Not only are many organizations incapable, by virtue of their lack of maturity (eg. process/performance absenteeism), from implementing many ITIL best practices, but their culture often prevents any progress, whatsoever. Individual and siloed work habits prevent the kinds of cross-organization endevours necessary to achieve CMMI level 3 (ie., process-driven) maturity characteristics. Performance measures may be reported but they reflect internal massaging to bloat results to enhance or maintain staffing and budget levels - there is no independent verification of measures or results. Indeed, best practice initiatives will most often “back-slide” and individuals and silos retrench to reflect protective measures (much as countries retrench during recessions to protect their own workers). Momentuum must be sustained to “institutionalize” results or regression is inevitable.

There is still much conceptual work to be done in ITSM. The concepts in CMMI, MOF, CobIT, SixSigma and ITIL need to be brought together into a complete framework. Unfortuneately, there is less overall money to be made in an integrated framework than in separate, competing methodologies, leaving it to the implementer to take the best of each and produce their own appraoch.

Ask Them What They Need! - If they aren’t interested in looking at what you are producing, find out what they would be interesting in looking at. The service desk is the moment of truth for your IT services and organization. It provides an important touch point with your users and in return collects very valuable information that, if presented properly, is a gold mine for actionable improvements and early warning to pending issues and customer dissatisfaction.

Find the Dog to Put the Flea On! If your not ready to approach senior management to draw out their requirements, then seek out that little itch that you can scratch for them. Use your knowledge of the information available from your service desk and link it to an issue you know is top of mind with your management team. Too often service desk reports speak about incident volumes and FPOC rates, when what management really needs to hear is that there is a spike in outages for a particular application solution that is really impacting the business. When it comes to reporting

Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast! Find the critical few out of the important many reports that you have available. Before you know it your Service Desk will be recognized as an invaluable source for customer satisfaction and service improvement information.