Freedom Now - Or how to stifle business innovation via corporate IT

For around fifteen years I worked on the other side of that veil of separation that is known in corporate environments as the IT service desk. On the employee side of the service desk you have the ordinary 'business users'. Here be folk who are simply trying to do their jobs: customer service agents, pricing analysts, underwriters, engineers. Their drivers are the usual human things; to get the job done with the minimum of fuss, achieve business goals in order to help with their career ambitions, or keep their jobs, or to go home with the sense of a job well done.

All of this activity above involves (or at least should involve) contributing to the overall business objectives of profit and growth. The customer service agents do this by helping retain customers and to please them such that they recommend the firm to others, pricing analysts help to keep the organisation focused on selling profitable products, underwriters make risk decisions favourable to the bottom line and engineers build the infrastructure that the company's services run upon.

These various workers use tools to help in their travails, and these are myriad. However in the information age they will largely be IT based. This, then brings us to the other side of the curtain;  that shadowy authoritarian world behind the impenetrable boundary of the IT service desk.

Deep Thought: Existentialism, Lumiere and IT service

Jean-Paul Sartre addressing students at La Sorbonne, May 1968 Claude Dityvon

Today I'll be mainly blogging about philosophy. It’s a viscous subject, especially for those who don’t roll that way naturally, but it’s the method by which we get to the deepest understanding of things and I guess it is for that reason that it will always be there, behind the scenes; at the back of things . Anyway, in this piece I hope to use philosophy to arrive at insights about my work approach Lumiere, and a little bit about work in the IT service industry. We love a bit of diversity here!

It's The People, Stupid

The Cumberland Hotel on Day 1 of #aapcon14 (Peter Johnson)

I should be sleeping. Or at least dozing. I'm on my way back to the post-industrial north having spent two utterly fantastic days at the All About People conference in sunny (and it actually was) Bournemouth.

The Voice of Occupational Serfdom?

Artwork by Ursula Von Rydingsvard. Photographed by Peter Johnson at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2014

I recently attended an event organised for the benefit of those who work within, or who have an interest in the provision of healthcare. I'll say no more about it as I really want to protect the innocent – they seemed like nice people with their collective hearts in exactly place where the specialist, looking at the x-ray would expect to find it.

They were seeking to initiate new conversations about the way in which healthcare services are provided and run, and I, with my book to promote thought that it could be a useful opportunity to generate some interest in Making Light Work.

Tomorrow's People: A Sketch of a Post-Mechanistic IT Service Department

'Blue Sky Thinking'. Edale, Peak District. Peter Johnson, 2013

Regular readers of this blog and my followers on social media will be aware that in recent years I've taken to relentlessly critiquing the thinking which dictates the interactions between corporate IT and workers. It's fast becoming my online raison d’etre. That said, I have always, and will continue to acknowledge that much of what is designed and implemented by IT departments is useful, stable and appreciated by employees.

There is a however, however, and it is that IT is ever-evolving. Those of us who work in this area can never rest content on our laurels, safe in the knowledge that 30 years of the Tayloristic-cybernetic paradigm known as ITSM has delivered everything that our audience wants and could ever desire.

It doesn't.

Yes it's broke. The question is, how do we fix it?

Stones in my Garden. Peter Johnson, 2009

With my advancing years I suspect that I must have arrived at the state of mind often described as ‘grumpy old man’. In addition to regular gripes about the state of the roads and the priorities of the local authority in the city where I live, I've also noticed my becoming a tad dismayed with the never-ending stream of commentary about things that don't work as they should in ITSM and the ways in which we should fix them.

New Wave IT

'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'  Katsushika Hokusai, 1833

It’s 2014, over 30 years since the IBM PC hit the streets. The corporate IT community remains as afraid as ever to move on from the ITSM approach that has been its bedrock in most of that time. In many ways I understand why, but on the other hand such conservatism also bemuses me. To start with the latter; the underlying sector – IT – is one which thrives on change, indeed it refuses to stand still. Even in the midst of great achievement (for example the PC) it was looking beyond to the next thing, that which promised even greater delights (the internet, mobile computing, cloud). It is strange therefore that in corporate IT, we choose to be satisfied with a rather ancient (in IT years) method of facing off to the parent corporation in order to help them leverage these amazing technologies.