ITSM Now!

I had a few conversations with a candidate in an ITIL v3 Foundations Certification Course I was teaching last month.   The candidate in question is an IT Operations Manger, and would like to implement ITIL in his organization.  He’s been shopping  around for Service Desk software, and has reviewed the offerings from the usual suspects in that area.  There are two significant obstacles standing in the way at the moment, however:

1. The CIO is not currently behind the project, and is somewhat resistant to change.
2. In keeping with the above, there is no budget for the initiative.

So…  what to do?  Can process improvements be achieved without executive buy in and without spending any money?  (more…)

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As many of you are now aware, Microsoft’s Bing search engine suffered a 30 minute outage yesterday. According to CNET:

A Microsoft representative told CNET on Friday that the problem appears to have come when something being tested was moved onto the live site.

I spent a large portion of my career managing mission critical IT Services at GoDaddy.com, an environment with an absolute “zero tolerance” attitude toward unplanned downtime. So, before I climb up onto my soapbox, allow me to acknowledge that I was not there, and that it’s always easier to play “Monday Morning Quarterback” than to manage these types of situations as they happen. </disclamier> (more…)

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Verizon recently ran an ad depicting an iPhone relegated to the Island of Misfit Toys (see the video below). From Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, we know that the Misfit Toys are toys which have been discarded because they have some intrinsic (and fatal) flaw. Residents of the Island include a train with square wheels, an airplane that can’t fly, (more…)

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ITIL makes sense in concept: focus IT efforts on the support and delivery of services that meet the needs of the business. Manage risk. Improve. Rinse and Repeat. It’s really a common sense approach, and it’s hard to argue with that.

The CIO who attends a 60 minute talk about IT Service Management likes what she hears, but at 2:00 AM she wakes up with some nagging questions:

So… How do we actually DO this? (more…)

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Many IT Organizations have implemented a Configuration Management System to track and control IT Service Assets. As I mentioned in my earlier article “Don’t be Intimidated by ITIL”, this system doesn’t necessarily need to be an elaborate and costly commercial product. It just needs to have sufficient scale, features, and capabilities to meet the current and future needs of your particular business. (more…)

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According to a study by TechRepublc, the ITIL Foundations Certification is the 3rd highest paying certification in IT. The two certifications that rank higher (PMP and CAPM) are Project Management based and thus not necessarily specific to IT, making the ITIL cert the highest paying “pure IT” cert on the list. (more…)

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A lot of CIO’s are facing the specter of reduced or frozen IT budgets as the US economy slows and pundits toss around the dreaded “R” word. However, a frozen IT budget can actually present opportunities if it encourages a little healthy self examination. Unfortunately, IT divisions are often paralyzed when these things happen. Instead of taking a hard look at processes and asset management, a lot of IT “leaders” exhibit the tendency to simply limp along and wait for the money to return. (more…)

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I wrote an article on CIO.com regarding the importance of ITIL processes for the SMB space:

When it comes to smaller IT organizations, this means missing the opportunity to “design in” great service oriented processes at a relatively early stage, before bad habits and inefficient processes have a chance to become company culture.

Read the full article here:

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Originally posted in a response to a comment on my article on CIO.com

From a practical standpoint, I have always viewed the discipline of IT Service Management as an ongoing continuum with periodic intersections from the discipline of Project Management. In ITIL v2 the intersection between ITSM and PM was mostly isolated to the “Release Management” process, when a new or revised configuration item (more…)

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When you plug the stereo into the wall, you expect to hear music. A lot goes into generating the electricity, getting it into your home, through the walls, and into that plug, but you don’t have to care about that. The electricity is there when you need it, you get exactly the amount you need, and you can reasonably account for the cost of using it.

It is precisely because these things are true (more…)

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