Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

Posted by Aswin Kumar

Dear Enterprise Architecture Group,
I am writing this letter to express my desire to work towards a closer and effective relationship between our groups. We can use the synergies to build a leaner and a better IT organization.
Let me put forward my viewpoint with respect to the references to Enterprise Architecture in the ITIL v3 framework.
ITIL always evolved towards adapting a common framework of practices that unite all areas of IT service provision towards a single vision – delivering value to the business.

Continue reading "An open letter to Enterprise Architecture from IT Service Management !!" »

Posted by Guest Author at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Aswin Kumar

It may be a funny debate if I start scoping out the extra number of R’s required in Change Management. Anyway, I’m not a potential author of the next version of Service Transition book yet

Of course, I always wonder why all the R’s were fitted under the magic number ‘Seven’? Was someone inspired by the ‘McKinsey 7-S Model’ or the ‘7 principles of Supply Change Management’?

Hey, Shirley and Ivor, Are you reading?

Continue reading "Does the next version of ITIL needs more than 7 Rs of Change Management? YES!" »

Posted by Guest Author at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As the popularity and adoption rate of ITIL grows, it widens the scope for new ways of managing the Assets of an organization. One of the key areas of interest in this domain is Software License Management. As we all know managing software licenses can become a tedious task. Forums like Business Software Alliance, www.bsa.org work hard to reduce software piracy. In most cases, illegal use of software is a result of lack of knowledge rather than malicious intent.

Ankur, one of our team members, has done extensive research on Software License Management. He has looked into some of the best practices that the organizations should follow in pursuit of a Software LM solution. He has also shown why an organization should adopt these even if the current economic situation has cost-cutting as a prime objective.

If you have questions like, why should we go for dedicated solution for Software LM? What business benefits can software LM can achieve? We have already bought licensed copies of the software we use, then why should we bother to manage those for optimum use? ; I would suggest you read though the post that Ankur has put up. Some, if not all your queries may be answered in some of Ankur's up and coming blog entries...

Posted by Bruno Calver at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Ravindran A Varier 

As Bruno rightly suggests in his latest blog, companies are nowadays having this big question in their minds – ‘What next?’

This question is prevalent even in the minds of those companies and Organizations who have taken pains to undergo ITIL v3 readiness, ITIL benchmarking and assessment in their respective Organization. And one possible answer that seems to be emerging is – A continued audit of their ITSM process.

Continue reading "ITIL Audit - Benchmarking Vs Climbing the Bench" »

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Continue reading "ITIL in our lives" »

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Posted by Ravindran A Varier 

After a lot of deliberation and rethinking and after about 20 days of preparation, I finally made up my mind to take the ITIL v3 Foundation Course. A rainy afternoon welcomed me to put my plan into action. As I went to the test centre, I kept reminding myself that this is a perfect business case wherein I have to concentrate on a break-even for the investment than arriving at huge ROI.

For all those who have been used to ITIL v2 concepts, v3 Foundation would come as a shower after the drizzle. And the best way to enjoy this downpour is to get drenched in it. What I mean is that while v2 concentrates only on Service Support and Service Delivery, v3 comes with a whole lot of concepts ranging from Service Strategy, designing the Service Design Package to transitioning them into Operations, complete with a framework for Continual Service Improvement. A humble request to all the prospective test-takers – Do not have a schoolboy approach of preparing only a handful of key concepts because the 40 questions will literally take you through every nook and cranny of these 5 service lifecycles.

Continue reading "ITIL v3 Foundation Test Experience" »

Posted by Guest Author at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

What do rising gas prices, increasing food prices, rising sub-prime losses, lay offs and slow economic growth have to do with Industry best practices on Business-IT Service management?  The trends mentioned above are monsters facing the US economy. These trends are shaking the senate, the US corporations and the consumer behavior. As a consequence, the consumers have started to look for cost effective products and purchase experience.

Continue reading "ITIL V3.0 guidance on addressing the inflationary pressures in the economy" »

Posted by Guest Author at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the complex areas to assess from ITIL v3 is “Strategy Generation”. In more than a couple of ITIL v3 assessments I have conducted, I have always found it difficult to ascertain whether a process for Strategy Generation exists or is followed in an organization. What does one look for, as evidence of Strategy Generation? Should there be AND more importantly is there a need for a defined and consistent process for Strategy Generation for an IT organization?

