Why buy a super car for grocery shopping?

Why buy a super car for grocery shopping?

There is an argument to say that owning a super car for doing the grocery shopping might be a great idea, but let’s be honest whether one could economically justify that or not, one would have to admit, that is probably a waste of a really good super car. The car is built for high performance driving on a race track and not for bumbling down to the local supermarket to have bags of groceries loaded in the back (or front).

So why then do so many IT organisations invest heavily in the subscription (or purchase) of their super ITSM tool, only to then use it to track calls and requests to the service desk. In other words some organisations use a feature rich ITSM tool for ticket tracking. This is akin to using a super car just for the grocery shopping. Why would anyone do that?

So many IT leaders fall for the marketing hype and the promised land offered by the charming and talented sales person, only to find that all they really needed was something far less sophisticated that would do the job that is required for now.

Now these talented sales folks will present a very plausible argument to state the longer term journey of any ITSM capability maturity; they will present continual improvement initiatives and the IT buyers and leaders will become enamoured by the vision of the perfect IT Service Management capability. “Sold”, “Thank you for your business”, and there’s another nice commission cheque; great job talented sales person, your quarterly revenue figures are looking good!

Let's be honest, as a CIO investing in a sophisticated ITSM Tool, you must also budget for its continual maintenance and improvement. We don’t mean the support and maintenance that gets incorporated into the subscription, no, we mean the costs to configure the tool to support the ITSM capability maturity that is being committed to.

Oh so you say you’re not committing to continual ITSM capability maturity, so then why are you investing so much in a tool set that assumes you are?

Before, committing that hefty ITSM toolset budget, ask yourself are you committed to a continual improvement journey of ITSM capability maturity? If not, get yourself the equivalent of an ITSM grocery shopping run around, and maybe just forget the super car for now; you might not need it.