CSI, alongside with service strategy, is one of the most important components of ITIL. CSI deals with metrics that constitute the basis for the PDCA quality improvement cycle. It presents the process of continual improvement of IT processes and services that in fact represents a quantitative form of management of the organizations.

Now we have Web 2.0, alongside with the Enterprise 2.0, where IT users use new informal collaborative tools (blogs, forums, tweets, columns) to exchange knowledge and opinions about business operations and IT services. The concept of user is expanded outside the organization to include external business clients and external business providers connected via an Extranet, in supply chains, that can use the same informal type of collaborative tools. Many organizations nowadays provide client forums on their websites where users can express opinions about the quality of the service the organization provides.

As a consequence, the performance of business processes and services of an organization is evaluated internally, and now also externally, introducing what we may describe as a qualitative form of evaluation that also must be taken in consideration by the management of the organization. This form of evaluation, that expands the usual customer satisfaction metric for the business units of the organization, is registered via these collaborative tools and is also used, in another context, for the improvement of customer retention.

The concept of value of the IT services, and its utility and warranty, is equally important for the internal business users and for these new external users, since they both are clients of IT services that the organization provides – but the external users do not have formal service levels agreements. For example, the IT operation of a bank concerns their internal business users, but also their external users for the operating of e-banking and ATMs ensuring the availability and continuity of the services.

In my opinion, the PDCA cycle should then evolve into a new form, that I designate as PDCA 2.0. This new PDCA cycle takes into account these new realities, specifically this new form of qualitative evaluation.

The stages of this new PDCA 2.0 should be analogous to the traditional PDCA cycle:

Plan – create the IT infrastructure to support the collaborative world of the Enterprise 2.0

Do – analyze previously recorded content with business intelligence tools (e.g. text mining and web analytics) for extracting patterns of behaviour by the users. This data can be used for the improvement of not only business processes and services, but also the IT processes and services that support them.

Check – listen to the users using tools that can record, in a structured way, the content of forums, blogs and other forms of user interaction.

Act – implement the improvements of the IT processes and services that can be taken into account in the context of the existing IT infrastructure and all the agreements already contracted (SLAs, OLAs and UCs) with the internal clients.

If ITIL would be in sync with important developments in the field, its next release should take into account these new realities and acknowledge that they are part of IT service management. One should measure the evaluation that can be found in these individual interactions (blogs, forums, tweets, columns, product evaluations at websites, popularity indexes, etcetera) and not limit service evaluation to traditional measurement, for example customer satisfaction surveys limited to official first tier users. The traditional quantitative forms of performance evaluation are no longer the only ones to be considered in ITSM.