Yes I know I've been away and not kept this blog up much - well that's so over, particularly now that I have my website also up and running. Anyway in the last month or so I've got set up with my portfolio business and am back again in the independent world - and enjoying it greatly...!
Recent client and industry research work has given me a lot of good new exposure to some of the emerging areas of ITSM, notably Social Media, Cloud and of course the ever developing Service Catalogue/service definition area. Interesting to see a lot of new activity and approaches in this area, particularly with concepts like OBASHI and other new ways of consulting and matching business demands with IT ones.
I've recently done some Service Definition and Service Catalogue work with both a small IT department in a college, and a global multinational corporation - IT operations budgets varying from £500K to $2Bn...!
It would of course be nice to say that both projects had the same issues and basic principles/requirements, but that of course is stretching a point and really not true. One organisation was just starting out in the area of Service (not system) definition, whilst the other had an internal industry in place to manage this on an annual cycle - where the SC was in effect a cost recovery mechanism.
However neither really had a good grasp of the opportunity and potential real value that they could get from applying the 'supply chain' concept to their organisation and IT provision. This could help them to focus and prioritise their services, deliver and demonstrate value, and also operate and run services with differentiated sourcing models...
It was obviously easier in the smaller organisation to reach the key people and sell them the concepts - which was done in the College who are now building their service catalogue and also using that to build their own internal service improvement plan.
So how can we get the message across better about the need to think about services? particularly as there is more evidence that IT departments are being by-passed and businesses are simply buying IT services direct? For some IT departments and businesses it may already be too late but there's still plenty of opportunity to 'embrace the Cloud' and use this as an opportunity rather than the threat that I still hear many IT-istas murmuring about. true, Cloud in itself is not really a new idea but either is voice recognition , although that only recently seems to have been more widely used.
Cloud requires Service Catalogue at its centre and we should all waken up to that and the potential threats and outcomes of not adapting and developing new ideas. At very least we must be clear and start thinking about what services we actually provide.
I do also think that as an industry we do need to continue to develop sector-based and sector-friendly solutions and models - its really not enough any more to say that ITIL/ITSM can be easily applied to any industry and demographic - of course it can but not always easily and the more we can build-in local knowledge and language that is understood by IT and business alike in each sector - the more value we will deliver.
Look forward to speaking on this and other related SLA/ITSM stuff at the BCS meeting in London on 6th December - see you there..
Also good to catch up with a whole pile of old and new friends at the recent UK itSMF conference - first in many years for me when I wasn't glued to a stand for 2 days...
Thursday 25 November 2010
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Barclay's Blog: Why don't we just get on with it/IT ...?
Barclay's Blog: Why don't we just get on with it/IT ...?: "This is my first of a new blog series - you may have read my previous Axios blogs on Service Catalog and ITIL. I'm now back in the independe..."
Why don't we just get on with it/IT ...?
This is my first of a new blog series - you may have read my previous Axios blogs on Service Catalog and ITIL. I'm now back in the independent community again and able to spend more time looking at what's going on.
There seems to be a lot of debate and 'ranting' going on still around ITIL. Aidan Lawes has produced I'd say pretty fair analysis of where the ITSM industry has and is going wrong. This lays out a number of areas where greed, avarice, ignorance, naivety and many other sins have been committed by all areas within the ITSM world. We also have Noel Bruton now trying to force his own agenda on the failings of ITIL with his articles and we also have the recent '@fakeITIL' Tweeter who seems content to snipe from the sidelines at all things ITIL.
NO ONE CARES...!!
Well of course we in ITSM do, but the real world of business and public life don't frankly have the time or interest in our current navel-gazing. They are all too busy trying to cut costs, improve service and - most fundamentally - keep their jobs and organizations alive. We are in danger of Nero-fiddling or Titanic deck-chair re-organizing if we spend too much of our efforts in-fighting about ITIL. My position is simply that ITIL is not perfect and never has been, and should never been seen as a complete panacea or self-contained solution. However it contains a lot of good stuff around which most of the IT service industry now works and we shouldn't get too worked up about the gaps and throw it all away.
