Continual Improvement > Status Quo Patrick Clements

One of the great things about being in technology and especially catering to service management and customer support is the desire for continual improvement.  It is a part of our company’s DNA to always be looking for the next best feature for our solutions and figure out how we can improve what we are providing to our customers.  One of the main things we look to reference is the ITIL framework in handling continual improvement as well as constantly talk to our customers.  Improvements must focus on increasing efficiency as well as maximizing effectiveness and optimizing costs of services.  Thanks to an article, How to Conduct an ITSM Process Assessment, provided to us by Matthew Frederickson of Council Rock School District it helps define the beginning phase how to conduct an assessment for gathering data for continual improvement. 

The goal of an assessment is to effectively collect the data, analyze this data, and turn it into some useable sense of judgment.  The Pink Elephant team break information into 4 parts:

• Data – a set of discrete facts about events
• Information – comes from providing context to data (who, what, when, where?)
• Knowledge – composed of the tacit experiences, ideas, insights, values and
judgments of individuals, used to facilitate decision making (how?)
• Wisdom – the application and contextual awareness to provide a strong common
sense judgment (why?)

There are some best practices out there on how to adequately go about gathering data, but the key is to always ensure the data you are collecting is quality data.  Once you understand what the data is telling you then being able able to effectively make sound decisions which are in-line with your business objectives.  Of course everything will then tie back to to measure, measure, measure the results.