'Tunnel Vision' or 'ITSM and the Passage of Time'

My career has taken many twists and turns over the years. However, in my work, technology has always been a constant. From analogue to digital electronics; assembly code through ansi C to visual languages; and desktop support into line management and ITSM. I've recently popped out of my umpteenth chrysalis and find myself fluttering my wings in the pretty garden of data and predictive analytics. ITIL seems like a distant dream (or is that nightmare?).

A Heresy: Social Media Ain't Perfect

File this one under heresy. Burning at the stake is thankfully consigned to history, but "flaming" is not. The responses to this may therefore be quite interesting. Also this is not actually related to the psychology of IT service management, but rather to the psychology of social media use. It's a departure, I know, but hopefully an entertaining and thought provoking one...

The process of changing one's perceptions can begin in the most inauspicious of moments. I've already alluded to this in previous blog entries by way of the manner in which my older views towards radical feminism and operatic music were changed during chance encounters.

I had another such damoclean conversion recently. At the time I thought very little of the sentence that prompted the change; I considered it another fashionable utterance designed to make an impression. The time and place was the Sheffield DocFest early in 2011 and the catalyst was a talk given by the filmmaker Adam Curtis (All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace). What he said was this: "Twitter is a self-aggrandising, smug pressure group, that's all it is". I enjoyed the quote and watched it reverberate around the blogosphere for a couple of days.

Climate Change

I'm heading down to the Languedoc in southwest France later today. I planned this trip some time ago and the idea is to enjoy the cultural and culinary delights of the region and to write a lot (not blogs, I'm working on a book). In addition, I was also looking forward to having a real summer and topping up those vitamin D levels. The last time I visited that region (in 2007), the temperature was regularly in the mid-thirties, and even in the dead of the night it was very hot. I've been keeping a close eye on the weather in recent weeks, and those who watch Le Tour de France will have also noticed that there has been a lot of rain in southern France this year. The Languedoc, a normally sun-pounded setting, is a little less so this year, leading folk to talk about climate change.

#ClimateNotCulture

I thought I'd take some time out from some rather serious and quite involved writing that I'm doing to exorcise (exercise?) a minor obsession of mine.

Organisational culture seems to be a buzzword in ITSM circles at the moment, and for good reason. I think its becoming clear to most that the laudable aims of our discipline cannot be achieved without paying attention to the people who work within the sector. Good old homo sapiens, were not like microprocessors; we don't execute a JP NZ 4000H command if certain conditions are met or not met. So the question appears to be, how do we align the mindset of those working in the ITSM enterprise with its stated goals.

The answer to most is simple. Get the culture right.

Out of contract

It's been an intense year of analysing ITSM data for a large fast-growing enterprise, but the contract is over, the Fairday Research Ltd coffers are suitably replenished and I'm back to exploring people and organisational issues within the ITSM field. In fact, during the course of this contract I sketched the outline of an idea which I look forward to sharing with readers here. It draws upon the previous foci of this blog (culture, motivation, autonomy etc.), but also introduces some new theoretical ideas into the mix. The work pressures during the contract were such that I had a very limited amount of time in which to develop the concept so I have much research and fleshing out to do. As of today (Tuesday) I'm still in post-contract chill mode, but from Thursday I'll be surrounding myself with books and journals in Sheffield University's Western Bank Library (pictured), where hopefully I'll begin tying all the threads together.

As for the contract, it had its pros and cons, much like every other ITSM assignment I've ever taken on, with the additional stress of a 250 mile round-trip commute! There were extremely demanding directors on both the business and the IT sides of the fence. So demanding were they in fact (for statistics, analyses, reports, new initiatives, new processes) that it seemed to me that the organisation had evolved a structure geared in large part to meet those demands rather than using the considerable abilities of the workers to create increased value (via efficiencies, automation etc) and deliver great service. Such an approach is predicated on the idea that the ten people at the top are better placed to innovate than the 500 specialists 'below' them. Such organisational toxicity ultimately helps no one; neither the customers nor the staff, nor ironically the top brass themselves. What CIOs want isn't always what they need...

One for the Work Psychs.... Opportunities in Disguise.

As a member of the British Psychological Society, a copy of The Psychologist lands on my doormat every month. My current IT service management (ITSM) assignment contains little in the way the of formal work psychology (although informally I draw on much of the knowledge regularly), so the publication is a welcome method of staying connected to the last research findings and trends. A recent issue contained a debate about the future of occupational psychology, and while there were many interesting views expressed, Professor Rob Briner's honest and critical appraisal of the discipline chimed with me the most. He argued that practice can be compromised through too close an association with those who pay (the management), and that the practice of work psychology is often indistinct from the work of management consultants, despite being supposedly grounded in scientific method. In reality, he suggested that work psychology has only really made a lasting impact in the area of psychometric assessment.

The Psychology of Service Data...

For the next six months or so there will be a reduction in my activity in the blogosphere as I'm diving deep into the world of service management data for a large international organisation. Of course ITSM data, service improvement and organisational factors all should exist cheek by jowl in the the IT service space.

Data gives you the understanding (or knowledge and "wisdom" as ITIL would have it) of your situation, and if staff are any good with regression lines and multivariate modelling you may even be able to predict likely future outcomes. Thankfully I spent a few years getting to know Excel in some considerable depth and I'm also pretty handy with the Microsoft SQL Server suite (the recent Integration, Reporting and Analysis Services packages are excellent). I'm also adept with the reporting application that is used with many service management packages such as Remedy - Business Objects.