Knowing Where You Are Going: Identifying ITSM Requirements and Maturity

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Damon Edwards / October 4th, 2007

Charles Betz’s ERP4IT blog has an interesting post on what Betz calls “The Four Pillars of ITSM”. It is an interesting read because not only is he spot on, but his “pillars” also appear to reflect implicit stages of maturity

The “pillars” (see his post for the details):
1. A service-focused view of IT
2. Process orientation
3. Master data management (business and internal IT data)
4. Well-architected internal IT

The maturity levels I see in this would progress something like this:

First you wake up and realize that you operate software as a service. This often results in a bit of an upper management hand-wave, but none the less, it’s a critical step because it means you recognize that you have to change how your organization runs. (Pillar #1)

Then you realize that the service lifecycle actually cuts across many different disciplines and you need coherent processes that span them all. Once you have those processes defined you also need to know how to measure their effectiveness. (Pillar #2 and #3)

Finally you need to bake those processes and methods of measurement into your IT systems (Pillars #3 and #4)

Note: Pillar #3 is the linch pin between #2 and #4.