Setting the Managed Services Industry Standard

Something that has occupied a lot of my thinking lately is the development of an industry-wide standard for managed services.  No matter who I talk to, from large OEM manufactures to the smallest of service providers, each sees value in the development of a standard that clearly communicates an MSP’s managed services proficiency to their customers, partners and vendors.  A standard would significantly help promote managed services to end users, differentiate strong MSPs from the less qualified, promote professionalism in the industry, and bring about greater standardization and best practices. Sounds good, doesn’t it?  But as you dig deeper, the development of an industry managed services standard has some thorny problems that need to be worked through.  I’ve broken down the issues into a few areas for the purpose of this discussion.

The first area of consideration is what would such a standard look like?  At the high end would be an accreditation. The advantage of an accreditation is its rigor resulting from its development process.  An accreditation is vetted by industry subject matter experts, psychometricians, and industry thought leaders taking up to a year to complete.  Companies seeking this industry endorsement must clearly demonstrate their competencies and submit their business to an audit.  An accreditation is a high bar to achieve and requires a significant investment in both time and money on the part of the accrediting company; however, once completed, it confidently demonstrates a company’s abilities.  The downside is that it requires significant effort and investment in both its development and on the part of each company seeking accreditation.  While this is laudable, and in many cases desirable, the question is “do enough MSPs see value in investing in such a process to the point where there would be adoption by a critical mass (ensuring the success of the accreditation in the market place)?”  Without the latter, an accreditation has little value.

An alternative to accreditation is the development of an industry designation.  A designation is a much lower hurdle to clear where the company attests to the fact that it has completed a minimum level of training and has agreed to abide by an industry code of conduct.  Again, this program has pluses and minuses.  On the positive side, standards are set and agreed to and since the effort required on the accrediting party is lower, there is greater opportunity for market adoption and achievement of the original goals.  The downside to a designation is that due to a less rigorous process, MSPs may qualify for a designation, but ultimately be unable to deliver on the expected standard.

A second area of consideration is to determine the scope of expertise being standardized.  Unlike a technical standard, managed services is a service delivery model for IT with no clear boundaries.  We would all likely agree that managed services encompasses service delivery, remote monitoring and management (RMM), as well as professional services automation (PSA), but it gets more difficult to define a boundary after that.  Most would agree that there are important distinctions in how you market, sell, operate and financially manage a managed services business.  Even more difficult is characterizing the services MSPs offer, such as help desk, email management, backup and disaster recovery - but what about emerging technology offerings such as virtualization and cloud computing and future services? Furthermore, we need to determine how to integrate these industry standards with existing complementary standards.

A third consideration is to determine who is best positioned to develop and accredit an industry standard?  Clearly this organization must be 100% neutral.  It must also seek to represent all of the stakeholders in both the development and standardization process (whatever that may be).  Lastly it must have a history of successfully developing and delivering industry programs.  While it is not a foregone conclusion that CompTIA is the right organization to do this, it certainly does have the right pedigree.

While work is continuing and many are rallying to the cause, these are some of the important issues that need to be wrestled with prior to the successful introduction of an industry standard. This will be a significant topic of discussion at CompTIA’s Annual Member Meeting in April and I welcome your participation in this debate.  In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on what a managed services industry standard should look like.

Jim Hamilton is the Senior Director, Member Relations for CompTIA and leads the communities’ management team. You can send him your ideas and suggestions anytime at jhamilton@comptia.org .