What Are Your Top 10 Reasons to Use Evergreen Systems to Deliver ITIL Awareness Training to Your Organization? These are ours:
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I had a frustrating conversation with one client I’ve worked with quite a bit in the past, who wants to have us back to help them build a Service Catalog, including Service Level Agreements, OLA’s, and a bunch of other related things. One of those things is a web-based IT request portal for security and application access that automates the multiple approvals, keeps everything auditable so the compliance folks are happy and reduces everyone’s workload.
This week we finished up the first phase of an ITIL / ITSM improvement project in sunny Tampa. This has been a great place to work, first of all because the client wasn’t “broken” in their processes. They just needed a few tweaks in processes and some education and conversation around ITIL and why to do things in a slightly different way.
So this past Tuesday we gave our end-of-project wrap up presentation to the CIO and the senior staff, which went well, including a brief demonstration, lots of conversation about “what we can do next,” and a somewhat surprising insight from the CIO.
Okay, so last time we had a chance to chat, I made the statement that running CMDB and Service Catalog projects can increase the acceptance of operating in a service-oriented fashion. If you recall, my reasoning was largely due to how foreign a service concept is to IT. So I proposed that by building a data model that integrates the service catalog and CMDB, one can establish a familiar reference point for IT which brings the adoption rate into acceptable portions.
In the past few weeks I’ve been getting my first close look at HP / Peregrine software’s ServiceCenter Service Catalog module in the 6.2 release that’s just out, and frankly it’s changing my standard opinion about Service Catalog tools, and “ITIL software” in general.
My old stock answer to “which software should I use for ITIL?” is that you could “do” ITIL with almost any of the toolsets out there advertising. I’ve personally worked with Remedy, Peregrine, Mercury, some of IBM’s Tivoli stuff, some of CA’s products, plus other niche or point products like NewScale. And the painful honest truth was, you still had to do a bunch of “make your own” integration and customization to make any or all of these products really work in an ITIL environment.
Last time I talked about why it’s so hard to estimate and measure business value. This time, I offer the outline of a solution that has worked for many IT shops.
But first I have to give due credit and say this is not my idea. I learned this many years ago from a very smart guy named Mahan Khalsa and his course called “Helping Clients Succeed.”
Here’s the method that we use, in brief:
“In a crisis if I had only an hour I’d spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem and the last 10 minutes solving it.” -Albert Einstein
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Which comes first, Change and Configuration, or Service Catalog and Service Level Management?
This is a trick question. I’ll give you the answer later. And it’s also the actual decision we’re facing right now as Phase 1 of this client’s ITSM initiative wraps up and Phase 2 planning is in full gear. Based on the current state assessment, I personally think the most business value “bang for the buck” is in improvements to Change and Configuration Management.
But there are some important reasons why SLM and Service Catalog are important too. Those reasons are key Directors in the organization, who have a vote in the budgeting decision for Phase 2. And they also have specific objectives of their own that they want to get completed as soon as possible.
Our project sponsor understands all of this, and agrees that from the ITIL perspective, and more importantly from the business value point of view, Change and Configuration should be tackled next. But he also understands that “The other Directors understand why Change and Configuration Management are important, but they don’t see why they need to be addressed first. However, what they do understand is why their Service Level Management and Service Catalog goals are immediately important.”
So what’s up? How are things going? I hope everyone had a good holiday full of quality family time and turkey. Such is life-all holidays must come to end, and we all have to get back to work.
So when last we chatted, we were discussing some benefits of undertaking a strategy to construct a service catalog and CMDB in a joint effort. The first benefit that I mentioned was the ability to identify the composition of a service, which includes Hardware, Software, Manpower Governance, Standards, etc. Let me elaborate. One of the biggest challenges for IT is to gain a universal understanding of what a service is. You might laugh but a common reaction when first trying to define a service is skepticism and uncertainty. A common feeling is that if the item can not be shoved in a rack or is not the latest flashy piece of technology, it is worthless or a waste of money. The reality is that IT functions in the realm of the tangible. So there is not the typical warm-heart welcome when someone brings up the concept of a ’service’.
So how does one get around this?
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