CHAPTER 3: THE IT PROVIDER’S PERSPECTIVE ON YOUR IT

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Mahatma Ghandi

Service roles can be rather thankless. The provider’s job of satisfying customers by meeting contractual or SLA obligations and providing value for money is not easy, being dependent on infrastructure, vendors, business processes and customer relationships. The service is usually highly visible to customers and their expectations tend to be high. IT services are business-critical, prone to requests for change and improvement, and prone to faults. From the IT provider’s perspective, customers often want more and better, and they can’t tell you precisely what they do want, but they’re pretty quick to say what they don’t want. So IT service provision can be particularly challenging.

The fictitious commentator below represents real opinions that IT provider staff have expressed, either to your author or in his earshot, about third-party organisations that must remain anonymous.

An IT provider comments:

Well, I’ve just about had enough of this client. The users only ever tell us what’s wrong. We’re working our socks off with flaky technology to provide them with actually quite a good service that usually far exceeds their mediocre contract terms. When the occasional problem does arise, we usually close it well within deadline, though we did admittedly have an exceptional outage last November, which took us the wrong side of compliance. We’ve now resolved the underlying problem, so it won’t happen again. The customers are far too quick to tell us what they don’t want, or don’t like, and never very clear on what they do want or need. Half the time when things go wrong it’s their fault anyway.

They expect us to deliver projects on time, yet they can’t agree the spec, their senior managers don’t turn up to meetings, decisions are made without them and then they undo the decisions. It’s so annoying. How can we work like that?

We’re expected to reduce costs from year to year, but quite honestly it’s a pure fluke we’ve been able to do it. Luckily we’ve taken on new customers that we’ve been able to service without raising our headcount. That’s because we managed to iron out a lot of faults, so we didn’t get the increase in support enquiries you might have expected with a bunch of new users, which would have strained our capacity.

Mind you, we do have one or two model clients who make up for the hassle we get with the others.

Wanted: a quiet life?

IT providers generally want:

• customer satisfaction;
• to meet their obligations under their contracts or SLAs;
• to be perceived as offering value for money, which can be a prerequisite for repeat business;
• to deliver projects within budget and to customer satisfaction;
• to be seen as offering a responsive service, with efficient handling of problems;
• to be on top of risks;
• to keep a step ahead by being able to offer more and better, without demanding more payment for it;
• to have an inside track with their customers, so that new business opportunities come their way;
• in all the respects above, to be better than IT providers that are, or could become, competitors.

Paddling below the water line

Those responsible for IT provision will have things to measure and deal with that will contribute to meeting these customer-driven wants. Just like the garage looking after your car, the IT provider needs to look after what’s going on under the bonnet – the provider’s infrastructure and processes.

For example, providers will want to know the following:

• if the IT equipment or software is unreliable, meaning it needs to be replaced or repaired;
• if the users don’t know how to use it, meaning they need to be asked to learn;
• if the IT isn’t secure, meaning it needs to be made secure;
• if the processes for managing the IT configuration don’t keep it under control, meaning they need to be changed so that they do.