Had a long conversation last week with two ladies at a large company; both carry the title of Portfolio Manager. Basically, they are IT-background folks who work for “the business” and represent the relationship between their respective business units and IT.

Man, did I get an earful!

A solid hour of (polite and professional) venting about IT’s lack of visibility for the business. Costs, benefits, activities, projects, efforts, labor are perceived as a great black hole. The business receives budget reports (and chargebacks), but has no idea what goes into them, or any way to effectively find out.

The result, of course, is frustration - and seeking out alternatives. In this case, the business units have been buying their own IT, “under the radar” for years.

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Happy holiday Friday. Thanks for coming back to read some more!

Although we appreciate Fridays in general here at Real World ITIL, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t look forward to the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, in particular. Somehow it feels like we’re making “progress” if we’ve made it this far through the year, doesn’t it?

Or is it really more like we feel that the “year is nearly half-over and our ITIL change leadership efforts arent going as fast as we’d like them to?”

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I’m sure that most of you understand that changes happen to systems and equipment within your infrastructure. A major question is how to we identify the relationship between the various systems? This is the primary challenge when determining risk and impact. Establishing a CMDB can be confusing as well as a real nightmare.

I’ve found an article (click on this title) and a white paper (see link below)that will help clear up some of the confusion. Also discussed in these is using ITIL as an approach for establishing standards and using the federated approach (centralized database linked multiple data sources).

http://www.remedy.com/solutions/documents/white_papers/BMC_CMDB_wp_en.pdf

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I found a site that pulls papers focused on compliance issues together. Check it out if you’re looking for information to help establish a direction to get started on your IT Change Managment program. I found the short synopsis of each article very helpful.

http://www.black-beans.com.br/change_management_sarbox.htm

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Since you’re in you’re in ITAM, and the knee-jerk reaction is to say “hey - let’s put a stop to that right now - we can’t have business people out there making their own decisions about IT!”

I think this gets to the core issue that internal IT departments struggle with: namely, the business does have a choice. And if IT doesn’t execute well - in terms of delivering services that the business wants, in a timely and cost-effective way, then the business will look elsewhere.

Outsourcing is one way that happens. And of course there’s a whole spectrum of “outsourcing” ranging from a temp contractor for a few days, to the huge “today you have a new badge” takeovers.

But another way is “rogue IT”. The business can say “hey, we have goals to meet, we can’t/don’t trust IT to help us get there, so we’re going on our own.” The result is servers hidden under desks, or off-site/hosted apps.

So what’s it have to do with ITAM?

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In my previous article I suggested that Service Level Management (SLM) was critical to service management in general because SLM provides the measurements necessary to facilitate continuous improvement. I haven’t received opposing feedback so I’ll assume most of you agree with this assertion. Then again maybe no one’s reading the blog, or you simply said “No s*@! Sherlock.” At any rate, I also promised some advice on how to get started with SLM in my last posting.

Based on the assertion that SLM is critical to establishing a measurement for continuous improvement, I would start by making the ability to measure service your primary focus. In other words, how can you quantify the quality of IT service that your organization provides?

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Welcome back to Real World ITIL!

Thanks to those readers who have left postings, including Don, Mari, and “IT Consultant” (is that you, Joe?). Let’s keep the discussion going!

Special thanks also to “randyy” for linking to this blog - it’s a great way to form a larger ITIL community. Randy: I tried to respond to your recent blog entry on using MOF to map organizations to processes, but there was no input link.

Also, to follow-up on the change leadership thread from earlier in this blog, we read a great article this week on how to do ‘Change Through Persuasion’. It’s in the February 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review. I recommend that you read it if you can find a copy.

With these messages from our sponsors done, it’s now time to get back to our story…

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Wow this is a great article on why Enterprise IT Change Managment programs are not effective and key considerations to develop a successful process set. The findings really opened my eyes.

http://www.technologyexecutivesclub.com/Articles/artChangeControl.htm

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It seems to me that an effective patch management program is continuing to grow in importance and is directly related to an effective Enterprise IT Change Management Program. I was talking to a one of our customers today on developing an effective patch management program. It seems that the constant barrage of worms viruses and other damaging attacks only makes patch management more critical.

Our conversation quickly focused on the crucial business processes and the relationship between patch management and their Enterprise IT Change Managment Program. Our conclusion was that we were going to have to focus on how their change management program can be leveraged to provide significant value to the Patch Management Program. We’re also ensuring that both programs leverage inputs from the Service and Asset Management programs.

I found the following article to be very helpful in understanding Patch Managment.

http://www.patchmanagement.org/pmessentials.asp

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Did your internal IT audit identify key issues with your Enterprise IT Change Managment program? I’ve found that following a systematic approach helps identify the key deficiencies, establish minimum requirements and allow an effective implementation effort. One thing to remember throughout your development program is to make sure that you define the crucial processes first.

Some basic guidelines to follow include:

• Identify basic requirements: Remember that the core requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley require that the associated business processes, policies and procedures are defined, documented and followed. This really is the hard part.
• Tackle the most critical business issues first: These are the ones that the auditors are going to focus on. You’ll have time to fine tune the system at a later date.

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