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Malpractice
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02.07.07
2
Faces Of Demand Management
 By
Charles Betz
As I continue my journey through the terminology difficulties of modern IT management,
one issue that keeps coming up (as recently as this week's IQPC
IT Governance conference, where I spoke) is the question:
What is Demand Management?
There are actually TWO quite different interpretations:
- Demand for new IT services
- Demand upon existing IT services for (typically) increased transactional
or storage capacity.
Consider this
illustration, using my IT
value chain:
So, where is this non-ITIL definition coming from, you ask? Why bother with it?
I know it best from seeing a large outsourcer implement Mercury IT Governance
(formerly Kintana, and now Mercury
Project and Portfolio Management Center) at a former employer. If you are
going to start extracting cash from an outsourcing engagement, one of the most
critical things is distinguishing "base" from "incremental" expenditure, and the
outsourcing team this firm brought in considered that to be demand management.
They had clearly developed a whole set of practices and philosophies around it;
it was not a casual usage of the term.
Increased demand for capacity increases existing services (the ITIL interpretation)
was considered base and was of less interest to them; I think supporting that
was baked into the contract and was not a margin opportunity.
I attended an excellent workshop put on by the folks from Swingtide
and they also used demand management in this sense. (Topnotch IT finance folks
if you are trying to figure out how to do IT chargeback based on activity based
costing... but that's another post.)
ITIL consider this flavor of Demand Management flavor to be Change Management;
readers of this weblog will know that I
don't care for that definition. We have too many overloaded terms in enterprise
IT and I think that disambiguating Change Management is preferable, especially
since the project portfolio management vendors are calling it Demand Management.
Let's keep Change Management in the data center where it belongs. Or qualify it,
e.g. "Organizational Change Management" or "Human Change Management."
About
the Author:
Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service
Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the
forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning,
and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier,
2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com
weblog.
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