ThinkITSM Blog

Risks for Organizations with Maturity less then Level 3

There are risks for organizations that operate in the Level 1-2 maturity range. If there is a plan to develop and mature the practice(s) to level 3 or higher the risks are somewhat mitigated. However, while at a level 0-2 some of the key risks to consider are:

Service Desk and Incident Management

• Perception of IT as a whole is lowered and considered not customer focused
• There is a danger of negatively impacting external customers and their perception of the business
• There are costs (financial, reputational) when the business is interrupted while users and major services are down
• There is an inefficient use of skilled IT technical resources
• There is little incident reporting data because most of it is inaccurate and consequently little basis for improvement
• Many of the same incidents are resolved repeatedly (re-inventing the wheel)
• There will be a risk of high Staff burnout and high turnover of support staff

Change Management

• The infrastructure is very unstable and has long term performance issues
• There are frequent outages following unauthorized changes
• Project implementations are delayed because changes cannot be coordinated
• There are many failed changes that cause incidents
• The requirement for changes outstrips the capacity to implement them
• Support for third party applications expires due to inability to stay current

Problem Management

• Common incidents are resolved repeatedly, lowering customer satisfaction and inflating support costs unnecessarily
• Re-inventing the wheel when sporadic incidents occur over longer periods of time
• Frequent interruptions or degradation of service
• It is difficult to introduce new services when unknown errors may jeopardize the implementation.
• The change practice gets bogged down due to higher rates of failed changes
• Due to a lack of work around information the Service Desk regresses to a call dispatch function.

Maria Ritchie Uncategorized Add new tag, Change Management, IT, ITIL, Maria Ritchie, Practice Maturity, Problem Management, Service Desk and Incident Management