play it again, sim
June 2007
One company that specializes in training simulations says the approach brings ITSM concepts to life for a larger number of individuals in the IT organization.
What's the application developer's role in helping an organization implement an IT service management discipline such as ITIL, or an IT governance initiative? Such an individual doesn't have a specific part to play in the institution and instantiation of the best management or governance practice, but perhaps that person's job function should be viewed in the bigger picture context of where they fit in the organization's overall lifecycle and value chain.
With the increased emphasis on business-technology alignment in ITIL V3, for example, some vendors are saying that more companies need to expand exposure to the discipline beyond the individual evangelists and subject matter experts who will go through the ITIL Foundations course to gain certification.
"ITIL V2 was focused on IT operations, though it alluded to communicating with other parts of the organization and alignment. But it didn't give you prescriptive guidance on how to do that," says Mark Ross Sutherland, CEO of G2G3, a consulting and communications company that provides gaming simulations to help companies achieve business-IT alignment. "With the lifecycle approach [of V3] that reflects the real-world enterprise IT environment, it's very important to come at this in a holistic way."
Whether it's ITIL, other ITSM frameworks, SOA or other practices, these days the name of the game is bringing services to market more quickly, and becoming more competitive, says Sutherland, and to do that an organization needs all the players on the team ready to play in the most effective way.
Understanding the ecosystem
Application developers, for instance, can't afford to be out of the office for days to sit for traditional ITIL ITSM instruction - nor are they likely to come away from the experience with much, if any, understanding on how their work ultimately impacts colleagues in operations engaged in service management initiatives.
"It won't bring to life the importance of what they do and where they need to consider their impact in the lifecycle," and on the company's performance, says Sutherland. "This is an ecosystem now and people need to understand what part they play."
In so doing, Sutherland envisions benefits including projects delivering on their goals - which today doesn't happen in about 80% of the cases - and a better understanding of the role they play in driving the business forward.
Traditional learning tools have their place, he says, but for a wide swath of users simulations make the dynamics real in a way that helps break down the barriers that typically separate IT silos.
"Simulations are a great way to immerse people in a way that they remember what they're learning," he says, typically in just a day or a half-day's time. It's an approach that has worked well for the military since forever, says Sutherland.
"Many of us [in the company] are from a military background and we couldn't understand that organizations rarely simulate and train their people and staff that way," he says. "In the military we are constantly simulating, because you can't go to war every day"
But when you do, you've really got to be able to put the principles you've learned into practice. Games work because they're fun, and people remember the experience, he says.
"And if they think back for second, they'll remember that in the game we had chaos, we understood how to prioritize, we put in incident management, then a service catalog, then change management, and had to have process in place to do that," he says. "One hundred slides in a Powerpoint deck discussing the value of incident management is not going to give you a real, tangible reference point to that."
Organizations may get to the goal of providing more employees with an end-to-end understanding of the lifecycle for delivering quality of service using other educational approaches, Sutherland acknowledges. No surprise that G2G3 has a bias toward it own approach, he says, but the important part is that companies take some approach to "doing the cultural work to get into [employees'] hearts and minds, break down the silo mentality that exists in the entire IT environment, to deliver value in projects and services."
The company launched its ITIL V3 simulation just a few weeks ago, and Sutherland says it's getting a lot of interest. Because it doesn't have to go into the minutiae of ITIL as do traditional courseware vendors, and instead takes the 5,000-foot view, G2G3 was able to pull the simulation together based on information that's been coming out about V3 since last November. "People haven't absorbed the library of books yet," says Sutherland. "They understand it may be a good thing, but they really don't understand it. This is a risk-free way to find out without having to commit everyone and everything."
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