Service with a smile

IT service management and service-oriented architecture are attracting a lot of attention. But is this move to make IT more service-centric a fad or something more significant? Neil Davey investigates…

IT is no stranger to trends and fads, some of which have been successful and some of which have been exercises in throwing money away. At present there’s a big push towards a more service-centric IT model, with IT service management (ITSM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) – two topics that have attracted a vast amount of interest recently – representing just two examples of how technology is moving in this direction. But there are signs that this is not a trend that will abruptly fizzle out. And there are plenty of business drivers behind the crusade to make IT more service-centric to suggest that this may be a significant – and permanent – shift in mindset.

Today’s customer, for instance, is more demanding and more service-savvy than ever before. Organisations providing services to customers can no longer down tools at five o’clock, switch off the lights and come back the next day 9am. Many businesses run 24/7 across different timezones, and this means that IT systems have to be continuously on. They also need to be easy for any type of customer to use and they have to be accessible and available at all times across multiple locations.

Marina Stedmann, Marketing Director at IT business management solution provider Touchpaper has witnessed other drivers. “Increasingly, companies also have contractual service level agreements (SLAs) with customers and clients that further impacts the way that IT works,” she highlights. “There is now a requirement for intelligent systems that maintain, automatically monitor and alert on issues so that service problems can be avoided or, at worst, fixed quickly. Compliance is another driver that is making IT more service-centric. Not only do companies have to deliver excellent customer service, but they often have to rise to the challenge of meeting the regulations imposed on their industry at the same time. Needless to say, IT systems have to address and support both service delivery and compliance requirements.”

More than ever before, organisations need to demonstrate that they can deliver consistent levels of service, monitor against targets, identify potential issues, facilitate the management of complaints and comply with regulatory requirements. “The combination of today’s customer behaviour and the growth in regulation are having a huge impact on the role of the IT department,” continues Stedmann. “There is a definite sea change from IT merely fixing computer problems and managing service to proactively supporting customers and their overall business processes and goals.” Fortunately, this sea change in IT has also been accompanied by a similar watershed moment on behalf of the users. “We are at a very distinctive change point in IT,” says Karl Deacon, VP at Capgemini. “Web technology models make it possible to be information and people-centric, not applications-centric. When you link this to a shift in how people (especially the under 35s) expect to use technology, we are looking at a tipping point for IT as a business support service that aligns IT to business strategy.”

IT-business strategy alignment

Indeed it is this IT-business strategy alignment that is perhaps the most poignant aspect of this shift towards a service-centric view. “In a globally competitive market, businesses need to reach their widest potential markets and ensure they can innovate so their products and services can be marketed for as long as possible without imitation,” continues Deacon. “Now that technology has spread deep and wide into operations, the ability to both align IT to the business and make IT service-centric plays a vital role in helping all parts of the organisation move equally together towards the same goals. Where the IT function understands businesses imperatives more clearly, the technology is now available to provide the flexibility and agility, which is why service-centric IT is such a hot topic.”

Aligning IT with business strategy has topped CIOs’ management concerns in annual Gartner surveys every year since 1996. But although people have been talking about business/IT alignment for nearly a decade, it is only now that they are finally doing something about it. “Businesses are finally realising that there are reasons why projects fail and they can’t respond quickly enough to market – the infrastructure underlying their business is not aligned or up to the challenge,” says Ian Cartwright, Technical Architect at IT consultants ThoughtWorks. “Business is realising they simply cannot compete without an IT department pulling in the same direction as the rest of the organisation.”

Norman Wilkinson, Service Management Leader at IBM Tivoli Software for UK, Ireland and South Africa, suggests that making IT more service-centric is critical in aligning IT to a companies’ business strategy and to achieving business agility. “IT is the prime-mover in the whole service delivery process,” he suggests. “Where IT is not aligned to business services, its value to the business is very limited as effectively it is managing technology devices without regard for business strategy or priorities – it has no mechanism for doing otherwise. In this situation, the business perception of IT is that it is internally focused and a cost burden. Conversely, where IT is more service-centric, it delivers value to the business by aligning to business strategy and delivering IT services against business priorities. It becomes a channel for effective business service delivery and is seen as an essential service to achieving business goals.”

