Anonymizing Data to Use for Organization Learning

Data on IT Processes

Planning a change to an IT process depends on the type of business goal you want to achieve. Do you want to improve user satisfaction by preventing outages, reducing the impact of service outages or analyzing what the impact of various activities are on your IT services? Gathering the data on your current IT service performance will present information on possible options for implementing improvement actions.

Business Goals and IT Processes

Linking a business goal and an IT process can be simplest when identifying a pain point for users of an IT service. Document the current pain points by talking to users or members of the IT team, and then prioritize which ones are most important to your organization. Even when there are constraints on the time and resources that an organization has, it is worth listing up user pains because it is the first step to identifying areas for improvement.

Improving & Updating IT Processes

In any organization, there are pools of knowledge and skills that are being shared and updated constantly between members. Documenting processes for the organization, and identifying out of date documentation helps to strengthen the process of sharing information and improving processes based on feedback and changes in technology. One key indicator of the need for this, in addition to feedback from members, is the existence of hacks and workarounds for processes that are not fit for purpose or not applicable to the use cases for members of the IT team.

Example of IT Incident Report

For documenting IT incidents, most organizations use a ticketing system to process open IT incidents that are generated either automatically or from a call or email. If the impact of the incident is severe enough, an RFO or Reason for Outage, might be created by a vendor to share with users and the IT team. When an incident is serious enough that management and users want to know more details and what preventive actions can be done to avoid this reoccurring in the future, an incident report can be created to capture the details and share with internal and external stakeholders.

Adapting the format and content of an IT Incident Report to reflect updates over time, and feedback from users makes it a more valuable document for the reader and clearly shows how a conclusion was reached on root cause and next steps.

Making a Plan

Create a plan for determining what are the current areas for improvement in IT processes and how they match with business drivers. Using a list to document the areas is a way to view the scope of issues, even if not all are addressed or aligned directly with your organization’s business. By listing as many as possible, as one outcome of a group meeting or workshop, members might be able to propose ideas for actions that improve current processes and remove the pain.