Back2ITSM, the initiative designed to gather intelligence and ideas for meeting the challenges faced by industry practitioners, was officially launched at SDITS12. Showcasing the newly launched Back2ITSM website, members of the ITSMWP Rest of the World podcast who are spearheading the launch revealed the support of two of the industry’s foremost member organisations, Service Desk Institute (SDI) and itSMF.
Back2ITSM has grown from the original idea by Forrester’s Stephen Mann that best practice content and thinking has traditionally been driven by what consultants and industry ‘experts’ think the industry needs, not necessarily what practitioners are really looking for. ”As practitioners, we are consistently having to reinvent the wheel because of the absence of ‘shared practice’. How many practitioners have created an incident prioritisation matrix or a capacity plan from scratch rather than leveraging a Blue Peter-like “here’s one we made earlier” example?,” explained Mann.
The presentation revealed the three topics which participants will be working on first; building a service catalogue; incident categorisation; and service desk metrics. The audience broadly agreed with the choices, but when the presenters asked if anyone had any materials to add in, only one one came forward. Eventually another audience member admitted to being constrained by their business which contractually owns any resources they create.
Stephen Mann recognised the difficulty of extracting material from businesses, but said that a number of large vendor organisations were beginning to see the value of sharing information through Back2ITSM to show their commitment to improving the industry and becoming though-leaders. He is hopeful that the offering and use of initial content will breed both greater interest and the offering up of further content by practitioners and vendors alike.
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The good news is that we are already actively working on content in the three key areas already identified, and will be using the key ITSM conferences in the UK to both build and present collateral. .
Good to meet you at last James!
On the face of it, providing a central and shared repository for ITSM real-life practice seems a good idea, indeed an act of altruism, for all the reasons the proponents suggest. However, I have two main practical issues with Back2ITSM.
The first is the question of the value, quality, and workability of the submitted practices. The phrase ‘Best Practice’, so blithely bandied around anything to do with ITSM, has come up again, and yet again (just like in ITIL), there are no checks to verify that what turns up will actually be “Best.” Might be great – might be amateurish and incomplete. Might be relevant – might be unusably esoteric. Caveat emptor.
The second, much more important issue, is that in most employment contracts, there is usually a clause stating that anything invented by the employee in the course of his job, remains the property of the employer. That’s reasonable; an invention is a competitive advantage and so presumably may not be released into the public domain. Therefore, a submission to Back2ITSM may actually be a disciplinary offence. Not only that, but as observers from one large company offered to the Back2ITSM panel on the day, it would be almost impossible to find out who in the company might have the authority to allow the release.
Although I wish the principle of Back2ITSM all the best, I fear that the practicalities may severely limit its actual impact.