Hello to All!

Welcome back. What makes it so hard to deliver the business value of IT in key projects? Part of the challenge is defining the business value of IT, and part of it is delivering it.

If we leave the “define” off the table for now, let’s look at delivering the value–and one really key element of why projects fail to deliver value, and what can be done about it.

The primary reason projects fail is not in delivery, its not in some tough technical challenge, its not in changing priorities. It is in the failure of the organization to adopt the change.

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Welcome back! It’s that time of week again, when we blog about the everyday experiences of everyday IT folks who are working to implement ITIL principles in their particular chunk of corporate America. As usual, I’ll start off this week with some administrative remarks and then we’ll see how our continuing story unfolds from there.

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Quick note:

The folks at ECP Media have released their survey of IT Asset and Software Management practices. If you want to know where you stand versus your peers, this will give you a good snapshot.

http://www.ecpmedia.com/page40.html

Best,
Scott B

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Well, so much great ITIL stuff has happened this week that it?s difficult to decide what to write about this time on Real World ITIL. So, welcome back and I hope y’all don’t mind if I think out loud for a bit:

First, I recommend that you read Scott Braden’s great ITAM blog entry from last week in which he tells a story about how metrics are useless unless management actually uses them. I’d like to see a discussion happen on that topic in his blog. We’re likely to encounter that very issue about a year from now on the ongoing project I’ve been writing about, so I’m going to learn as much as possible from his experience. Won’t you add your ‘war stories’ to his blog, too?

After all, as a global community, we ITIL implementers are going to face a hard road ahead if we can’t get corporate management to witness the value of process improvements through objective, numerical measures.

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Within my organization there are several ITIL certified individuals with many years of experience helping organizations to better manage their IT Service Support and Delivery. Nonetheless, I’ve had a hard time finding someone who’s actually been involved in writing a Service Catalog. Moreover, when the subject comes up we often have differing views on what should be included in a service catalog. One colleague believes the catalog should be high level identifying services broadly by category. Business applications for instance might be a service. Internet connectivity might be another. I on the other hand, believe that for the most part a true services catalog must define services specifically. For instance, each application owned and operated by the company would be a specific service. How else can Service Level Management be measured?

As I mentioned in a previous article, I believe the development of a service catalog should begin with those applications or services that are most critical to your company’s business. Beyond that I would suggest creating service definitions only for those services for which you plan apply Service Level Management. If you don’t plan to measure the availability of your internet connectivity for instance then there’s no point in defining it as a service.

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Welcome back to Real World ITIL!

We took the weekend off from blog writing for the Independence Day holiday on July 4, when we in the U.S. celebrate declaring independence from the British government 229 years ago.

Perhaps it’s a bit ironic, then, that many Information Technology shops in the United States can think of celebrating independence from weak IT processes thanks to the British government’s Office of Government Commerce, who originally developed ITIL. How things have changed in 229 years! So, let’s all take a moment today to say, “Thanks, OGC. Much appreciated!”

July 4 was also the day when a NASA space probe called ‘Deep Impact’ successfully made a big splash by colliding with a comet. So, at the risk of stretching our analogies about 83 million miles too far, here’s hoping that your ITIL implementation efforts will have as much impact on any inefficiency that your shop may have!

Recently, we’ve been involved in a lot of chat about the importance of ITIL-type Service Catalogs.

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Back onsite at a major retailer - if you live in the US they probably have a location within a few miles of your house.

Talking with my customer; he says that even though our previous project phases were technical successes - they met requirements, the system functions as designed, does what it was supposed to do in ITAM… nevertheless, the real business value is not being realized.

Why? Because a lifecycle ITAM system like this one generates (captures) a lot of data that would otherwise be lost in the daily course of business.

But the problem here is, nobody is using the data.

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I found this white paper and thought it did a good job of explaining SOX in an easy to understand format. Let me know what you think.

Technology and Corporate Governance Elements of Sarbanes-Oxley

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Okay, here it is- class is in session. The first domain, Planning and Organization is comprised of the following high level process, IT Strategic Plan. I would like to give a summary of IT Strategic Plan and then follow up with some questions and answers.

SUMMARY:
Here it goes- per the IT Governance Institute an IT Strategic Plan needs to clearly define the following:

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