By Dick Stark

We are currently working with a RightStar customer to help re-engineer their FootPrints system to make it better. And last Wednesday, I interviewed a Remedy consultant working at a government account.. When I asked about their ITSM implementation, she responded that there was room for improvement. The culprit in both cases? Poor user adoption.

To understand better how RightStar can make a difference in this regard, I reviewed a webinar, “Overcoming the challenges of ITSM Adoption,” hosted by George Spalding, Executive VP Pink Elephant, and Anthony Orr, former BMC Director, Office of the CTO. Interestingly, they began with a poll question: Why are organizations challenged with ITSM adoption? The results:

• Partners        2%
• Products       5%
• Processes      28%
• People          66%

This is an astounding statistic and reminiscent of the quote form Management guru Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Yet, RightStar spends 95% of its implementation consulting time on products and processes, and very little time on people. What gives?

To fix user adoption, it is essential to understand what motivates people. According to George Spalding, people do what is necessary to get positive feedback and bonuses. People are natrually resistant to change and tend to move in the direction of “safety.” In other words, there is an intersection between the needs of people and the organization. That is the “safety point,” when people won’t take on the risk of new ITSM processess or systems. It is the old adage, “no one ever got fired for selecting IBM,” or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Of course, most ITSM systems and processess are broken and it is up to us to fix things. ITIL, by itself is not the answer, and a toolset such as Remedyforce is not necessaily the answer either. Recently a cutomer moved from SDE to Remedyforce. Shortly after implementing Remedyforce, we received an email saying, “we tried Remedyforce and don’t like it. What else you got?” Fortunately, we had FootPrints to offer….

How does RightStar overcome these challenges? Here are several suggestions:

• First, we are not wrench turners, we are consultants. When the customer says, “This is stupid,” it is up to us to respond, “Trust me, this will be better in the end.”
• Go for quick wins. Don’t try to implement all ITIL 26 processess at once. Look for one or two processess and put all effort there.
• Education and simulation training. Since the biggest challenge is the people, why not focus on training. The Apollo 13 simulation exercise is an excellent way to kick-off any project as it help people change the way they looked at ITSM. Who thought ITIL could be fun?
• Measurement and validation. Work on improvements in reporting, or for those more serious, look at ITSM benchmarking from MetricNet.