Hello fellow Bloggers!

Transformation of IT driven by a coordinated process framework approach (such as ITIL, CobiT, and CMMi) just plain makes sense. Sometimes (lots of times) we just need to get our heads up out of our own gopher holes and look around (outside of IT) to see what others are doing that can help us.

HOW TO FIND BEST PRACTICES RIGHT AT HOME

For example–lessons learned from the ERP adoption curve finance endured might have real benefit as we transform IT from silos to enterprise workflow.

Speaking of workflow–who executes that better than the supply chain folks?

Best Practices for Pro-active Compliance with standards? How about HR or finance, or our own internal audit?

Quality and efficiency? Who in our organization has leveraged Six Sigma or Balanced Scorecard?

Portfolio Management? Other parts of our business must make investment tradeoffs, who does it best?

Customer Service, setting and meeting customer expectations, and service catalogs? How about our own sales, customer service, and web enabled sales functions?

You get the gist.

Now before everyone groans (read more work) there is an 80/20 approach to this. Interview with a short list of questions–

What were the key challenges you faced? What were the business value drivers?

How well did your planning and strategy address them?

How did you keep focus on them, and prove their value in an incremental way? Did you audit results in any way, and if so was that valuable?

How did you get and keep key executive involvement and funding for the duration of the project?

What was the magnitude of the organizational change, and how did you manage it?

Did you require an effective communications strategy, if so how did you execute it?

In general–

What were the greatest surprises?
What were you naive about going in?
What do you wish you had done differently given what you know now?
What kept you going throughout the tough, dark hours?

That would take no more than an hour per interview–and I guarantee you would have mined diamonds. PLUS–you would spend time meeting with your customer, better understand them, improve your relationship, and MAYBE they would give you some feedback on how you are doing.

Remember–Early on, Henry Ford visited a meat rendering plant, and watched the carcasses go by suspended on hooks and chains. The original Model Ts rolled down the assembly line–suspended on hooks and chains…

Success to You,

Don

Technorati Tags: itil best practices itil model itil risk management audit

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Here’s an intersting article on compliance and process management–looking outside ITSM for ideas. Do you see a high level parallel?– ERP and BPM equalling a closed loop process–in much the same way as ITIL’s CMDB and change management form a closed loop process.

“Compliance is a huge topic everywhere,” says Dr. Mathias Kirchmer, CEO of IDS Scheer for the Americas and Japan. It’s a huge topic at ProcessWorld, too, just as at previous years. That said, this iteration of the annual IDS Scheer event looks forward to a world of process management that subsumes compliance, not the other way around.

Here’s another way to look at it. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) plus business process management (BPM) equals an integrated people-process-compliance loop. Dr. Kirchmer offers an example from an organizational perspective. “The procurement clerk executes the job using an ERP system, while the manager organizes the process work and integrate it into the overall organization.”

There are two layers here: business activities enabled by operational systems, and the organization and reporting of such activities via a superimposed BPM solution. If you adopt these layers in concert, you have a framework that can be applied specifically to compliance but to risk management in general. “Siemens started with global BPM,” says Dr. Kirchmer of an IDS Scheer customer, “but used our ARIS Audit Manager to also handle a global compliance and global SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley] approach.”

When you stop thinking of compliance as a one-off headache but rather as a practice anchored in a specific process-oriented approach to business, you can get more mileage out of your investments as well as derive certain benefits (such as streamlined workflow).

Technorati Tags: business process management business process risk management business process model process

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Hello to All-

I have just returned from the Pink Elephant annual ITSM conference in swinging Las Vegas! I actually managed to win $68 at the blackjack table after 6 hours of hard play. I think I’ll keep my day job!

I wanted to share some early observations of the benchmark ITIL survey we ran at the conference. We had around 130 participants. Here are two points of interest from the data-

1) What are your top (ITIL) initiatives in 2006?

71% chose improving incident & problem management
60% chose improving change and release management
53% chose improving configuration management

Then we asked a new question for our benchmarks, to uncover obstructions faced by those trying to lead ITIL improvement initiatives:

2) What are the three most significant barriers to ITIL adoption within your organization?

71% chose organizational resistance to change
35% chose not sure where to start
31% chose either lack of executive support, or unproven business value

It’s clear that organizational change resistance is the hands down winner.

