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This article follows on from part one of our blog series, "Everything Looks Green From Where You Are Standing"
Running services proactively asks more of an organisation than buying the right tools. Five obstacles stand in the way, and most of them are organisational rather than technical. Underneath them sits the harder problem of how you fund the change before the value is visible, and there is a practical, data-led way to answer it.
Keyvan: So if the case is that obvious, why does almost nobody actually do it?
We were in a café in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the large square in the historic legal heart of London where barristers cross between their chambers and the courts. Mak and I had spent the morning at the museum on the north side of it, and we had come out with a question we could not put down. It was the one I had just asked him. Running your services proactively, catching trouble while it is still forming and dealing with it before a customer feels it, makes failures both rarer and shorter. Those are the two numbers a board lives by. The case for it can be made in a sentence. . And almost nobody does it properly. They buy the tools, they stand up the dashboards, and they go on finding out about their problems at the same moment their customers do.
Mak: People assume it is a tooling problem, so they buy another tool, and nothing moves. The tools matter. Most organisations are running modern, fast-changing services on tooling built for a slower world, and that gap is real. But a tool on its own has never fixed this. The hardest parts live in how the organisation is put together, and ultimately in how it decides what to spend its money on. There are five obstacles I see almost everywhere. And then there is a sixth thing that matters more than any of them, which is what you actually do about the five.
Keyvan: Start with the five.
Mak: The first one sounds too simple to be true. Most organisations have never agreed what the service is. Take the claims journey we were discussing for the insurer. Ask the infrastructure team and they describe servers. Ask the network team and they describe links. Ask the application team and they name their part. Every one of them owns a piece. Not one of them owns the claim. So when you ask to see the health of the claims service, nobody can show you, because the service as a single thing does not exist anywhere except in the mind of the customer trying to use it.
Keyvan: But surely everyone knows the claim matters most. It is the thing the business runs on.
Mak: Everyone knows it matters. Nobody is accountable for it end to end. Those are different things. Seeing a service whole, which is the whole of what we talked about this morning, depends on someone having first decided that the service is a thing worth seeing whole. Most places have never drawn that line. They have a hundred components, each with an owner, and the journey the customer actually takes falls down the gaps between them.
The rain had been threatening all through lunch, and now it arrived properly, the kind that empties a square in under a minute. Through the window the plane trees went grey and the gravel paths turned to rivers. The door opened on a gust of it, and Ray came in backwards, fighting an umbrella that had given up entirely, shook it out over the mat, and dropped into the chair across from us with the rain still running off his coat.
Ray: You are talking about data. I could tell from outside.
Keyvan: We had not got to data yet.
Ray: You were one sentence away. You cannot see a service whole if you cannot see the parts of it, and most organisations cannot see the parts. That is the second one, and it is mine, so let me have it.
Ray had flown the same kind of distance Mak had, and he carries the data side of this work with great care and a long memory. He ordered tea by pointing at ours and held his cold hands around the pot before he had even taken his coat off.
Ray: Here is what you find when you actually look. A company will be running ten thousand things and have decent telemetry on two thousand of them. The other eight thousand are dark, or watched by something nobody has touched in years. So the intelligence we were all so impressed by this morning is sitting on top of a picture with most of the lights off. It is only ever as good as what it can see, and what it can see is usually a fraction of the truth.
Keyvan: And the fraction it can see, presumably that part is at least clean.
Ray: You would hope. It rarely is. The same company will have three systems that each believe they hold the master list of what exists, and all three disagree. One says the service runs on forty components, another says thirty, a third has fifteen the other two have never heard of. So before you run anything proactively, you have a long, unglamorous job of working out what you actually have and what depends on what. It is the least exciting work in the field, and it decides whether everything else stands up. I have written the longer version of this down, because it deserves more than a paragraph over a pot of tea.
Ray is right that it never gets the attention it deserves, and the link to what he wrote is at the foot of this piece.
Keyvan: All right. No agreed service, and we cannot see the parts of it. What is the third?
