Create a Service Management and IT Operations Strategy

Move from assessment to action, using an interconnected approach to meet organizational goals.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Develop an actionable service and operational strategy that ensures value delivery to the business.

Today organizations operate within complex technology landscapes, often using disparate frameworks, methodologies and tools, which may lead to inefficiencies and misalignments with real organizational requirements.

IT operations and service management practices should be tightly integrated, yet we often see them being assessed and improved incrementally as disconnected practices. These practices may be missing documentation or may have data that meets the basic needs of the practice leaders but is not able to support adjacent practices. A great example is to see if the data produced in your incident management practice can be used today to launch a problem management practice or could tell you where the biggest impact will be if you can eliminate one or two sources of technical debt.

A systems-thinking approach will start with assessing practice capabilities all under the same lens that includes process accountability, policy, data, documentation, technology and funding, as these are foundational factors in every successful practice. By understanding how these practices align with the typical goals of an IT operational department and aligning those operational goals to organizational priorities, it becomes easier to see where the most impactful enhancements can be made to interconnected practices and where there may be opportunities for systematic improvements, like developing and enforcing data quality standards.

This research provides a comprehensive guide to create a vision of the future of service management and IT operations, assess the current state and develop a strategy and roadmap that will align IT operational initiatives to organizational goals. This blueprint will help organizations create a cohesive vision of how to improve their IT operations and service management practices, regardless of which frameworks and methodologies are in use within IT.

	Mahmoud Ramin, PhD Senior Research Analyst Info-Tech Research Group
	Sandi Conrad, MBA Advisory Fellow Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• In today’s fast-paced, evolving marketplace, your organization is striving to innovate and deliver value to your customers.
• Technology is critical to delivering that organizational value, yet it is often difficult to keep technology problems from negatively impacting those services.
• Lack of collaboration between IT teams negates incremental improvement efforts, and it seems impossible to move out of firefighting mode.

Common Obstacles

• IT operations should be effectively monitoring service delivery and looking for continuous improvement opportunities, but lack of time and cooperation between groups hinders efforts.
• Failure to connect interdependent systems and processes leads to delays in delivery and a perception that IT is slow to fulfill business needs.
• The communication gap between IT and organizational leaders makes it difficult to articulate the business value of investing in technology and process improvement.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Define a vision and guiding principles to support organizational and operational goals.
• Assess capabilities of each practice within or aligned to IT operations, identifying strengths and areas needing improvement.
• Prioritize improvement efforts that will positively impact operational and organizational goals.
• Build a comprehensive strategy and roadmap to unify operations and service management to support your organization’s objectives.

Info-Tech Insight

Operational effectiveness embedded with forward-thinking service management will enable IT to adapt to the organization’s evolving needs, ensure resiliency, and enable innovation. A holistic approach ensures the focus moves beyond individual practices and balances organizational objectives with service and operational mandates.

Your challenge

IT operations face many challenges that hinder the achievement of organizational goals:

• Technical debt is a big roadblock: Info-Tech’s Future of IT Survey shows that 38% of infrastructure respondents reported that their technical debt increased over the past year, while 25% reported that it stayed about the same (Future of IT Survey, 2024, Infrastructure respondents; n=59).
• Skill gaps are a constraint: An Info-Tech survey shows that 55% of CIOs find that staff sufficiency, skill, and engagement issues are a major pain point. (CIO-CEO Alignment Survey, 2024; n=115.) Another survey by Info-Tech reveals that 60% of respondents plan to deal with the current talent shortage by building internal staff capabilities to reduce the need to hire for specific technical skill sets (Future of IT Survey, 2024; n=494).
• Budgetary Constraints: Economic uncertainty, including rising interest rates, inflation, and tech layoffs, force companies to tighten their budgets and look for alternative ways to make their IT operations efficient. For instance, according to one report, only 40% of CIOs reported increased budget to support their cybersecurity (“State of the CIO,” Foundry, 2024).

Kaseya’s IT Operations 2022 Survey revealed that 10% of respondents stated that their IT budgets had decreased; this ratio increased by 8 percentage points in 2023. (Source: Kaseya, 2023.)

