How is IT doing, and how could it do better?

Can you say (after all of the hard work and late nights) that you have made measurable progress on improving service delivery quality, or is it a struggle to even define what that means?

Having perspective on this question is critical to setting and achieving goals that can be demonstrated to the business, and one way to achieve this perspective and its benefits is establishing a Service Management Office (SMO).

A SMO is a small group of employees within the IT department of have responsibility for:

• Measuring process maturity and quality of outcomes;
• Defining the service catalog;
• Formalizing the evaluation and introduction of new services;
• Identifying and proposing opportunities of improvement.

The direct analogy is of course a Project Management Office (PMO) which performs similar functions for projects.

The Impact

Over the past 2-3 years, my company (Long View) has created a SMO that manages our entire services portfolio. The SMO has led progress in maturing many process areas like change management, the service catalog, and knowledge management. We’ve improved our customer experience metrics for service desk, lowered the cost and frequency of outages and incidents, and most importantly improved customer experience.