Mak: The organisation is built to chase a green dashboard, not health. Think about how a team is measured. They are measured on their own box being up. Their server, their link, their application. So everyone optimises for their own piece showing green, and they can all be green at the very moment the customer cannot file a claim. Nobody is measured on the health of the journey, so nobody is rewarded for it, and what gets measured is what gets attention.
Keyvan: That is uncomfortable, because that is a management choice, not a technology one.
Mak: Most of them are, and that is oddly good news. A management choice can be remade. You are not stuck with it the way you are stuck with physics. You can have flawless tooling and still fail, because the way you have organised and measured your people quietly works against the thing you say you want. The good news is that the same levers that built it can rebuild it.
Keyvan: Number four?
Mak: Change and operations live in separate kingdoms. This is the one that costs the most, because most failures are caused by us, by something we changed. So the biggest lever on how often things break is the quality of the change going in. In most organisations the people who make changes and the people who run the service do speak, but on different clocks and in different languages. Change runs on its own cadence, through its own committee. Operations finds out what changed when something falls over. The connection that would do the most good, feeding what operations can see straight back into how change is decided, is the one nobody has built.
Keyvan: So the lever exists and nobody is pulling it?
Ray: The lever exists, and the two hands that would pull it have been put in different buildings.
Mak: And when you connect them it compounds. Operations sees what each change did within hours. The bad ones get caught earlier. The ones that keep causing the same trouble get fixed at the root. Change gets better because operations can see, and operations gets quieter because change is better. They were always the same problem. The organisation chart pulled them apart.
Keyvan: And the fifth? You said five.
Mak: The fifth is the hardest, because it is human and no tool on earth touches it. Prevention goes unrewarded. Think about who gets praised in your organisation. It is the person who was up all night saving the system, the hero of the outage. We give them the story and the recognition and the quiet promotion. Now think about the person who, a week earlier, spotted the thing that was drifting and quietly dealt with it, so the night never came. Nobody thanks them. There is nothing to point at. No outage, no war room, no rescue. You cannot celebrate a problem that never happened, so the people who prevent problems work in the dark.
Keyvan: And so you teach your best people to wait for the fire.
Mak: You teach the whole organisation to prize the rescue over the quiet fix. Until you change what you reward, the other four keep coming back, because the people doing the right thing get none of the credit for it.
The rain had not let up. If anything it had settled in, that steady grey weight a London spring does so well, and the square outside had given itself over to it entirely. We were not going anywhere for a while, which suited the conversation.
Keyvan: Let me say them back. One, there is no agreed service to see. Two, you cannot see the parts of it. Three, you are organised to chase a green dashboard instead of health. Four, change and operations are kept apart. Five, prevention goes unrewarded because no one can see the problem that never happened. And underneath all five is the same failure we kept circling this morning. An organisation that cannot say, at any moment, whether its service is available, whether it is performing, and whether it is doing the job it exists to do. Those three questions are the whole of health, and every one of the five is a reason a business cannot answer them. Five problems. And every one of them costs real money and real effort to put right. Which is exactly where I get stuck, Mak, because I have sat in the rooms where that money gets decided.
Keyvan: Picture how it looks from the top. The tech is old. The service is stuck. Little has improved in years. So when someone asks what return we are getting from all of it, the honest answer is, not much. And if there is no return, there is no case to invest. With no investment, nothing improves, so next year the answer is still, not much. The worse the thing is, the harder it becomes to find the money to make it better. The state of the thing argues against fixing the thing.
Mak: That is the real reason all five survive. Everyone in the building can see them. Nobody can get them funded, because the brokenness hides the very value that would justify the spend. That is the sixth thing, and it matters more than the other five put together. Not what the obstacles are. How you ever get moving in spite of them.
Keyvan: So how does anyone break out of a cycle like that?
