The 20 Biggest Failures in IT Service Management (and how to fix them) – Rob Akershoek (EN)

What are the biggest (recurrent) failures in IT management we have seen the last 20 years? And why did our maturity not significantly improve? We seem to fail a lot and not learn ! 

This presentation is about all the things that typically have failed and still continuous to go wrong in IT Service Management. Despite all investments in new practices (e.g. DevOps, SAFe, ITIL 4, Agile development, SRE), new tools (e.g. CICD pipeline, observability, AIOps, modern ITSM systems) and new technologies (cloud, containers, micro-services, …).   

This presentation explores all biggest recurring failures in IT management, and captures the learnings and potential solutions to fix these for once and for all. Really? Yes ! 

These are just some examples of what will be covered: 

• The CMDB is failing : Why is the CMDB never up-to-date?  
• No integrated service catalogue: Why do we still not have a solid catalogue of all our services and applications? Why are we even still debating of what a service actually is (or a product or an application)? 

• Technology debt: Why can’t we keep up with technology life cycle changes resulting in technology debt and risks? 
• Failing monitoring:  We have plenty of monitoring tools, but we still rely on end-users to report issues ! 
• No visibility of work in IT: Now we have agile backlog tools and Kanban boards, but still no visibility of what everyone is doing ! 
• Communication with business: Still no clue what IT is doing for the business and how it adds value.
   
• No cost transparency: Still no insight on cost of an IT service based upon actual consumption?  

• Overload: Everyone is busy and still no time to resolve problems and continuously improve.  
• No traceability of actual value delivery: Why can’t we track actual value delivered by all initiatives, projects and epics? 
• SLA reporting: Why does it still require a lot of effort to reporting upon our SLA performance?  
• Compliancy: Why does it take so much effort to ensure and report compliance?  
• And many more will be covered