Are you Holistic?

One of the most popular terms that has emerged from the ITIL community is "holistic." Wikipedia says it is derived from the Greek word meaning "all," "entire," and "total." It's a term consultants like to throw around a lot. But let's face it, how many consultants actually believe it? Or the converse, how many companies listen to those consultants who do recommend a holistic, strategic, and program approach to IT Service Management? Consultants tend to live from gig to gig and rarely are they positioning themselves to provide holistic guidance for an ITSM implementation. Even more rarely, despite the barrage of holistic and enterprise-wide strategic planning pleas in the trade press, few companies look beyond the immediate process design project.

One might ask if one of the reasons for the initial slow adoption rates of ITIL in the United States is because of a short-term, project-by-project view of ITIL. Would the success rates be higher if the process projects were evaluated from a holistic, program perspective? Could we better quantify our success if the metrics used to evaluate our efforts were linked to the strategic goals of the organization? Would we better engage our IT folks if they understood how sitting through hours and hours of process design workshops actually supported how they, as IT people, add value to the organization as a whole?