Spin in the market

Making IT align with business demands is no simple matter, of course, or else enterprises would have been doing it years ago. The challenge for most organizations is that roughly three-quarters of their IT resources are committed to supporting legacy systems and requirements with only a fraction of their IT spending allocated to bringing new innovations to the business. “As a result, IT is often viewed as an inhibitor rather than a game changer in competitively differentiating the business,” suggests Lance Hill, VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at webMethods. “The challenge for IT organisations is to shift their overriding focus from the applications that enable the enterprise to the processes that define it. For example, what’s needed by most businesses are customer care specialists that can ensure a single view of the customer as opposed to just another technician that is solely focused on application availability. As such, by leveraging approaches like SOA to deliver new applications to the business faster, IT can enhance the value that it offers the business. Through this process, enterprises can implement new processes and strategies more quickly, easily and cost-effectively than would be otherwise possible.”

SOA’s focus on process assembly using reusable services means that IT departments will become even closer to the line-of-business, often working hand-in-hand with their colleagues to address these business requirements. “Companies are finding more and more that IT systems are far too rigid to adapt when a change in business processes is needed – IT service management and SOA address these issues,” says Melvin James, Director of Diagonal Consulting. “The core problem faced by IT for years now is that it has been seen to be holding the business back and not driving it. In fact, recent research we commissioned highlighted this need for flexible IT systems, with 55 percent of respondents admitting that they had been unable to undertake business improvement projects because IT systems were too rigid and complex. SOA is gathering momentum as it can help organisations address this complexity.”

“A service-centric approach like SOA allows organisations to build new applications more quickly, cost-effectively and provides more functionality than before,” agrees Ross Altman, CTO of Business Integration Platforms at Sun Microsystems. “It enables organisations to enter new markets and increase business capabilities faster and cheaper, achieving the ultimate goal of business agility. Responsibility for identifying which areas an organisation wishes to have greater agility lies with business strategists, but the ability to reuse and loosely couple applications means that service-centric IT is well placed to respond rapidly to any new business initiative it is asked to address.”

Nevertheless, while corporate leaders and CIOs may be increasingly acknowledging the potential benefits of aligning IT with business strategy – to the extent that SOAs and IT service management are high on many corporate agendas – few firms have yet to successfully make the link. In fact, research by Deloitte Consulting suggests that while 96 percent of IT executives surveyed predict a ‘significant’ or ‘moderate’ positive bottom-line impact if an IT strategy were specifically developed to closely align with and support the corporate strategy, only 10 percent report their enterprises have been ‘extremely successful’ in IT and business alignment efforts. It would appear that there is a notable disparity between goals and results.

“There is a lot of ‘spin’ in the market right now on IT to business alignment,” suggests Wilkinson. “Analysts and consultants generally concur that this is the way that IT needs to grow and if you take a look at Gartner’s ‘Hype Curve’, all the topics associated with service management are pretty much at the peak of hype today. This indicates that there is a lot of talk but not much action and what seems to be lacking is the roadmap for companies wanting to transition from where they are today towards service management tomorrow.”

Service-oriented architecture

Deacon, however, remains confident about the long-term prospects and points to some good examples of businesses that have aligned their IT. “Low cost airlines, for example, make it possible for customers to check availability, book and pay for their travel, check in and print tickets,” he says. “They link customers and trading partners rather than working with siloed departments that have to transfer data to each other. Service-orientation makes it possible to design and build software and IT infrastructure and to link new and existing systems together. Most IT and business people we speak to know all the pieces – the challenge is about joining up the dots to be able to create the right structure going forward.”

