How to make people stop providing services IT does not offer

By ITIL from Experience ©

The issue is common in many IT organizations. A well-intentioned employee does a favor to a user. The word spreads and more users are setup for the service. This can go on for quite a while before management finds out that IT has been providing this service and its extent.

The rogue service is often discovered when it breaks down or becomes unavailable as a result of a change, like the upgrade of dependent configuration item(s) (CI). It can also be discovered when a user or customer asks for an enhancement. Then, IT scrambles to understand among other things the: owner, scope, infrastructure dependencies, configuration

(ITIL Service Transition) A generic term used to describe a group of configuration items that work together to deliver an IT service, or a recognizable part of an IT service. Configuration is also used to describe the parameter settings for one or more configuration items.
Source: ITIL® glossary and abbreviations, English, 2011 www.itil-officialsite.com/InternationalActivities/TranslatedGlossaries.aspx

, implicit commitment to users and the business, functionality, support model

A representation of a system, process, IT service, configuration item etc. that is used to help understand or predict future behaviour.
Source: ITIL® glossary and abbreviations, English, 2011, www.itil-officialsite.com/InternationalActivities/TranslatedGlossaries.aspx

, maintenance effort and funding requirements.

Unfortunately, in many cases the service cannot be shut down as the business evolved to rely on it. Now the IT organization has to formerly recognize it as a service, budget for its maintenance, lifecycle and setup a support process and procedures. Often it needs to be migrated to conform to the enterprise standards and tools and integrated in the Business Continuity Plans.

One method to control situations from creeping into a service offering is to implement specific service requests categories in the ITSM tool based on the service catalogue. Then, instruct every one that if they cannot see a category to log a request, they must escalate to management.

Of course, to be successful management needs to hold people accountable. It must be clear that this policy is non-negotiable and management needs to be willing to carry out disciplinary actions if it is not followed. Since this amounts to an unauthorized change the same approach should be used to deal with work carried out without approval. It is also very important for management at all levels, from the CIO down, to take every opportunity to promote, reiterate and reference this policy until it is incorporated into the organization’s culture.

Using this method brings governance around the service offering and prevents services from evolving outside the control of management.

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