We will produce the benchmark results within 3-4 weeks, published as a white paper with analysis of the findings, and key recommendations for addressing the challenges. If you would like to be added to the distribution list please post a reply and I will make sure you get a copy.

Cheers-

Don

Technorati Tags: itil itsm configuration management definition configuration management configuration management database it governance information technology infrastructure library

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It’s a very snowy weekend here in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., which for us is home base. They say that the storm is supposed to be worse right along the ocean beaches than inland, where we are. So, since we won’t be sunbathing on the snowy white sands of Our Dear Jersey Shore this weekend, what better to do than to blog about ITIL? Clean house, perhaps? Tackle that painting job in the basement? We think not.

Therefore, welcome back to another episode of Real World ITIL, where this week we’ll conclude our casual 3-part series on Availability Management.

Before we get started, though, let us send a hearty thank you out to Aaron who reads our blog over at newScale, Inc. Thanks for your helpful e-mail, Aaron, we’ll respond shortly. We’ve been interested in newScale’s Service Catalog products for a while now, so we’re happy to mention them here.

We respond to all reader comments and inquiries of a thoughtful nature, so we invite you to join the discussion by clicking the Comment link below. We hope to hear from you soon. Now, on to our story:

The week before last, we attended a presentation given by a prominent IT executive of a global investment house. In his talk, he made the interesting observation that (paraphrasing) ‘Availability is the price of entry for IT’. He continued by noting that infrastructure teams must do everything possible to guarantee effective delivery of services to their customers before even thinking about doing anything innovative.

Could his message have possibly been any clearer or simpler? We should be cautious about investing in innovation until we obtain maximum performance and value out of our infrastructure’s basic operations. So, if we aren’t doing an effective job in managing our existing infrastructure for appropriate levels of availability, we might as well stay home and shovel snow.

Inspired by this important but simple thought, the Real World ITIL team was further energized to build a great foundation for Availability Management processes at this company. So, as we noted in Part 1 of this series, we started by defining a clear, achievable scope, approach and organizational design. In Part 2, we described developing an Availability Plan and the need to coordinate our preventative maintenance windows with the usual downtime windows required by Change Management (on behalf of the applications group).

Having discussed all of that, what’s left to discuss? Process design! (what else?)

At the highest level, the practice of Availability Management has two, distinct branches as depicted in the following diagram:

Naturally, we have to create processes to support each of these functions, then figure out how to link these designs into the company’s existing organization. One way to accomplish this is to create an input/output table to identify how to hook AM into the organization (this isn?t the real table but a simple example):

The relatively low level of detail here reflects the modest scope of the deliverables for Phase 1 of our project. This modest scope was determined by several factors, including time pressures on project staff, organizational ability to absorb change, etc.

As a result of this ?analysis?, our AM process ended-up having these general parts, each box of which required the creation of detailed supporting workflows:

Of course, there is much more detail to what we actually created for this company than what we?ve written about here, but by now the concepts and approach should be clear enough.

So, to sum up this three-part series in one thought, Availability Management is all about doing the basics of IT right, all the time, in a thorough manner, and then continuously improving. We should focus first on solidly delivering basic services on a continuous basis and then work to improve them. Only then should we consider getting aggressive about innovation.

Thanks for sticking with us through this series, which we enjoyed writing. We would appreciate hearing your feedback, so please share your thoughts by clicking on the Comment link below.

Until next time, thanks for reading along, and we wish you fair weather & fine processes!

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

Technorati Tags: itil information technology infrastructure library sla helpdesk cmdb incident management itsmf

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Here is what has happened on Evergreen’s Blog for this Week:

• An Approach to Availability Management, Part 2
• “IT Governance Frameworks: ITIL® and CobiT® Overhead or Strategic Weapon?”

The Top 10 Post on Evergreen’s Blogs:

1. The Most Essential Elements of ITIL?
2. An Approach to Availability Management, Part 1
3. “IT Governance Frameworks: ITIL® and CobiT® Overhead or Strategic Weapon?”
4. ITIL vs. “Extreme Programming” + Answering the RWI Mailbag
5. How to establish a CMDB?
6. How to build a CMDB - Step 1?
7. Software audit article
8. An Approach to Availability Management, Part 2
9. Best Practices for IT Change Management
10. Configuration Management

Technorati Tags: itil itsm itil helpdesk itil asset management itil compliance

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