Mak: Small, and led by data. There is a name for the way we do it, Value Adoption Services, though the name matters less than the shape. It is a structured way of tying service improvement to the things the business already cares about, so you are never improving for its own sake. You start by letting the data show you where you actually are, where the friction is, where maturity is lowest and the return comes quickest. You pick the nearest worthwhile win, map it to an outcome the board recognises, and build a small case around it. You ask for a modest amount of money. You make the change. And then you do the part almost everyone forgets, which is to measure what it returned, in the numbers the business already tracks, and to benchmark it so the progress is visible. That is the engine. Find where you stand, prove the next step, and let the proof pay for the one after.
Keyvan: And I have watched that engine pay for itself. I sat in the rooms where the money gets decided for a very large US insurer we did this with. We took six months of their own service data, ran a short pilot to prove the cases were real, and built every number on deliberately conservative assumptions, half the value we thought was there, a fraction of what full implementation would reach. Even on that footing the single biggest line was root cause analysis. They were running around forty- four thousand incidents a year, and the time their people spent diagnosing what had actually gone wrong was worth over a million dollars a year on its own. The whole case came to roughly three million a year. You do not argue with a number like that. You take it back to the board and you show them what you did, what it returned, and what the same approach does across everything else if you keep going.
Keyvan: And now the next round of money follows the evidence.
Mak: It follows the evidence, because you are showing them more of something that already worked. The cycle that was running against you starts running for you. Value funds the next change, the next change makes more value, and that funds the one after. And it builds its own roadmap as it goes, because every measured win shows you where the next one is. By the time you have done three or four, you are not guessing. You have a data-led roadmap and a track record, and the funding tends to follow both.
Keyvan: This is the part I think most people get wrong. Everyone recites people, process, and technology as though naming the three parts explains the problem. It does not. The question it never answers is where the value comes from to fix any of them. You make the value first, in something small enough to fund and real enough to measure, and you let that value buy the next step. Do it a few times and you have turned the whole thing around.
Ray: And now you see why I go on about the data. It is the obstacle and it is the way out. The same honest picture that was missing at the start is the thing that finds you the quick wins and proves what they returned. You cannot do any of this on a hunch.
Keyvan: It starts with an honest baseline, then. You cannot find the low-hanging fruit if you do not know where you are standing.
Mak: It always starts there. Know where you are, find the nearest win, prove it, and use the proof to earn the next one. That is the whole method. Everything else is patience.
Ray: And it gets harder the larger you are, which is worth saying plainly. More components, more owners, more committees sitting between the person who can see the problem and the person who can fund the fix. In a small company someone simply decides. In a large one, the distance between seeing and deciding is where everything stalls. So the larger you are, the more you need the small, proven steps, because the leap of faith the board will never take is exactly the thing scale makes you ask for.
Mak finished the pot. The rain showed no sign of stopping, so we ordered another, and talked about other things, and let the square wash itself clean outside the window.
Everything we had been turning over at that table, an agreed service with a real owner, an honest shared picture of what you have, measuring health rather than each silo’s own colour, joining up the functions the organisation chart keeps apart, and funding it all by proving value in small steps, applies just as much to HR, to finance, to procurement, to every part of a business that serves the people inside it. Run it for one IT service and you have proactive operations. Run it across the whole enterprise and you have something larger, which is where this series goes next.
In the next blog, Ashley and I take this same discipline and widen it to the whole organisation, into enterprise service management and global business services, where the question is no longer how well IT runs its services, but how well the entire business runs the services it provides to itself.
Same house. Different room.
Keyvan Shirnia is Chief Revenue Officer at Fusion GBS.
Makrant Rajput is a Senior Technical Manager at Fusion GBS, based in Indore, where he heads the Digital Service Operations portfolio.
Ray Del Pino is a Solution Portfolio Manager and Advisory Solution Consultant at Fusion GBS, based in Ottawa. His piece on knowing what you actually have, the data foundation this depends on, can be found here.
This blog is part of The Six Critical Capabilities series. To find out where your service management foundations actually stand, the Fusion GBS scorecard gives you a benchmarked baseline in five working days. Details can be found be here.