Continue reading "“Process” for “Strategy Generation”? – Interpreting ITIL v3" »

Posted by Gautam Nadkarni at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Positioning IT Service management in the V3 context" »

Posted by Renjith Sreekumar at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditionally, IT organizations have seen CMDB as a mechanism to gain better handle on where their individual technology components are, who maintains them and track basic information about their current state. What is that you are looking from CMDB?

Continue reading "Building a Service Centric CMDB" »

Posted by Renjith Sreekumar at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If I were the CIO of any organization carrying the responsibility of putting  IT in order, would I take resort to the highly proclaimed best practice framework – ITIL version 3? I do not know. Having studied the ITIL version 3 books more than a couple of times, the one reason why I would think twice before taking the decision is – the practices within five ITIL version 3 books seem exhaustive and too voluminous to comprehend easily! However, a deeper reflection on ITIL version 3 principles, processes, concepts and techniques provide interesting insights in to its value addition.

Considering an IT setup of average maturity, with ambitions to adopt ITIL best practices, one would want to know the specific value addition that the ITIL v3 provides.

Continue reading "5 Reasons why you should go for ITIL v3?" »

Posted by Guest Author at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As ITIL V3 hits its six month mark, this is a good point to pause and check how many organizations are beginning to adopt it. Where are these organizations beginning their implementation? Assessments? Full process implementation? Or is it somewhere in between - adopting only the new processes? More importantly, what aspects are organizations considering as key in their V3 adoption approach? What are some of the key changes in ITIL v3 that everyone should be aware of?

Continue reading "ITIL V3 Implementation - Ready to go all the way? ... Introducing Gautam Nadkarni" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looking at the Gartner Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, issued in June 2007, many of the up-and-coming products including IT Service Catalog, IT Service Portfolio Management, etc are catered for in ITIL V3. In V3, the Service Catalog concept have been enhanced and coupled with Demand Management, Portfolio Management and Request fulfillment. With the expectations from service catalog on a rise, organizations need to plan carefully to choosing what "functions" they want to deliver with their Service catalog program.

Continue reading "Service Catalog - What is your focus area.?" »

Posted by Renjith Sreekumar at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In part 1 of my post – “Defining the Service owner role”, I penned about the need for service centric roles in IT organizations and some of the common misconceptions with respect to the service owner role. The reasons for these misconceptions need to be looked into.

Continue reading "Defining the Service Owner role - Part 2" »

Posted by Guest Author at 03:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

With V3.0 shifting the focus of ITIL from its traditional process centric approach towards a service lifecycle approach, there is an increased need for defining service centric roles within IT organizations. This paradigm shift of focus from IT systems & processes view to IT services view, which drive creation of values and influence positive outcomes to the customers, have made services the most dynamic “asset” with in an IT organization. As organizations progress towards the “Service-centric” model, the question of "who owns a Service" is being asked within an organization perpetually at various levels and at various times.

Continue reading "Defining the Service Owner role - Part 1" »

Posted by Guest Author at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Service Lifecycle, Service Portfolio, Service Catalog, Service Asset, oh dear. It goes on. And ITIL V3 just exponentially increased the IT vocabulary around the Service front, it seems.

So, how does someone navigate through this Service Conundrum? Well, here's introducing Renjith Sreekumar -

Through these blogs, I have requested Renjith to share his experience of designing and managing Service centric processes. Renjith is a consultant with the IT Service Management Process Consulting Group of Infosys. Over the past few years, he has helped several ITIL driven process engagements with clients including global fortune 500 companies.

Over to you, Renjith.

Posted by Arvind Raman at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Put in almost any name into Google - Bill Clinton, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Blair - and it is likely that the Wikipedia entry will be the thing that comes up first." Says Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, in his latest blog.

So, what's the first entry that turns up when you type in ITIL V3 on Google?

Continue reading "ITIL V3 on Wikipedia" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When should I raise a Change Request?

That's an innocent enough question. So what's your answer -

1. When Business states its requirements
2. When Business commits its requirements to a schedule / calendar
3. Or perhaps it's when the corresponding IT development project is identified and resources planned?
4. Well, how about when an IT Operational Change is expected?
5. No, none of these. I don't raise a Change Request, I just sneak them in when no one's looking - way too painful and bureaucratic otherwise. Hey, but don't tell anyone!

Continue reading "Engaging IT Change Management" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, I came across this blog from BMC's Ken Turbitt on Customer Focus. As Ken says (and of course ITIL V3 too), IT must have Business focus, with Business being IT's customer. While that is true, the main theme for Service Management continues to revolve around ensuring an excellent end-to-end Customer Experience. And having a Customer Focus is critical for that.

Over the last few weeks, I saw some amazing customer focus in action and experienced first-hand excellent customer service, that I wanted to share with you.

