VeriSM? What's that?
Many of us in IT will have dealt with some kind of Service Management framework in our careers. While they can be effective in dealing with some issues that arise, specifically within IT pipelines, it’s often difficult to integrate the principles and methodology within other departments. According to recent surveys, including that of 3800 industry professionals conducted by EXIN, a majority of organisations struggle to manage their IT and Business services in a cohesive manner. The EXIN survey reported that only 20% of respondents felt their existing service management tools were effective in managing multi-source suppliers. Many organisations are already using multiple service management frameworks throughout their business units.
While lots of businesses are using multiple frameworks, demonstrating the benefit of cherry-picking the best elements for an individual function, there has been little to formalise their integration over a whole organisation. VeriSM was developed to solve this and allow different business units to operate in a more holistic manner in line with their needs. VeriSM is an acronym, which stands for Value-driven Evolving Responsive Integrated Service Management and refers to the school of thought of the same name, Verism, meaning a creative preference for truth and realism over the dramatic and fantastical.
Most importantly, VeriSM doesn’t serve as a full replacement to current service management models, rather as an augmentation to currently existing methodology and frameworks. Individual departments retain autonomy and the ability to utilise the most effective model for them. VeriSM provides a wider set of guiding principles and policy arrangements on how to best approach the use of technology and resource management informed by customer and market feedback.
To get down to the fundamentals, the core of the VeriSM model revolves around the management mesh. Driven by effective management and governance, each department of a given organisation has its own set of service management principles to serve towards the overall strategic goals of the business. The principles serve to inform decisions made on most subjects including financing, risk management, resource utilisation, emergent technologies, and wider business decisions. VeriSM works by allowing autonomy and flexibility internally within separate business units, while ensuring the overall structure is all dancing to the same beat.
The main strategy of any organisation should be to meet customer expectations via four important factors, available resources, environment, emerging technologies and management practices. Each strand of the mesh mentioned previously represents a management component that can be utilised to meet a changing requirement at any given moment. By identifying current and desired states, the gaps are filled by following the necessary management practices until resolution. The systematic method of implementing the process follows four steps, Define, Produce, Provide and Respond.
By providing an overarching structure for individual departments to follow, companies utilising VeriSM can effectively respond to both rising customer expectations and the emergence of new technologies, both of which require a great deal of periodic reorientation. Allowing business units to retain a significant amount of individual autonomy under this process also means departments can still fully utilise the advantages provided by previously implemented service management frameworks.
Service Management has an inclination towards becoming ambiguous and overly complex, VeriSM serves to bring the entire process back into focus on a company wide scale. It might just be the tool you need to bring all the strategies and processes your business employs under one unified banner, united by customer and value driven principles.
If you want to find out more about VeriSM, or get some info on the courses we offer here at Cyclopz, visit our VeriSM course page.