Finding Focus: Risk Management, Service Desk & More

Finding Focus, Episode Summary

In this episode, David Van Heerden discusses the importance of getting on the same page when it comes to automation and IT. He introduces the ITIL v4 framework and highlights the 34 distinct practices it outlines. He then narrows down the focus to four key practices: risk management, service desk, deployment, and infrastructure and platform management. David emphasizes the need to identify the one thing that organizations must get right and explains how engaging with the business can help determine this. By prioritizing and automating this one thing, organizations can unlock efficiency and move on to other areas of improvement.

Read the Automate IT Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the Automox podcast series, Automate IT, hosted by yours truly, David Van Heerden. In today's episode, our theme is getting back to basics. And for talking about automation and IT, I think it's important for us to get on the same kind of vocabulary. We talk about common sense, where common sense isn't necessarily too common unless we really get on the same page on what it is that we're talking about.

So we all have to learn and adopt new levels of understanding at a more common level so we can all get on the same page. And so with that, I like to reference the ITIL version 4 framework. That's the IT Infrastructure Library version 4 by Axelos, where they outline 34 distinct practices that information technology is involved in.

Now, I'm not gonna read them all out to you here, but I do recommend that you do some research online. These practices are well published. You don't need to buy any sort of material to review what these practices are, but it will help you really articulate to your business partners, to the rest of your team, and just to yourself how much IT really does contribute to the generation of value and overall success in your organization.

And so no matter how large your org is, how small your operation is, there really are these 34 different things that you are contributing to, then it's important to highlight and mention. But again, trying to get back to basics and help all of you out in navigating this space. I went ahead and just picked my top four out of this, but just as a means to help you all along.

In my humble opinion, there's risk management as a major one, service desk as a core function, the deployment of new assets, software and information to the business, and then the overall infrastructure and platform management that you have going on within your org. Again, there's 30 other ones than these four that I picked, but I think again, bringing things down even a level simpler.

Take a few pages out of Gary Keller and Jay Papasan's book, The One Thing, where in that book they articulate this across a lot of different realms, but I think it's helpful in the business context of understanding that there has to be one thing that you have to get right. There's fires popping up left and right, there's issues going on all day long, but at the end of the day, on the list of all your priorities and everything that you have to handle, there's got to be just one thing that you lean on and say, hey, everything else fell apart, but I got the one single most important thing right. And I think approaching these large, complex and diverse and dynamic kinds of issues and challenges, it's important to ground yourself on what that North Star is.

What is that one thing, that one foundational thing that you have to get right? So of those four that I mentioned, you know, risk management, service desk, deployment, infrastructure, and platform management, you know, you might spark some different ideas as to what your one thing out of those four are. And again, I encourage you to read through the list of 34 practices in the ITIL v4 framework and see maybe within your organization, which one of those is the most important that you have to get right, that you can always lean on as you're, oh, I messed up here, but I got that foundational thing correct. And just to kind of be against myself here, right? Cause I feel the easy option might be the infrastructure and platform management side as the one thing that we have to get right. We have to keep the lights on, the networks always have to be up and running.

Wi-Fi is always there, the laptops, the servers, all of that infrastructure and the platforms that our services run on, non-negotiable, always have to be online. But I want to add some color to why risk management is on this list as a single thing that you need to get right.

And the reason why is because if you invest your time, energy, research into not just, oh, tinfoil hat, look at all the things that can ruin us, but instead learn how to assess and articulate and build those activities and processes out within risk management to communicate to the business, hey, if you are deciding to roll out this new thing or cut the budget here or remove this kind of product, that's going to introduce these sort of bottlenecks into your operation. If you want to reduce the use of this tool, say in our tech stack, that makes us less effective at responding to X, Y, or Z scenario. And even to flip it, again, further away from the tinfoil hat arena, risk management is also the risk of opportunity cost.

So you say, well, by removing an automation tool or removing some kind of enabler, we now have to commit manual labor to this kind of task, which means we can no longer focus on generating more value in our day-to-day operations. We can't automate X, Y, and Z things that will generate us more money because we're spending our time in some boring day-to-day toil and tasks.

So it's about really ultimately assessing the ROI, the impacts of those financial business decisions that's in the risk management side, which if you're in that leadership type position, that's something that you should be imparting into your IT team and into your peers at the manager level or above where you're saying, hey, these decisions that we're making have a major strategic impact in the overall value generation in our business. Is this really what we wanna do? Are we looking too short-sighted with this?

And I believe if you get that one thing right, if you are consistently asking those questions and articulating those arguments, you unlock the ability to do the other 33 activities that are also priority and important really well, because at least you can articulate the positive benefits or the negatives in deciding to do or not to do something. So I encourage the exploration of the risk management conversation.

