In our previous blog post, IT Service Management is broken, we talked about how ITSM is just the beginning for enterprise change management. ITSM has built a good foundation for change management but is in need of drastic innovation to keep up with the rate of change today. There is a need for a fit-for-purpose solution that reflects the advances in technology since ITSM and ITIL first came about. Existing ITSM is focused on the administration of change, which is important, but it’s only the beginning of what is required to deliver change at pace with resilience.
Perhaps the largest gap in requirements is post-change. As we’ve mentioned before in previous blog posts, most change events end with a rushed audit process and little if any post-event analysis. They shouldn’t. If there were a fit-for-purpose platform that provided the necessary analytics for audit and improvement they would not.
Meeting audit requirements
In the area of audit what is needed is a black-box system of record that is created automatically and is easily consumable and shareable. This capability means that there is no need to laboriously reconstruct the event from spreadsheets, phone records and human memory - all while exhausted from running the event itself. And more often than not, if things have gone astray, these records do not satisfy audit requirements.
Continuous learning and improvement
Manual methods also leave no time or ability for analysis and improvement, as teams are usually hurrying to prepare for the next change coming down the line. IT Service Management is only focused on the governance of change events, so there is no continuous learning on the correlation between change and ensuing incidents or focus on change risk measurement.
Satisfying regulators
Manual methods often don’t satisfy regulators. Not being able to play back in a step-by-step automated fashion leaves most auditors wanting. As a result, there is a current trend of regulators expecting more audit capability and companies that have embraced automation in regulatory reporting are already reaping the benefits.
Better tooling and automation will help to build on the existing foundation built by ITSM, but this is nothing without technology that empowers the people that use it. We cover this in our next blog post, ITSM is broken: Empowering people through collaborative intelligence.