Top challenges reported by Info-Tech members

• Lack of strategic direction: IT operations leadership often struggles to identify and align IT initiatives with business goals. It’s also difficult to connect different frameworks in use within the organization.
• Gap identification challenges: Gap analysis can be time-consuming, requiring extensive assessment, data analysis, and stakeholder engagement.
• Budget restrictions: Most IT improvement initiatives require significant investments, making budget a key concern. IT is often asked to do more with less. IT leaders need to prioritize service and operational improvements that will have the most impact on their goals
• IT-business communication: IT priorities, in the eyes of the business, should be focused on driving direct benefits to enable them to fulfill organizational mandates. However, much of the service and operational work that happens in the background is not perceived as important to those mandates. IT needs to improve its ability to connect the dots to gain funding and resources to show that effective operations can directly impact organizational mandates by ensuring technology is always available.

Info-Tech’s methodology for building a comprehensive IT operations strategy

Insight summary

Drive innovation through operational effectiveness

Operational effectiveness embedded with forward-thinking service management will enable IT to adapt to the organization’s evolving needs, ensuring resiliency and enabling innovation. A holistic approach ensures the focus moves beyond individual practices and takes an integrated approach to balance organizational objectives with service and operational mandates.

Build a collaborative IT strategy

Building an effective IT operations strategy is more than just following a framework for integrating various processes. It is a transformational change in the organization which requires collaboration across teams and commitment throughout the whole organization.

Conduct a self-assessment to define success for your organization

Conduct a self-assessment to understand the unique characteristics and needs of your organization and decide how IT operations processes will involve in organization’s success.

Focus on what matters

You don’t have to mature everything. Understand what’s most crucial for achieving the organization’s strategic objectives. Prioritize according to the impact that each process has on the organization and your capabilities in that area. Then make sure to allocate enough money, time, and talent to the tasks.

Build a balanced IT strategy

IT operations should navigate the balance between the need for innovation, adaptability and risk management. This balance is crucial for developing a robust IT operations strategy that will support the organization’s immediate needs and long-term objectives.

Go beyond single practices

No single practice will dramatically impact the effectiveness of IT’s ability to enable the business. Service management and operations must have an integrated approach to provide value for the organization’s reliance on technology.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Key deliverable:

Service and IT Operations Strategy and Roadmap Template

Document your strategy using this boardroom-ready template.

Service and Operations Strategy Assessment

Use this tool to guide your analysis.

Business-ITOps Alignment Workbook

Define the key focus areas and discover Info-Tech’s resources to guide you through improvements.

Service and Operations Task Planning and Role Assignment Tool

Use this worksheet to prioritize tasks and assign responsibilities.

Blueprint benefits

IT benefits

• Create a clear vision of the value IT provides to the organization.
• Ensure that initiatives within IT operations are aligned with business goals.
• Enable IT to quickly respond to business changes.
• Build a balance between innovation, adaptability, and risk management.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Integrate innovation into IT operations to adopt emerging technologies.

Business benefits

• Enhance business agility by maturing IT operations.
• Improve end-user satisfaction as a result of better service delivery and further alignment of services with customer needs.
• Enhance communication and collaboration between IT and the rest of the organization.
• Better allocation of resources, including staff, time, and budget.
• Identify and streamline IT spending and optimize costs.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Use the following performance indicators throughout this process to track the effectiveness of service management and IT operations.

• Customer satisfaction: Measure the level of satisfaction your end users have with IT, and assess the extent to which your services meet their requirements.
• Innovation index: Analyze the ratio of allocated budget for innovation projects (such as AI and automation) over operational costs. This indicates how much the organization focuses on growth.
• IT spend rate: Compare IT expenditure against allocated budgets to analyze potential cost overruns.
• Risk reduction: Understand the current state of your service management and IT operations to enhance efficiency and reduce risks.
• Service availability: Assess availability of IT services to meet organizational requirements.
• Time to deploy services: Assess how long it takes to deploy new applications to analyze responsiveness to business needs.
• Employee productivity rate: Analyze how IT performance impacts employee productivity to ensure that efficient processes and reduced downtime have a direct impact on business performance.
• Vendor performance score: Measure how vendors perform according to SLAs and service quality, which will help you assess vendor relationships and management.

