current state of affairs, but how the work is done in a systematic and repeatable manner, and how it is continuously improved. Thus, not only does the sixth category, Operational Focus, lend itself to further process examination using CMMI, all categories can find such examination useful. Thus, the Baldrige assessment and scoring can be augmented using CMMI examination and scoring.
It is also in the Operational Focus category that ITIL and COBIT can be useful, to ensure the I/T enterprise is executing good practice processes, and doing so in an industry standard manner. Thus, the process and operational frameworks do well to augment and support the Baldrige assessment. Baldrige and strategy maps cover much more ground than ITIL and COBIT, and allow the strategic enterprise to develop its balanced scorecard, taking the financial, customer, and organizational objectives and measurements into account.
Whatever the strategy framework chosen, the most important step in the development of strategy and corresponding objectives, measurements and results has already been taken, the realization that a strategic framework is needed. The choice of measurements is no longer a mystery, or even a question. Likewise the setting of goals for the results is no longer a question. They simply are the result of having a strategy and developing measurable objectives to realize the strategy.
Conclusion
I have covered two reasonable strategy frameworks in this article. There are many others from which to choose, and the organization needs to choose the framework that will be a good organizational fit and will yield the best results. The strategy map is a good place to begin, given its simplicity, but the most important first step is choose one and get started.
Bibliography Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1992, Jan-Feb). The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that Drive Performance. Harvard Business Review .
Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. (2010, March 25). Retrieved March 2011, from NIST: http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/enter/self_started.cfm