One of the most interesting and successful aspects of ServiceNow and other IT service request management tools is the way they have moved into non-IT areas. As business becomes more complex and digital, the desire for process automation has expanded. Facilities, Marketing, Human Resources, Legal, and other areas find that they are offering internal “services,” and that a structured service catalog is just as beneficial for them as for the CIO.
We also see that there is less and less difference between internally-facing and externally-facing services. In fact, Amazon directed its product teams to build everything as if it might eventually be provided as a service to external users.
In such models, where is the divide between “IT” and “The Business”? If a computer system is down, and someone is calling in to report the incident, how is this different if that person is an external customer?
It’s different in one important way: your internal Incident Management process is now, whether you realize it or not, part of Customer Relationship Management. In fact, IT service management tools have often been used in this way, but we are seeing a much broader across-the-board convergence:
Digital systems are complex because of their need to enable the delivery of value to customers. Customers often require assistance, troubleshooting, or even additional features. As organizations evolve through digital transformation, there may be less and less sense in keeping a distinction between ITSM and operational customer management. (Customer relationship management in terms of the sales cycle is of course a different thing.)
In the same way, IT projects and portfolios simply become enterprise products, with more or less digital components:
Products are outcome-focused, and represent organizational value; because of this, product management is gaining increased attention, and project management per se is being questioned. IT service and application portfolios may remain, but increasingly the question is what part of a market-facing portfolio do they represent?
Finally, as enterprise operations becomes more digitized, IT systems management merges with enterprise operations as a whole:
Asset and Configuration Management are no longer just “IT.” The bulldozers, trucks, and railcar wheels are Internet of Things endpoints. Their digital exhaust represents a massive volume of dynamically changing data, ripe for analysis for risks and opportunities. And traditional, non-IT “operations” is increasingly digital, requiring the same tools, skills, and risk controls as traditional “IT.”
Asset Management in particular converges with the operational enterprise concern of Fixed Asset Management. Reconciling IT and Fixed Asset systems has long been a challenge. As assets increasingly are endpoints, or at least have digital IDs, will it be possible for these two areas to merge? The answer is yes, but expect this to be a steep climb.
Further relationships could be drawn between all these areas. Vendors have increasing digital components in all their products, so all vendor management needs some ability to assess digital offerings for value and risk.
As we continue in this digital transformation, what is the role of Asset Management? Asset management is too critical a concern to be left to ad-hoc approaches, and yet with virtualization, automation, and Cloud we can have both agility and well-managed assets. Infoworld executive editor Galen Gruman suggests that the new CIO might focus on risk, processes, and/or platforms, all of which imply asset management.
At the end of the day, the digitally transformed organization still must understand itself, its investments, its risks, and its responsibilities. Asset management, high quality asset data, and most critically , Data Quality Management, remain as important as ever in this new world.