http://www.itsmnow.com Topics in IT Service Management and ITIL Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:16:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=20 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=19 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=18 Sorry for the long hiatus, I've had a lot of projects underway.  Should be back with regular content through 2010, though. http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=17 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=15 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, ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=14 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=12 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, ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=11 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=10 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 ... http://www.itsmnow.com/?p=9