And whilst SOA, IT service management and aligning IT-business strategies may be the latest in a long line of IT trends, this is shaping up to be no fad – and firms may be at risk of falling behind their competitors if they don’t learn to join up these dots. Stefan Van Overtveldt, Vice President and Head of IT Transformation Practice at BT Global Services, believes that newcomers that ‘get’ business agility and understand how to architect in a service-oriented way are beginning to find success in areas that leave their competitors in their wake.

“Early adopters of SOA are in a strong position to gain competitive advantage as they are more able to move into new markets and diversify and faster time-to-market means faster time-to-benefit,” he explains. “They come to the SOA table fresh, unlike more mature companies that have become jaded by the ‘alphabet soup’ of hot technologies. A good example of the agility that comes from mapping IT to business strategy is the ability of banks and, increasingly, supermarkets to leverage their brand and diversify into new products and services, often in association with external partners. In order to understand why SOA is truly a hot topic, it is important to underline the key pressures acting on today’s businesses. Market forces, new technology, the convergence of IT and communications, new economies and new requirements have resulted in and added to the headache of complexity. SOA is the answer to bringing the complexity under control, removing that complexity and moving to an agile IT environment that underpins its prosperity.”

Businesses’ desire to align IT with business strategy has long existed. However, IT has only recently become equipped to meet this mandate. Industry’s emerging service-centric view of IT promises to not only realise this dream of IT-business strategy alignment, but also improve business agility. “When IT was solely defined by ERP, the mainframe and similar concepts, it was impossible to deliver the adaptability and responsiveness that the line-of-business truly required,” concludes Hill. “What’s changed is the rise of SOA, software-as-a-service and other forms of componentised, plug-and-play IT. This is allowing IT to deliver the responsiveness and adaptability needed to better align with the line-of-business.” And that is much more rewarding than anything a mere fleeting trend can offer.

“SOA is fundamentally about modularity”

Ross Altman, CTO, Business Integration Platforms, Sun Microsystems discusses the increasing prevalence of service-oriented architecture.

SOA is fundamentally about modularity. Like all previous efforts in IT to build applications out of components or modules, SOA development allows you to build complex applications by first breaking them down into their constituent parts through functional decomposition. After this analysis step, the identified component requirements can be addressed through independent development activities and the resulting ‘services’ can be subsequently combined to form the required application.

The advantage of SOA in this context is that SOA allows you to change a component whilst other components are left undisturbed – we call this loose coupling. This is partly enabled through the use of technical interface standards within SOA implementations (e.g. JMS for messaging and web services for request/reply interactions). The use of these standards allows the program requesting the service and the program providing the service to be built without detailed negotiations between the two development teams regarding the specifics of the technical implementation.

The use of these interface standards is also part of the reason that SOA can provide another benefit to development groups within IT – i.e. the ability to reuse components. If you build a service to a standard service interface definition, then multiple programs can more readily call that service – i.e. you can use the functionality in the service again and again.

SOA is by no means the first attempt by IT to realise the conceptual benefits or functional decomposition and modularity. But, as the latest formal approach to component-based development it has much to offer. SOA reduces the amount of time, money and risk that is associated with the initial development of an application. And, because of the clean demarcation of requirements, the separable application logic and the clearly-defined, standard interfaces built for each service, SOA also reduces the time, money and risk associated with subsequent development – either maintenance of the original project or development of related follow-on projects.

“When you link this to a shift in how people expect to use technology, we are looking at a tipping point for IT as a business support service that aligns IT to business strategy” – Karl Deacon, Capgemini

“SOA is the answer to bringing the complexity under control and moving to an agile IT environment that underpins prosperity”– Stefan Van Overtveldt, BT Global Services

“What seems to be lacking is the roadmap for companies wanting to transition from where they are today towards service management tomorrow” – Norman Wilkinson, IBM Tivoli

“The core problem faced by IT for years now is that it has been seen to be holding the business back and not driving it” – Melvin James, Diagonal Consulting

“The challenge for IT organisations is to shift their overriding focus from the applications that enable the enterprise to the processes that define it” – Lance Hill, webMethods