I have to give a shout out to Tom Bowyer, our Director of IT and Security at Automox. I think he's a fantastic communicator in that risk management arena. So please check out his podcast and any webinars where his little gopher head pops up in, because you'll definitely get some wisdom imparted from him. Service Desk, another one that I'm putting on here to raise an argument for is at least within your organization, you may struggle on the risk management side, leadership doesn't wanna hear it. At least within your organization, if you can get the one thing right, it's solving those problems. It's putting out those fires as quickly as possible. It's being reliable and consistent and predictable in how you deliver your service. And particularly, it's not service management, but it's that service desk side of things.

So those human interactions, all of those touch points where you engage with the business. If you get that right, if your reputation is solid as a department of yes, so department of maybe trying to find that pathway to mutual success, with you and your user base, if you can get that part right, that similarly unlocks a wealth of opportunities to say, hey, we're doing this so well.

We can do it far better or do other areas better with some additional investment because all of our resources are committed to doing this very important, impactful thing right. And deployment is another one in the one thing mentality that you may want to consider being the thing that you just get absolutely right. And the reason why deployment, you know, might surprise some is like, oh, deployment's sort of one and done. You roll it out and then it's out there. Now you've transitioned to a kind of support phase.

But I think we've all experienced this constant cycle of change within our businesses where we are rolling back and pushing out new stuff quarterly, monthly even in some instances with how fast things are changing, where if we're really rusty on this deployment thing and we're not, we don't have that foundational piece done right as the one thing that we do really well.

You really miss a massive amount of efficiency and effectiveness in your org. And one example I can give is not too specific, but think of deploying a new tool, like a management type tool, or a CRM, a marketing or a point of sale system, that if you deploy it, you kind of get three choices, right? You get it done fast, you get it done well, or you get it done cheap, pick two of them.

And so, with that sort of conversation, right? If you're going and approaching these deployment conversations where something has to be sacrificed, that has big outcomes in the onset where, okay, we get it done fast and we spend a lot of money to do it and get it done fast. Well, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be done well, which means you're spending more time and resources later on maturing the tool that you just deployed.

On that deployment side of things, when you launch something in, it's there for a reason. We're launching it with a specific goal in mind. And if you can launch those tools as that's the one thing that your team is really solid at, then those tools are more effective, faster for your organization and deliver and yield that value so much faster.

Again, the break fix stuff that happens kind of becomes secondary because you are nimble and adjusting to all the changes so well in your org of deploying, rolling back and fixing, rolling out all these new things in your environment. And then lastly, which I think we all sort of instinctively attached to is the infrastructure and platform side, right?

Keeping the lights on, making sure that all those servers and services are available at all times. Networking devices and endpoints can get on, access everything and be fast about it. Which again is a bit of a no brainer, but just to add more color to it. You know, we We're spoiled nowadays when it comes to technology. It's almost unacceptable to see a buffer on a YouTube video nowadays, unless you're on mobile and you're on a bus and you know, you're in the middle of nowhere.

But for the most part, we've all been accustomed to high-performant infrastructure and high-performant platforms where optimization is critical for the success of these platforms. And so when we enter into the business environment, we sort of come in with this expectation that, yeah, this internal Salesforce portal should be snappy for me, or this intranet that I'm accessing behind this VPN should be quick and snappy like my home internet.

Why is this so problematic to us? Let alone the availability of it being 99.99% or above. And so with that, getting that locked in and down and having that fundamental piece is of course important and yields so much value getting that done. And that might just be your one thing that you need to lean back on and prioritize.

And the way to approach how to figure out what your one thing is, is to engage with your business, engage with the people within your organization that determine how valuable and useful your team's functions really are, and talk with them through these 34 things and say, okay, this is what service desk means. How important is this to you? Nine out of 10. If you get tickets resolved in five minutes versus 30, negotiate those SLAs, and see where their appetite is to really make sure that you get this part done right and force them to surface up to what that one thing is and then you invest in getting that part done right and well. And the reason why I'm harping on this so much is once you get the buy-in from your business, from your organization, the sponsorship that, yes, we have to get our deployment practice done well, we have to.

For all of these reasons, these business cases, this is our one thing that we're gonna do right. Now we're investing time, effort and resources into automating it, into driving efficiency forwards with it. Eventually the end goal to the point where that one thing is now so much less of a lift to get done, so much less effort to maintain and perform.

Because everyone is so well trained in it. Everyone knows how it operates and builds and has built in so much efficiency that you can now move on to, all right, what's the next thing? We've got that down packed, done. What's the next thing that we can tackle in this automation journey? So just to recap the conversation and ramble here, I know you're just listening to me, so I thank you for sticking around. Review the 34 practices that the ITIL V4 framework presents.

And from that, try to find your single thing that you absolutely have to get right within your organization. And you can define what that is by engaging with your business and having them score and rate how much they value that particular practice in their day-to-day work. So again, thank you for sticking around listening to this Automox Automate IT podcast. My name is David Van Heerden. See you next time.