Ensure the reliability and security of your computer systems

Each of these industry benchmarks helps organizations better accomplish various aspects of our IT management activities. Some of these best practices help us evolve our information systems quickly, while others seek to establish and maintain controls. These two orientations are not necessarily contradictory when each considers the benefits and requirements of the other "movement.

Many organizations make the mistake of promoting only one of the approaches at the expense of the others, causing significant shortcomings in the scalability, security, compliance and stability of our information systems.

It is essential that organizations understand the results, the gains but also the risks behind each of these industry practices. For each practice, objectives and outcomes should be clearly defined and put in perspective with those of other related practices. It is important at this point to reconcile the objectives that could clash (moving too fast can affect the reliability of systems or validating and controlling any change can affect the speed of adaptation), and determine how these will have to coexist.

Success factors

There are a few critical factors for success in balancing these outcomes.

Outcomes. Ensure that each practice is properly defined to achieve specific goals and outcomes.
Accountability. Ensure that each practice is governed and managed by individuals who are accountable for achieving the identified goals and outcomes. These people are identified as the process, practice or product owners.
Reconciliation. Before designing each practice in isolation or on its own, integrate the objectives with each other. If any seem contradictory, escalate them to the appropriate governance body. (See the article 7 factors for successful IT governance)
Rules. Design the integration of practices by defining policies and guidelines that will help ensure the optimal framework for decisions when one practice should be favored over others (for example, under what conditions should the importance of controls prevail over speed of execution, or vice versa).
Governance. Establish a practice integration committee to help establish, maintain and improve practices and their balance. When owners are unable to find the necessary trade-offs, they must use the established governance mechanism.
If these factors are met, this will allow each practice owner to put in place the elements (processes, technology, skills, contracts, etc.) necessary to achieve their own objectives. This approach again balances speed and autonomy with the quality assurance concerns that organizations need.

Achieving balance

By promoting this approach, we no longer speak of "Agility" or "Control" but rather "Robust and Scalable Agility" or "Agile and Scalable Robustness".

In this concern for integration, it is important to identify the factors that are essential to realistically achieve the objectives of a practice. If these factors are not present, it is unrealistic to expect that we will achieve the objectives.

Practice policies and guidelines will help identify and manage "non-propitious" contexts. They will also guide the organization's response when a practice is not beneficial and does not meet the needs of clients. This approach, if done well, would allow IT organizations to clearly articulate complete and accurate commitments in terms of service velocity, robustness, security, compliance, performance and resiliency.

A difficult but necessary exercise

It would be a lie to say that the integration exercise is trivial and easy. It requires a moment of analysis, reflection and decision making on the outcomes that the organization will prioritize.

Business units must know their real needs in terms of information systems usage. The IT department must understand what each practice can achieve and progressively put in place the elements that will allow the balance between the many requirements of its customers.

Budgetary integration

An important piece of the "puzzle" is to consider the financial component, not only to achieve the deliverable of a project but also to ensure smooth and efficient management once in production. A large part of this integration relies on the use of an integrated asset and configuration management framework that will be shared across multiple practices.
This will capture, maintain and track the elements required to build, deliver, maintain and support an IT product or service. This requires integrating the systems that are used to manage projects with those used to manage software development and to manage service support once in production.

Facilitating integration

In its latest version, ITIL®4 has recognized the need to facilitate this integration. It provides a set of practices that can be interconnected with related practices through defined "anchor points".
Its framework is flexible enough to be adapted to different organizational requirements, but also comprehensive enough to support a more complete integration of multiple IT management frameworks and approaches.

In conclusion

As we know, information systems are complex. The frameworks and approaches for managing them can be just as complex. However, by taking a thoughtful, focused and concerted approach, an organization will see its results improve and grow according to its ever-changing context.

These aspects of IT management are at the heart of the discussions and exchanges taking place during the annual iQ7 conference on IT management best practices. You can learn more by visiting www.iq7conference.com.

Technologia offers several training courses to learn more about IT service management