Case study: Singapore Airlines transformed customer experience through operational excellence

INDUSTRY: Aerospace | SOURCES: Splunk, HBR, Journal of Hospitality & Tourism, Ivey School of Business

Business challenge

Singapore Airlines (SIA) with a reputation for stellar customer service, while maintaining exceptionally low operating costs, found themselves suffering devastating losses after the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions.

Even so, as part of their digital transformation, they looked to improve customer interactions, through any channel (website, mobile applications, self-service kiosks at airports) to make all digital interactions easy and reduce in-person queues in the airports. SIA expanded in-flight digital services for Wi-Fi connectivity, entertainment, and shopping.

They continued to supply services to crew to maintain client personalization, such as knowing customers’ birthdays, favorite wines, and meals. And to make sure the online training, Service Over and Above the Rest (SOAR) program, and the CRM program could be accessible to all crew from anywhere in the world.

Technology was accessed on the ground and in the air, and needed to be consistent, reliable, and always available.

Operational approach

SIA ensures all employees know the organization’s overall operational strategy, which recognizes they’re in a highly competitive industry and they must focus on being efficient, cost-effective and invest smartly, but never at the expense of customer experience.

SIA is a technology leader, personalizing solutions whenever it aligns to their strategy and provides their competitive advantage. Where systems do not contribute to a strategic advantage, they are standardized, and many of the back-office systems are managed by technology partners.

To guarantee availability and stability, SIA purchased technology solutions allowing them to receive alerts, use AI to analyze data for incident and event management, root cause analysis, and predicting failures across disparate systems.

They ensured processes were in place to quickly respond to incidents, maintain systems, proactively monitor health, and automate tasks when appropriate.

Results for IT and the business

The applications teams were able to purchase commercial tools for operations, reducing the need to code operational functions into their applications, freeing time to develop solutions and innovate.

Singapore Airlines was able to continue to operate at a lower cost per available seat kilometer (ASK) than any other airlines while still differentiating themselves through service excellence.

The operations team is able to proactively manage technology, reducing downtime, and enabling scalability and reliability. Time to detect issues has improved by 75%, and they experience 90% fewer backend issues.

Staff and flight crews experience minimal interruptions when assisting customers and can access customer data when and where they need it, reinforcing the brand image.

Customers are able to access self-service for check-in, ordering meals, reserving seats, and more, and their in-flight services run with minimal interruptions.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 6 to 9 calls over the course of 2 to 3 months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Create an Actionable Service and IT Operations Strategy

Phase 1

Assess the Future and Current States

Phase 1 will walk you through the following activities:

• Document vision and mission statements.
• Prioritize organizational objectives.
• Create guiding principles
• Conduct a current-state assessment.

Phase 1 involves the following participants:

• CIO
• Senior IT team

Step 1.1

Define the future state

Activities

• 1.1.1 Construct your vision statement
• 1.1.2 Construct your mission statement
• 1.1.3 Define objectives and key results (OKRs)
• 1.1.4 Elicit guiding principles

Outcomes of this step:

• Vision and mission statements
• Guiding principles
• Prioritized organizational goals

Build compelling vision and mission statements to set the direction of your service management program

While you are articulating the vision and mission, think about the values you want the team to display. Being explicit can be a powerful tool to create alignment.

• A vision statement describes the intended state or outcome of your service management organization, usually expressed in the present tense.
• A mission statement explains how you will accomplish the vision and should focus on the most important or differentiating factors that will take you beyond stating basic service delivery.

“IT is usually brought in to do requirements gathering after the fact, rather than at the point of genesis for business objectives discussions. In such cases, IT is usually seen as a barrier to reaching these objectives. That's why IT is usually brought in late to the game to figure out how to actually deliver the solution for the predefined problem.” (Senior Customer Solutions Architect, Global IT Operations)

Info-Tech Insight

Your vision and mission statements can help to create the culture you want within the team and will clarify the values you want to convey when delivering your services.

Derive the IT vision and mission statements from the business

Begin the process by identifying and locating the business mission and vision statements.

• Corporate websites
• Business strategy documents
• Business executives

The sample one pager in the Service and IT Operations Strategy Template and Roadmap serves as an ideal starting point for presenting your vision and mission statements, goals and guiding principles to executives, articulating the rationale for your improvement strategy.

Ensure the IT statements support the business statements.

Note: Mission statements may remain the same unless the IT department’s mandate is changing.