For me the key point has always been 'what is an organization trying to do and what sort of business outcomes are they seeking?'
To answer that you need to engage with senior people who can see the benefits and understand what will need to be done to achieve this - everything else (training, tools, consulting, processes) is subservient to this. Without this level of engagement the success or failure of any ITSM/ITIL service will be completely at the mercy and whim of a few people and their own agendas in each organisation.
As such most of the real value in what the ITSM industry can do is to help organisations to identify their goals and then plan realistically to achieve these - not simply to tell them that they should be all ITIL certified and have these tools or run these projects (which coincidentally just happen to be what is on offer). I can honestly saw that in my 20-odd years of running these projects, about 90% of what I've ever actually done has been around working with the organisation on their structure, skills, people, goals etc - and frankly very little to do with (what are now fairly commoditised) ITIL processes and approaches.
I guess what I'm ultimately saying is that whilst we want the ITSM industry to offer and deliver the best possible solutions and methods, actually for most of what's currently on offer it doesn't actually matter. The Critical Success Factor for most of the projects I've worked on has been the engagement and active interest levels, combined with clear goals set, of the senior guys - regardless of tools, training and how much mapping was done.
So its not that we shouldn;t care and try to improve what's in ITIL and how its run - I just think that right now there's a lot more important stuff to be getting on with with our customers - and if they think that we are more interested in our own industry they won't bother us for too long.
There seems to be a lot of debate and 'ranting' going on still around ITIL. Aidan Lawes has produced I'd say pretty fair analysis of where the ITSM industry has and is going wrong. This lays out a number of areas where greed, avarice, ignorance, naivety and many other sins have been committed by all areas within the ITSM world. We also have Noel Bruton now trying to force his own agenda on the failings of ITIL with his articles and we also have the recent '@fakeITIL' Tweeter who seems content to snipe from the sidelines at all things ITIL.
NO ONE CARES...!!
Well of course we in ITSM do, but the real world of business and public life don't frankly have the time or interest in our current navel-gazing. They are all too busy trying to cut costs, improve service and - most fundamentally - keep their jobs and organizations alive. We are in danger of Nero-fiddling or Titanic deck-chair re-organizing if we spend too much of our efforts in-fighting about ITIL. My position is simply that ITIL is not perfect and never has been, and should never been seen as a complete panacea or self-contained solution. However it contains a lot of good stuff around which most of the IT service industry now works and we shouldn't get too worked up about the gaps and throw it all away.
For me the key point has always been 'what is an organization trying to do and what sort of business outcomes are they seeking?'
To answer that you need to engage with senior people who can see the benefits and understand what will need to be done to achieve this - everything else (training, tools, consulting, processes) is subservient to this. Without this level of engagement the success or failure of any ITSM/ITIL service will be completely at the mercy and whim of a few people and their own agendas in each organisation.
As such most of the real value in what the ITSM industry can do is to help organisations to identify their goals and then plan realistically to achieve these - not simply to tell them that they should be all ITIL certified and have these tools or run these projects (which coincidentally just happen to be what is on offer). I can honestly saw that in my 20-odd years of running these projects, about 90% of what I've ever actually done has been around working with the organisation on their structure, skills, people, goals etc - and frankly very little to do with (what are now fairly commoditised) ITIL processes and approaches.
I guess what I'm ultimately saying is that whilst we want the ITSM industry to offer and deliver the best possible solutions and methods, actually for most of what's currently on offer it doesn't actually matter. The Critical Success Factor for most of the projects I've worked on has been the engagement and active interest levels, combined with clear goals set, of the senior guys - regardless of tools, training and how much mapping was done.
So its not that we shouldn;t care and try to improve what's in ITIL and how its run - I just think that right now there's a lot more important stuff to be getting on with with our customers - and if they think that we are more interested in our own industry they won't bother us for too long.
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