Great Article

The DITY newsletter this week is an excellent piece written by Hank Marquis, in it are some very practical steps, (6 rather than the ubiquitous 10) to improving availability.

The great thing about this article is that he not only details the six steps, but also details (with links) to how each step should be completed.

There is no tool vending going on here either, as he puts it:

All it takes is a spreadsheet, or paper and pen.

Enjoy.
Read more...

How different are we?

When it comes to rolling out a new tool based on the ITIL framework, a bulk of the expense comes from customizing the tool to fit our own unique way of running our IT organization.

Should we be so unique?

Most IT organizations are not business differentiators, they are cost centers tasked with providing commoditized service: e-mail, databases, storage, etc. Why should we be so unique? I know there are IT teams on the cutting edge, providing industry-changing technology solutions, but surely this is a fairly small percentage.

So if we top and tail the landscape, remove the languishers and the “bleeding edgers”, and just take the middle 50 percent, why are we so different from each other? The tools are almost interchangeable, and we all use very similar software.
Why don't we have the same policies, governance, processes, etc.?

Is the effort we put in to be different from each other worth it? Are we bringing value to the party?

When building an internal wall that will not be visible to anyone unless it fails, is there any point in going outside the basic, standard and cheapest design and implementation?

I would be interested in hearing other opinions on this.

Read more...

CMDBf

The announcement today of a standard CMDB specification for the federation of data across multi-vendor environments is a good one.

I have not yet read through the full spec - at 70+ pages it's a few nights work for me, but the working group of companies is satisfyingly complete.

About time really, how long have the vendors been fighting with each other leaving us as casualties? but I digress, I think this (in theory) is a step forward in the population and maintenance of a real CMDB, though I do think it's interesting that they do not call this a CMSf.

All we need now is for all the vendors to adopt this spec quickly, follow their own guidelines, and leverage this to achieve the full potential of the CMS.

I imagine we are a few years away from seeing any impact from this announcement, but I have been wrong before.
Read more...

Service Management Scalability

An Introductory Overview of ITIL V3 says that "Change Manager" is not a defined role but rather:

"It is not anticipated that a typical organization would consider a separate group of people for this role, rather there is a flow of experience and skills meaning the same people may well be involved in multiple lifecycle stages."

Firstly I would question this statement, I believe that its very hard to manage the checks and balances of due diligence for changes without a strong change resource directing the traffic, answering questions and producing reports etc. In my experience I have not seen any organizations that have managed to forgo this role, in fact during ITSM conferences I have probably met more "Change Managers" than any other.

The tool vendors probably have a solution for this, I am sure there is some software that will "remove the need for a dedicated change manager", not to be a skeptic but I will believe it when I see it.

If we take this as a given, I think there is an issue of scalability of roles in ITIL, it's hard to wear multiple hats, change Manager/Problem lead/Unix sysadmin: probably not a fun job, and pretty difficult to hire for. Do you really want your expensive EMC expert approving RFCs?

A large IT organization has the benefit of resources but even then vacation and training etc. mean that consistency becomes an issue.

ITSM is not cheap, the "tools" cost a considerable amount of money, adoption is hard and time consuming, hiring for service management roles is not trivial, neither is the total person hours devoted to greasing the wheels of the service management organization.

The scalability of the roles defined in the ITIL framework is not helping small IT organizations adopt, or large organizations reap the "ROI" they believe are coming... I believe there are solutions to this THOUGHT of mine, but that's for a later post.
Read more...

Welcome

Support Thought, Supporting Business through the thoughtful use of Service Management.

Thinking hard about managing IT with an eye on best practices and just "being better"


This will be a forum to put my thoughts to paper; these maybe insightful, meandering or just plain wrong, but they will be down here for open discussion. Please feel free to comment, criticize or even agree.

About me:

I am an experienced IT manager currently managing a service management organization at a Fortune 500 company in the U.S. I have rolled out complete service management initiatives and have continued managing those global organizations through the initial and successful adoption of the framework.

For some time, I have been thinking about the management of IT and the use of frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT to manage the service supplied by IT. I have met many vendors, tested many products and even delivered some solutions, but during all this time I have felt that we in IT are missing something. I am not exactly sure what we are doing wrong, but it seems that with every technological leap forward, we struggle to keep up: Senior managers find it hard to stay technologically relevant while rebranding themselves as C-level executives, technical staff find it hard to translate the technology into value, middle managers are stuck with some reward but most of the risk, and the common solution to everything is "lets reorg."

This blog will try to cover a lot of ground, mostly be in the form of "thoughts," which will be opinions based on experience. They may incomplete, but hopefully they will spur debate.

Let's see where this takes us. Enjoy.
Read more...