Lesson 11: The Four Dimensions: #1 and #2

Let’s review two of the four dimensions of service management.

00:06 – Right. Welcome back.
00:09 – We’re going to talk about the four dimensions of Service Management.
00:14 – We’ve mentioned these before. Organizations and People, Information and Technology, Partners and Suppliers, Value Streams and Processes, and you can see there’s a nice picture that shows they’re separate, but overlapping and interfacing and intermingling.
00:30 – Maybe that doesn’t go with the word dimensions which are discrete measures of things, to place it exactly, but actually the picture is right and maybe, if anything, they could be more overlapping.
00:41 – The important message is that we need to think about all four of them, all of the time.
00:47 – You can’t build one separately and then worry about the next one.
00:50 – You have to think about each aspect at every element of your development, maintenance, management, integration, enabling, obtaining, building, everything.
01:00 – So, no order to those dimensions.
01:03 – So, it’s somewhat unfortunate we’ve given them numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, but live with it, that’s the way the world tends to be. People like to put numbers on …
01:13 – maybe think of them in terms of colors or something without a priority to them.
01:20 – So, let’s look at a couple of those in detail, and we’ll see how we get on about thinking of the rest.
01:27 – First of all, though, Dimension number 1 or this dimension, Organization and People.
01:37 – Really focuses on how an organization is structured.
01:41 – So, we’re going to look at things like roles and responsibilities, formal organizational structure, culture, organizational culture anyway, staffing, competency, systems for communication, systems or authority, all sorts of complicated phrases you could put in there, but it’s really about understanding the people we’ve got.
02:02 – What skills will we need, what skills will we have, how will we structure and organize them?
02:07 – Don’t underestimate the importance of management and organization.
02:12 – So, if I go back to my football analogies again, if a team is losing, the standard technique is not to sack all the players and give the manager some new ones, the technique is to fire the manager. Now, obviously it’s easier to fire one person than 20, but what often happens is that team will now start winning with the same people because the new manager will work those same skills in a different way, will motivate them to work together, will encourage collaboration and cooperation in a different way.
02:46 – Organization and management makes an enormous difference.
02:50 – Of course, we need to worry about the roles and responsibilities and the skills and the competencies, but critically things like communication and systems or authority and whether that group can make decisions or whether everything stops while somebody three levels of management up makes a decision.
03:07 – Those are things to think about every situation.
03:11 – So, People. Talk about that one quickly. It’s crucial, but it’s there all the time.
03:19 – One other thing about people, I will say, is we keep telling people, telling organizations that people matter, that people cause more damage than anything else, and they listen and they agree, and then they’re going to take no notice about it.
03:33 – It seems to be something you need to keep reminding everyone that people matter.
03:38 – So, please, keep reminding yourself, keep reminding other people.
03:42 – Come back and look at the guidance and the blogs and the lessons out there in the world.
03:46 – It’s still important, it was important yesterday, and if you think you’ve solved it today, you’re wrong.
03:53 – You’ll have to solve it again tomorrow because people keep changing.
03:56 – Information and Technology Dimension is a little bit easier, a little bit more intuitive perhaps to IT people.
04:05 – It’s about information and knowledge and it’s about the technology we use to deliver that.
04:12 – So, it includes the information created and managed in the course of service provision and, and the stuff that you’ll bring in and maybe the stuff you’re creating as well, and it also is about the technologies that support and enable a service.
04:30 – So, that will cover things like workflow management, systems, knowledge bases, communications, analytic tools, automated testing, inventory systems and all the rest.
04:40 – Don’t fall into the gap of thinking the only tools and the only technology in the world is computers.
04:49 – Services, systems, value chains, service value systems, and all the rest of it, they will need tech … information technology. People also need chairs to sit on, offices to work in, cars to travel in. There are other technologies; don’t dismiss those either.
05:07 – So, information management, in many places, that’s a primary means we’ve got of delivering service.
05:16 – So, for this component and this dimension, we need to think about what information is going to be managed by the service. What supporting information do we need?
05:28 – What are we going to be delivering? Who are we delivering it to? Where are we getting things from?
05:32 – How do we protect our information and our knowledge? Security issues?
05:37 – Do we need to prove that we’ve got security?
05:40 – So, there’s masses of challenges of information management and the associated security concerns and ethical concerns.
05:50 – Massive focus in this dimension. This is one that’s getting bigger all the time on us.
05:57 – Think about the criteria for your information.
06:01 – Is it available when it needs to be? Is it reliable? Can we trust it?
06:07 – Can we always trust it? Can we sometimes trust it? Are there occasions when we can’t trust it?
06:11 – Again, these issues are dynamic. Solve it once and you probably haven’t solved it forever.
06:18 – You do need to go back and check.
06:21 – Is the information accessible? Can everybody who needs it get to it?
06:26 – Is everybody happy with it in one language? Do we need translations for some of our information?
06:32 – Do we need to worry about people who are visually impaired or hearing impaired or dyslexic?
06:39 – Is that important in our environment? All those things need to be thought about as we go through.
06:44 – What is the accuracy and the timelines? Now, I could talk for hours about the need for accuracy and you don’t want me to do that, but do consider how accurate a thing needs to be and how accurate it is if you’re going to base decisions upon it.
06:59 – If you want, I’ll indulge myself with one small example.
07:03 – Say, for example, you’ve decided that it’s cheaper to buy in a service than to use your staff, who are doing it at the moment.
07:11 – It will cost 1 million Euros at the moment. It would cost 950,000 to buy it in. Guaranteed 50,000 saving.
07:20 – If you actually look at where you’ve got your information from, if the accuracy of your figures, of your in-house figures, is maybe plus or minus 10%, which to be honest, it’s probably not much more than that.
07:31 – Now, you’re saying the cost is between 900,000 and 1.1 million.
07:39 – You could buy it for a million, say.
07:43 – Now, what this means is instead of a guaranteed saving, you’ve got a likelihood of a saving.
07:48 – Accuracy makes a difference to our decisions. Please be aware of it, and make sure information is relevant. Don’t collect data because you can.
07:57 – It’s a terrible temptation in IT to collect data because you can. Collect it because it’s relevant.
08:03 – So, all these factors will affect how we deal with the Information and Technology Dimension.
08:09 – Thinking about it all the time, and remember we’re thinking it in concert with the other ones.
08:15 – We’ve talked about number one, the people factor.
08:18 – I’ve mentioned several issues here in information that are not separable from people factors.
08:24 – Accuracy and how that affects people. Accessibility.
08:29 – Dealing with dyslexic and visually impaired people who need to access our information.
08:34 – That’s information and people factors irrevocably wedded together, and there are many more examples of how all these dimensions fit together, how these two dimensions fit together, and how the next two dimensions will fit together as well.
08:48 – So, please bear this in mind. So, what are we going to look at next?
08:53 – We’re going to look at Dimensions number 3 and 4. No surprises.
08:57 – So, we’ll see you in a moment, talking about those.

Can you explain the two dimensions that were discussed in this lesson to an imaginary audience?

Lesson 11: The Four Dimensions: #1 and #2

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