A Common Problem

IT organisations and their clients have a wealth of knowledge and experience. The trouble is that when decisions need to be made at levels high or low, urgently needed guidance is spread around, unstructured, and practically inaccessible. Nevertheless, decisions have to be made. It is not until months, sometimes a year or two later, that the lessons are (re-)learned the hard way.

Use Case: High Availability, Backup and Disaster Recovery

When 24-hour/365-day operations became important, the architects of one organisation had to design solutions delivering to this need. However, no matter how hard they worked, this area was too complex for the individual architect to fully understand. Expensive lessons were learned the hard way. Still, the lessons learned and needed know-how were available with the top experts, who were in different countries. The logical step would have been to bring the experts together in a formal team. Procedural needs, budget approval needs, and associated delays led to a different approach. The experts were brought together in an informal team.

From the starting position of lowest-effort/highest-impact guidance first, the know-how of the experts was translated into clear ‘use/avoid' instructions. Additional background information helped the colleagues to see why it was better to follow a certain direction and to avoid other routes. A total of only 60 pages enabled the architects and decision-makers to identify optimum solutions and the type of Service Level Agreements that provided optimum business value for the client and the IT supplier.

Overall, the development cost of the paper was less than that of a single medium-impact problem. It prevented not only high-impact problems, but also shortened solution design efforts and prevented costly configurations that offered no additional value.

Closing the Gap

There are two levels through which the gap can be closed.

Level 1: Ground Rules and Fundamental Guidance

From the position of ‘lowest-effort/highest-impact interventions first', lessons learned and know-how of the experts are translated into:

• One Ground Rules Paper, containing guidance applicable for the whole of IT, AND/OR
• Fundamental Guidance Papers, containing guidance for particular areas or projects of high impact.

Once approved, Ground Rules and Fundamental Guidance Papers are integrated into the daily operations in such a way that they are proactively applied.

For more information, click here.

Level 2: Compliance the Smart Way^TM

The nature of Ground Rules/Fundamental Guidance and their integration into daily operations provide sufficient functionality so the papers will be used widely. However, for IT organisations to deliver to the needs listed at the top of this page, a whole range of papers containing strategies, standards, architectures, processes, and the like need to be of high quality, executable, and executed. The trouble is that root cause analysis has identified 42 issues standing in the way.

In larger organisations, a lack of effective strategy/standards and compliance functionality for solving these issues creates major obstacles. No matter how well IT governance, ITIL, and other best practices are implemented, if important input documents for the best practice processes cannot be found, are outdated, contain too many conflicts, or are designed for stable situations while the situation is dynamic, best practices cannot deliver on their value promises. In such a situation, further emphasis on improving best practices can only lead to higher costs and disappointed clients and colleagues.

When the lack of effective strategy/standards and compliance functionality was addressed with the goal of solving the 42 issues and making compliance work, a surprisingly simple solution emerged: Compliance the Smart Way. As more and more issues got resolved in one organisation, colleagues started to trust the papers and applied them proactively.

For further information, click here.