Continue reading "Customer Experience @ The London Bikeathon" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

In my earlier blog on Change Management metrics, I wrote about how several organizations use total number of Changes as a measure of the success of their Change Management process. Here, I would like to share with you some practices I have found useful in deciding what type of metrics to measure.

Continue reading "Musings on Change Management Metrics - Part 2" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The total number of changes has gone down - our Change Management process is a success ... Is it?

A while back, I was assisting an organization to implement ITIL based Change Management process. Apart from (the usual?) complexities of implementation, something that struck me was the trigger for this implementation. "There are far too many changes within our organization - we need to reduce the total number of changes".

So, why am I writing about this? Well, for one, I am still quite amazed by the number of organizations that use total number of Changes as a primary measure of how successful their Change Management program is.

Does it make sense? No? So, is "total number of changes" a wasted metric? Not really. Arguably, it is a relatively easy and very visible metric to measure. But is it sufficient? Does it give a sense of what impact these changes have had on services? Does it indicate whether testing happened rigorously? Or, for that matter, does it even indicate whether basic adherence to process happened or not - such as having a back-out plan, impact analysis carried out, etc. Obviously it's not a stand-alone metric.

So then, what's a better measure? Hmm ... we'll get to that in a bit.

Continue reading "Musings on Change Management Metrics - Part 1" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

So, who in your organization is championing your ITIL Service Management (ITSM) program? The CIO office? Does your CIO understand or speak ITIL? Or is it driven more locally through pockets of excellence within the Infrastructure and Operations groups?

There appears to be a good amount of euphoria within the industry that the refreshed service lifecycle approach in V3 will put it straight on every CIO's radar. In the article ITIL Dons a Suit and Tie, published on searchcio.com, Linda Tucci suggests that "CIOs especially, should find it of interest". Similarly, Brian Johnson, one of the original authors of the first ITIL books, in his article ITIL Framework finds new stakeholders with V3, talks about how V3 discussions will now move to the executive level. Whether these statements prove true or not remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the question still remains as to how much benefit the CIO's influence brings to an ITSM program's success. Let me lay out a simplistic scenario of how the CIO influence may impact two organization's desire to implement an ITSM program -

• Organization A - "CIO's ITIL mandate" or "CIO says ..." is the mantra that goes here. The CIO understands, and what more, even speaks ITIL! (And I have personally been involved in or know of several such organizations.)
• Organization B - The CIO and his senior leadership are quite "ITIL agnostic". In some situations, you are even advised not to utter that four letter word.

So which organization has a better chance of success?

Continue reading "ITIL V3 CIO - Chief ITIL Officer?" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been nearly a month now since the new ITIL V3 books were published and shipped to near and distant shores. So have you had a chance to read these up? Not yet?  Well, if you pick up these books, one of the first things that will put a smile on your face is the structured and lean approach to detailing each process. Apart from that, one aspect that I found particularly interesting is the inclusion of IT Service Management Technology Considerations.

Continue reading "V3 Out of the Box" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The "Are you ready for V3" Email

Quick question - over the last week or so, how many emails or articles did you come across that were titled "Are you ready for V3" or something to that effect? Quite a few, I bet! And how many of these did you find useful?? Hmmm ... alright - we won't get into that part

With the release of the core ITIL V3 texts on 30th May, there has been a good amount of buzz in the industry. But how long it will be before organizations start embracing V3 remains debatable. Ken Turbitt from BMC says in his blog that it will be between 18 months to 3 years before adoption of V3 goes mainstream. While that may eventually turn out to be true, it has definitely not stopped several organizations from already starting to think and plan out their V3 journeys.

Earlier this week, I was speaking with one of our clients here in the UK. With an ISO20K certification and a relatively mature Service Management program under their belt, one of the burning questions facing them has been how V3 will impact them. Here are some quick points from my discussion that I thought you might find interesting if you have also been thinking about starting on V3. So, is this an exhaustive list? By no means - these are some broad initial directions that can guide you as and when you plan for V3.

Continue reading "ITIL V3 – Readiness Assessment" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The ITIL Buzz

With the release of the new version of the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL V3, as it is popularly known, there is a huge amount of interest and anticipation among IT organizations, the user community and service providers as to what the buzz is all about. This blog will revolve around discussions on what ITIL V3 is all about, its new aspects, sharing of thoughts and points of views on its adoption and implications to IT organizations at large.

Continue reading "ITIL V3 - The Fresh New ITIL" »

Posted by Arvind Raman at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)