IT Service Management - Significant Components of the Service Culture

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) implementations “require” a Service Culture in order to be truly effective.  You may read my dissertation to find the citations on this, but here I ask you take my word for it.  What is Service Culture, how is it measured, and how to we get there?  Basically, how do we “mature” the Service Culture like any other component of Service Models like ITIL, CMMI, or CobiT?  Some of my initial data gathering and analysis is beginning to tell the story.  The Organizational Culture Domain (OCD), which I have written about in my dissertation and earlier Blogs, proposes a model and an instrument to help answer those questions.   

To refresh, the OCD models several components of organizational culture that have significance to ITSM:

• Organizational Tension - The basic trust in a change or upheaval and the amount of "mourning" the organization requires for the old way
• Coordination and Communication - The need for or extent to which key departments and individuals work together to improve the organization
• Organizational Commitment - Convincing those in the organization to be committed to the new vision and their roles in achieving it
• Organizational Competency - Learning the analytical and interpersonal skills managers and employees will use in the Change effort
• Organizational Leadership - The demonstration by top management of visible and consistent support for change.  There is a component for executives to assess their leadership call Executive Leadership.
• Management Innovation - Management support for the business application of creativity
• Organizational Innovation - A culture of continual service improvement
• Organizational Continuity - Retention of cultural fundamentals important to organizational change, such as purpose or mission, core technologies, and key resources and skills.

Recently, I collected data with OCD Assessment instrument and have some preliminary findings.  In the data sample of IT Professionals, there are statistically significant relationships between OCD Components and Organizational Process Maturity.  In other words, maturing an Organization’s IT Services through ITSM can be augmented by also “maturing” certain cultural components of the Organizational Culture.

There were relationships across almost all of the OCD Components, but the strongest relationships were in Organizational Leadership and Organizational Tension.  So what does that tell us?

·        First, the relationship between ITSM maturity and the Organizational Leadership component of Organizational Culture shows having an “agile” organizational structure, leaders who consider organizational-wide impact of decisions, and the ability to seek the input of team members are all significant variables to building the Service Culture.

·        Second, the relationship between ITSM maturity and the Organizational Tension component of Organizational Culture shows having the ability to respond to shifts in the larger society and the larger culture as well as the ability to respond to decisions of Senior Leadership are also significant variables to building the Service Culture.

We can conclude a few things from these findings.  First, this is an initial sample and more data will refine the results and yield more confidence.  More data will lead us to determine industry averages and eventually industry best practices.  This will enable the examination of specific organizations to determine where they may fall along the Organizational Cultural Maturity continuum as compared to comparable industry or government organizations.  Second, some of the things we might believe are obvious are indeed statistically significant and deserve our attention.  This will focus the Organizational Change and Transformation models to important targets of opportunity to affect Organizational Culture change that go hand in hand with Organizational IT Maturity through IT Service Management.

FG