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Troy DuMoulin, AVP of Product Strategy

Troy DuMoulin is an experienced Executive Consultant with a solid and rich background in business process re-engineering. Troy holds the Management Certificate in ITIL and has extensive experience in leading Service Management programs with a regional and global scope. His main focus at Pink Elephant is to deliver strategic and tactical level consulting services to clients based upon a demonstrated knowledge of organizational transformation issues.

Troy is a frequent speaker at ITSM events and is a contributing Author for the ITIL “Planning to Implement IT Service Management Book.” He also works with ISACA on COBIT v4 development.

 

The Guide

"This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."


Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactic as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper: and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover." ~Douglas Adams

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Service Owner – The Missing ITSM Role

There has been much written about the role of the process owner being a critical success factor for any effort that attempts to manage cross functional processes across a silo based organized. However, processes are not the only things that need to be managed across the deep management chasms that separate our IT domains.

Consider that most IT Services are also agnostic to organization charts and require the same enterprise accountability and oversight. This role has been largely missed in the ITIL literature to date.

The Service Owner is accountable for a specific service (Infrastructure, Application or Professional Service) within an organization regardless of where the technology components or professional capabilities reside. To ensure that a service is managed with a business focus, the definition of a single point of accountability is absolutely essential to provide the level of attention and focus required for its delivery.

Much like a Process Owner the Service Owner is responsible for continuous improvement and the management of change affecting the services under their care. In both cases these horizontal roles are effective or not according to the level of empowerment (true power) given to the lucky person by the executives of the IT organization. The Service Owner is a primary stakeholder in all of the IT processes which enable or support it. For example:

  • Incident Management: Involved in or perhaps chairs the crisis management team for high-priority incidents impacting the service owned.

  • Problem Management: Plays a major role in establishing the root cause and proposed permanent fix for the service being evaluated.

  • Release Management: Is a key stakeholder in determining whether a new release affecting a service in production is ready.

  • Change Management: Participates in Change Advisory Board decisions, approving changes to the services they own.

  • Configuration Management: Ensures that all groups which maintain the data and relationships for the service architecture they are responsible for having done so with the level of integrity required.

  • Service Level Management: Acts as the single point of contact for a specific service, and ensures that the Service Catalog is accurate in relationship to their service.

  • Availability and Capacity: Reviews technical data from a domain perspective to ensure that the needs of the overall service are being met.

  • IT Service Continuity: Understands and is responsible for ensuring that all elements required to restore their service are known and in place in the event of a crisis.

  • IT Financial Management: Assists in defining and tracking the cost models in relationship to how their service is costed and recovered.

Is this role missing in your organization?

Troy’s Thoughts

“If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.” ~Douglas Adams

 

Posted by Troy DuMoulin on 11/21 at 11:11 AM

  1. I still do not see a clear difference in a role between Service Owner and Service Delivery Manager.

    Of course, we do not have any of these roles in our organization yet.

    Without a big shake-up in organizational change in IT, who should be taking these roles. We have application owner and asset owners in place.

    Is Service Delivery Manager more operational oriented and Service Owner should have a strategic view of IT Service?

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  05/03  at  12:05 PM

  2. Hello Chris

    In our book on the service catalog we refer to the Service Delivery Manager as an owner of multiple services of like characteristics. For example: A Service Delivery Manager would be a Sr. Manager who is accountable for a grouping of back office infrastructure services such as File Print, Storage, Hosting, etc..

    So is this view the Service Delivery Manager is a strategic role that owns a portfolio of services and manages them through the entire lifecycle. (Strategy, Design, Transition and Operation, and Continual Improvement)

    However, if the word Manager bothers you for this role call this person what you would like. They key is that there are levels of accountability established for all IT capabilities and resources.

    For example:

    * Service Portfolio: Shared Infrastructure (Owner??)

    * Service Owner: Storage (Owner??)

    * System Owner: S.A.N. (Owner??)

    * Component Owner: Server (Domain Owner??)

    You are right that most organizations have not established ownership past the System Level and this is one of the inherent challenges with adopting a Service Management approach.

    To manage services you need to understand what they are! In my experience less then 20% of IT organization have defined and manage their technology resources in terms of a service.

    Troy

    Posted by Troy DuMoulin  on  05/04  at  10:55 AM

  3. Hi Troy

    I agree that the Service Owner is the missing role in ITSM. I enjoyed reading your thoughts on this role. I am currently working on aligning the role of Busines Delivery Manager (BDM) which I think is more along the lines of a Service Level Manager with the business and also want to introduce the concept of Service Owner. How do you see the role of SLM and SO interacting and the avoidance of duplication of effort. Also where do you see the CSI Owner sitting in the organisation and their relationship to the other roles already mentioned.
    Kind Regards
    Karen

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  05/22  at  12:56 AM

  4. Hello Karen

    The way I look at it the three key roles are.

    Customer: He or she who is paying for the service

    Service Owner: He or she who is accountable for delivering the service consistently in accordance with the business requirements and service design.

    The Client Relationship Manager / Account Manager: He or she which uses the Service Catalog as the basis for developing and documenting agreements with the business unit customer.

    The Service Level Manager in ITIL is a role that monitors and reports on the levels of the IT service being provided. Because this is a role and not a function this may be done by the Service Owner or perhaps there is a full time person which is responsible for the monitoring and reporting aspects of the IT Services.


    The Continual Service Improvement Owner as you put it, can be seen in two ways.

    ITIL v3 refers to a CSI manager as being over all the ITSM processes and is responsible for ensuring the measurement and improvement occurs over time through the use of formal and informal service improvement programs (SIPs).

    However I believe you are referring to a person who sits over multiple service owners and is responsible for the strategic planning and improvement of a collection of like services. This is typically a Sr. IT Manager / Executive and is called by ITIL a Service Manager or in our Service Catalog Book a Service Delivery Manager.

    Troy

    Posted by Troy DuMoulin  on  05/27  at  12:16 AM

  5. Hi Troy,

    I am in the process of developing a service catalogue in my company and am finding your book invaluable. However, I am finding the concept of a Service Owner difficult to define. The people I am working with want to define the CIO as the service owner, since they argue he/she is ultimately responsible for the delivery of the IT services. But this is not my perception of what a Service Owner is. Do you have any suggestions for defining and making individuals accountable for a Service?

    Lee

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/25  at  01:26 PM

  6. Hello Lee

    As you can see from the comment that Chris left IT People have a real challenge with the concept of anything outside of a Technology Domain. Anything higher than that on the IT accountability level they typically want to assign to the CXX something.

    However I think you would agree that this is not practical when it comes to individual services and their underlying systems. Someone, somewhere has to be accountable for a specific IT service that has time enough in their busy lives to actually plan, and manage the service as a consumable service.

    I have actually written a paper that is appearing in an upcoming book on the subject of Service Organization Design that I believe you will find useful.

    The Service Organization Part 4

    http://blogs.pinkelephant.com/index.php?/troy/comments/the_service_organization_part_4/

    Check out this blog post for the link to that paper.

    Best Regards

    Troy

    Posted by Troy DuMoulin  on  09/25  at  03:47 PM

  7. Hello,

    What are the specific differences between process owner and service owners in terms of their specific responsibilities?

    Regards,
    Anantha

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  06/09  at  10:11 PM

  8. Hello Anantha

    Please follow the link in the comment above to article “The Service Organization Part 4” You will find a link to a whitepaper I wrote on this topic which covers both roles.

    Best Regards

    Troy

    Posted by Troy DuMoulin  on  06/10  at  04:39 PM
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