ITIL: Process or function??

Some thoughts that have been bubbling for a while, as I dig deeper into the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) -

Many of the ITIL practice areas (in particular those in Service Delivery) do not appear to be processes in the strict business process management sense. Change, Release, Incident and Problem management all are true business processes: they are repeatable, measurable, start with a defined event, and have a clear value-add end state.

This may be heretical, but I am starting to view Configuration, Availability, Capacity, Financial, and now Operations Management as functions...

They are steady state capabilities with no defined beginning or end, often owned by organizations tending towards silos, which Change, Release, Incident and Problem cross. Their staffing is specialized, as are their tools, which are not generally shared with other areas (unlike Change, Release, Incident, and Problem, whose tools have cross-functional user bases).

If this seems radical, ask the question: What is an Incident? Do I know when one is identified, its lifecycle, and when it ends? Are the activities measurable and repeatable? Then it is a true business process. Now ask yourself, What is an Availability? What is a Capacity? And so forth.

Configuration Management is a bit of a special case, but I see it still as more function than process; even though it does fundamentally support many areas, that contact generally is realized through one of the true processes, and certainly it requires a deep center of excellence organizational model to do right.

Core BPM principles can be found in Geary Rummler and Alan Brache's Improving Performance, perhaps the classic statement of the business process management movement. Other influential BPM authors align with Rummler & Brache on these distinctions, e.g. Paul Harmon (www.bptrends.com), Alec Sharp, and Roger Burlton.

We debated process, function, and organization on the Yahoo! dm-discuss list some weeks back (groups.yahoo.com/group/dm-discuss, "function and process" thread, 9/10/2005-9/28/2005) and the final consensus there was also the same.

I think one outcome of the whole process management movement, starting with Michael Hammer, is that people are thinking "function bad, process good" and therefore want to call EVERYTHING a process, without being rigorous about what that exactly means. A purely process orientation presents its own set of challenges; reality is a messy matrix.

I can't imagine that these questions haven't been debated in the ITIL/ITSM world previously, but I haven't seen any discussions, and I'm concerned that there is a disconnect between ITIL/ITSM and the BPM movement.

Thoughts anyone?

-Charlie

PS. One thing that would help is adopting the principle that (at least in the English language) processes start with active verbs, and functions are passive verb-based nouns: e.g. “Resolve Incidents” or “Execute Changes” versus “Capacity Management” and “Availability Management.” BPM author Alec Sharp frowns on using vague verbs like “manage,” “coordinate,” and “analyze,” favoring concrete verbs such as “resolve,” “execute,” and “complete.” I know when I have “resolved” an incident, but I have no idea when I’m done “managing” something.

PPS. An issue the BPM community is still debating is the concept of “process area” which is a grouping of cross-functional processes. The classic example of this is CRM. See again Alex Sharp’s book.

Comments

[The ITIL Skeptic]

Right on the money. I've often thought this but never taken the time to examine or formalise the idea. Thankyou

[The ITIL Skeptic]

Right on the money. I've often thought this but never taken the time to examine or formalise the idea. Thankyou

[GRIN-NZ]

Good reading.... here's my 5 cents worth in agreement, with a slight slant.

When you look at it further - for the four areas you have defined as true "processes" – we can draw a nice process diagram for each and it will encompass 80-90% of what ITIL is saying for that subject.
The other areas (eg capacity and availability etc) are hellishly hard to draw an all-encompassing process diagram for…. and when you do, it is very high level compared to the wealth of knowledge contained within ITIL guidance for that subject.

The real learning from this is that we in the ITSM world need to avoid trying to fit the entire ITIL guidance into a process document supported by a procedure document.
We all agree we need to create process and procedure documentation, but we should concentrate on doing this only for defined, repeatable tasks.

Let’s try not to create procedures that are merely guidance. Those that try to do this will be disappointed in the outcome and their documents will end up being re-worded versions of the ITIL library.

[Max]

I am defining an Operations Architecture and I am having exactly the same problem. For some topics like availability, It is very complicated to map the ITIL Procesess to the real activities in a Production environment.

When we try to define scope of the work, the ITIL processes do not help much, but if I think about them like functions wich I can decompose, it helps.

Thanks... and keep writing.

[Hank Marquis]

Process describes the work that people in functional organizations carry out. A process is best thought of at the function level as list of activities, tasks, guidance, roles, responsibilities and authorities. Availability and Capacity decribes the work required of a group of people (function). Thus, ITIL availability management describes the metrics required, the infrastructure to underpin, and other related tasks. It is clearly a process and not a function. Whether or not it is a well formed process is another question entirely. However, unlike say, the Service Desk function, which offers 5 related organizational structures and how they ought to be staffed, none of the other ITIL processes offer any organizational structure descriptions or staffing beyond that of roles, responsibilities, and suggested character attributes.

[bob s]

The issue of which processes are truly processes or not, I was wondering if anyone has created or come across a logical process model for IIL. I know that I have seen a data model created by Charles Betz, bu I was looking for a one page model hat represens each of the processes and the flows between them.

Surely his exists. My inten was to use he one page model as a way to represent a summary of ho ITIL works and then use coloring to note what processes and connections between processes have been implemented in a target environment.

Has anyone seen this?

[bob s]

Sorry for the spelling errors in the above message. My "t" key is sticking.