Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sorely needed work on IT services, 22 Nov 2007
The ITSM community is a parochial and insular lot. Much of what prior versions of ITIL offered as wisdom were either obvious or as thin as tissue paper. Take the case, for example, of the Amazon reviewer who dismissed Service Strategy based on its abundance of diagrams - while admittedly never having read the book! Arrogance indeed.
This volume is a welcome departure from this impoverished tradition. Whilst the prose is challenging (it appears to strive more for precision than ease) the ideas are noteworthy and current. If Service Strategy is intended to provide a strong strategic foundation to ITIL, then it has succeeded.
The template offered by Service Strategy for companies that want to use ITIL for value is as follows. First, determine the customer's desired outcomes, and pick one or more that enable it to be unique and inimitable. Then, work backwards to develop the internal outcomes that are essential to the delivery of these external outcomes, and aim for efficiency in them. And, finally, use these choices to pick relevant resources and competencies.
Camouflaged in the common-sense--which also links the goal of process reengineering with that of strategy--is a major piece of heresy for those who accept the value-chain as the best analytical tool for understanding the activities of a company and seeking a source of competitive advantage. Its smaller component is the contention that Porter's advocacy of either cost or differentiation--but, usually, not both--as a generic strategy is anachronistic. As industry gurus from Hamel and C.K. Prahalad to Philip Kotler have pointed out, success belongs to those companies that can provide highest value at low costs, without attempting to enter into a trade-off. SS's principle of the value of desired outcomes as the source of advantage dovetails neatly into modern management praxis.
More important, however, is its argument that the value which a company seeks to capture resides not in its internal abilities and processes but in its marketplace, in the customer's perception. Everything else must flow backwards from that. And IT's differentiation is a matter of identifying the outcomes that matter to the customer and making them visible while making those that are irrelevant either invisible or extinct. The proof--and the profits--of the competitiveness pudding is squarely in the eating.
Out the window, accordingly, goes the notion that merely optimizing processes is a source of advantage. Only by leveraging it for a value offering that, crucially, competitors cannot imitate even with other resources will a company extract a competitive advantage. Why should the customer care that its IT uses processes to ensure speedy repair when alternative providers offer services that never break down?
The SS volume should be mandatory study for senior IT leaders. Those seeking the illusion of pragmatism ("12 easy steps to a service strategy") may find themselves treading water but those willing to embark on careful study might find this the most pragmatic ITIL book of all.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Diagram Fever, 22 Nov 2007
As a qualified V2 Service Manager, active in an ITIL V2-compliant major plc, I have been very keen to get my head around V3 and see if there is practical benefit to be gained from this extensive review of a trusy best practice framework.
I'm now looking at the new cycle, and there are some worrying trends. This volume, Service Strategy, is inevitably going to veer towards the theoretical. However, regardless of the written content (which I have not read in detail yet), this volume is immediately dispiriting as it appears to have been written by a pair of consultants on a drug-binge!
I have rarely seen so many meaningless and generally utterly useless charts, schematics and diagrams in one volume. It appears as if the authors are frightened to write more than a handful of paragraphs without drawing a picture to keep us entertained - or confused and in awe of their great learning.
They range from the comically obvious to a level of byzantine complexity that the authors themselves would surely be hard put to explain meaningfully. It would be an interesting exercise to remove some of these small works of art from their context and ask a range of insiders exactly what they are portraying and what they both mean and deliver. I suspect most people would be hard put to explain.
I note one of the lead authors is from Accenture. Hmmmmm ....
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