Step 1 was about creating the context for change, getting things ready for a change to occur defining what should be changed and why. Step 2 is about determining who really cares (or should care) about it and why. Read the rest of this entry »
When a customer hires a company like mine to outsource their IT department, they always come with a question or a problem that needs fixing, and rarely asks to help keeping things exactly as they are alleging their organization and processes work perfectly. After all, almost every organization has pain points, and allmost all managers and leaders are trying to improve their organizations. ..
Magic Quadrants
I don’t think there is a more important source of information worldwide on IT than Gartner; it brings in-dept analysis and research about almost any aspect regarding technological universe. It’s the place you must go to know in which Hype-Cycle stage the cloud computing thing is, if VDI is the magic potion that will set companies free from the slavery of hyper-expensive and slender productivity of desktop management, to know the maturity lever achieved worldwide on the adoption of ITIL processes, or CobIT, or Six Sigma, or CMMI; in Gartner they discuss the appropriateness of getting an ISO 20000 certificate, who’s the coolest provider on each technological branch, and so on.
From June 28th, ITIL Acronyms, an app for iPhone and iPod Touch is given away free at AppStore (it was 0′79€ before); it’s a list of all common acronyms widespreaded along ITIL publications, ITIL & IT related blogs and articles and frequently blurbed by anyone more or less involved in that IT Service Management thing.
Basically, it displays on a list all the acronyms and what they stand for, and clicking on one of them triggers a Google search of those words; this may be not the most useful feature of the app, but easily get access to the meaning of some of those acronyms is worth buying this app. Well, buying… I mean, it’s free, so as long as there’s a gap on your iphone for one more app, just download it and avoid looking dumb when you hear about SIP or BIA or BCP.
The Spanish Jury after their unanimous decision: ITIL V3 is worse (sic)
A few minutes ago, a mail landed in my mailbox from an IT training center offering ITIL V2 Practitioner courses partially subsidized by Catalan Government. I’m talking about “Service support” and “Service delivery” courses, you know, all that ITIL V2 stuff. I hope I made it clear: it’s V2 we are talking about; no V3 signs anywhere in that mail.
I insist about it displaying ITIL V2 courses because in Spain is settled the general opinion that V2 is better than V3, although anyone can tell for sure why.
After the jump, the most common bullshit arguments supporting such a daring quote…
Give one of those to everyone at your company before letting them contact your Service Desk
Setting incident management, at a higher or lower maturity level, in an organization, is the only way to try to keep the sanity of the IT crew. Besides the effort needed to get Service Desk (SD) personnel committed to do a perfect by-the-book management of their incidents and requests, efforts must also focus on training users on how to contact the SD and place their requests; the way I see it, it’s needed not just to make the management of their requests faster, more efficient, eliminating the need of being constantly contacted by technicians asking questions relative to the incident because of poor information supplied to the SD; it’s also needed because they must be responsible on their relationship with technology they work with and with the SD and, in the end, the way they use and take profit of the means the company puts at their disposal to reach the business goals (a goal shared with IT, of course).
A practical case, after the jump…
Root cause analysis (RCA) is an intuitive activity, we are naturally inclined to do it in our daily life; we know the techniques and methods to make deep and sharp analyses of our daily events, from enumerating causal factors to the generation of recommendations and the implementation of changes to eliminate the underlying cause.
Why, then, it’s so hard to take that ability to a work environment?
Tweet tweeet
Lately, it’s exhausting reading on a nearly daily basis on any blog a success case of using Twitter at work; some of them, obvious, on IT support teams, though none of them about using it as an ITIL process management support tool. Does Twitter fit among ITIL support tools?
After the jump, I’ll try to make my try explaining how…
I’ve been working on IT for about 8 years now, always as a member of support teams (except for a couple of years, when I, just me, was the “support team”). Through the last 2 years, beyond the mega-hype of ITIL as a magic recipe to turn IT shops into perfect machines (as if that was enough) one of the most used expressions for selling and buying IT services has been “continual improvement”.
On January 2008 I joined a support team of 5 people, where I played the systems administrator role; the customer was a private holding who bought to my company a managed service pack, including the adoption of a few ITIL v2 processes: incident, problem and change management.
I had never known, through my years of experience in the IT field, nothing like problem management, whose goal is finding the underlying root cause of major or recurring incidents and then raise a request for a change (of the infrastructure, the operations procedures or documentation or whatever) to permanently eliminate that cause and so prevent the recurrence of such incidents.
No creo que haya ninguna fuente de información del mundo IT más importante que Gartner; ofrece análisis e investigación sobre casi cualquier aspecto relacionado con el universo tecnológico. Es donde debe uno acudir para saber en qué fase del hype-cycle se encuentra la movida del cloud computing, si lo del VDI es la poción mágica que liberará a las empresas de la poco carísima y poco productiva gestión de escritorios, qué nivel de madurez se ha alcanzado en la adopción de procesos ITIL, CobIT, Six Sigma o CMMI, se discute la pertinencia de conseguir una ISO 20000, cuál es el proveedor más molón en cada área tecnológica…
Hace 4 años que descubrí Gartner, pero los disparatados precios de la suscripción a sus fondos documentales me convirtieron en un niño triste y pobre que mira desde la calle los pasteles expuestos en el escaparate. Hasta que en febrero de este año, descubrí que con la matrícula de la universidad me concedían acceso gratuito (aunque limitado) a Gartner; y lo aprovecho, desde luego.
Desde ese momento, a dios puse por testigo de que nunca más volvería a tomar una decisión sin consultar antes sus Magic Quadrants.
Y desde luego, todos deberíamos estar al tanto de los hype-cycles que ayudan a tener una visión general del panorama IT global año tras año, y a tomar con calma el entusiasmo con el que algunos acogen cualquier nueva idea loca lanzada al aire desde Palo Alto, CA… aunque sólo sea por tantear el ambiente (y si no, basta echar una mirada a lo que se movía en 1995).
