The novice says “knowledge is power,” and takes pride in their saying going viral. The master reflects on “the proper application of knowledge creates...
When I wrote my book in 2013 and did the layout in Adobe InDesign, I was able to put tab leaders in my table of contents and have spaces after the chapter title and before the...
Where organizations start thinking of services in terms of the complications or complexity of delivery they approach services from the wrong direction. Where organizations...
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-3 Define and explain the concept of a service (SS 2.1.1) There are a multitude of definitions for the term service. ITIL provides...
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-2 Describe and explain why ITIL is successful (SS 1.4) Many believe that ITIL is successful because it provides a practical...
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-1 Describe the concept of best practices in the public domain (SS 2.1.7, Fig 2.3) Best practices are a way of doing things that...
If you have been struggling with building a services business, then ITIL has provided some help in the form of a new definition for services targeted to the business owner or...
IT service management is about delivering sustainable value to the business from the use of technology. It is not about defining the best process. It’s not about assigning...
A few years ago, I found myself in a two day meeting with a sales person, a technical presales person, and a client’s IT executive team. The company I worked for sold IT...
SLAs should only include those items that can be effectively monitored and measured at a commonly agreed point. Inclusion of items that can’t be effectively monitored almost...
In order for processes and services to be managed and optimized, there must be a feedback loop that provides management information regarding the functioning of the processor...
The quantity and levels of service that IT is able to provide are always bounded by the associated costs. IT Service Level Management (SLM) is tasked with helping the customer...
The configuration management database is a virtual concept and is made up of many physical databases and physical stores of information. It becomes a CMDB, when the...
Many IT organizations suffer from less than optimal communication between development and operations groups. This happens so often that a special term has been created to...
What happens in a typical organization when there is catastrophic damage to a hardware component that requires rebuilding form scratch? In many organizations the existing...
Release management impacts every process area in the production environment. In addition its effectiveness and professionalism contributes significantly to the general...
Effective communication flows are important for any organization. They become increasingly important as organizations grow in size or are required to operate in a more rapid...
How do you know if an individual change or the change process as a whole was successful? This question can be answered by creating a feedback loop. The components of this loop...
Many IT organizations have change processes that are specific to different parts of the organization. For instance, development may have its own change process, and each...
The change advisory board is an important concept in change management. It is a group of key stakeholders of changes and they serve to advise and assist the change manager in...
Urgent changes represent an unrecognized and unmanaged cost to the typical organization. The costs are easily measured in terms of unplanned downtime, utilization of IT...
There are two primary roles inherent in the duties of Problem Management, that of fire fighting and fire prevention. All organizations are faced with emergencies (fires) that...
I learned the benefit of duplicability from my experience as an IT director for two multilevel marketing companies. The name of the game there is to create a system that...
In a simple world people often try to link strategy directly to action plans without any concept of tactics. In a complex world we need a middle piece that lets us accomplish...
The critical distinction between Incident Management and Problem Management can be defined by their contradictory goals. Incident Management is concerned with restoring...
An error in the infrastructure causes a disruption in service. This disruption causes an end-user to call the Service Desk and create an incident record. If the incident can...
Service is an integrated composite that consists of a number of components, such as management processes, hardware, software, facilities and people that provides a capability...
These are some of the key considerations to keep in mind, when implementing the Service Desk function. Information collected here is used in many of the other process areas,...
For every need that an end-user has of IT, there should be an acceptable response from the service desk. For every IT activity that affects an end-user’s ability to work,...
Extending the Range of IT Services – In ITIL the Service Desk is considered to be a function, not a process, and it does more than simply log and resolve incidents. Service...
ITIL is based on quality initiatives in businesses, which find their roots in the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Business students will recognize Dr. Deming as the person who...
In the effort to produce competitive advantage there are three primary resources that IT managers have at their disposal to meet business requirements. They are People,...
Process is a series of related activities aimed at achieving a set of objectives in a measurable, usually repeatable manner. It has defined information inputs and outputs,...
Every IT organization is familiar with the natural boundaries for communication and cooperation that arise from organizing IT around technology specialties, which are often...
Service is an integrated composite that consists of a number of components, such as management processes, hardware, software, facilities and people that provides a capability...
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) embodies the idea that the IT department is a service organization, delivering IT services to the business. As such, IT should...
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. – Alfred North Whitehead IT is a mere infant in the business world, having existed no more than a few...
Are you looking for a more consistent way to produce success in your personal and professional life? Strategy is the fundamental means by which we produce success in anything...
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to Alice: I don’t much care where. The...
ITIL’s Process Confusion NOTE: As promised in an earlier post, the confusion with the terms process and function will be cleared up in IT Business Fundamentals Part 3....
Value Creation Drives Everything I still vividly remember speaking with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar government research facility about value and services. I posed the...
IT as a Business System Why does IT exist as an organization? What is the IT organization? What is its purpose? These are fundamental questions that every IT executive should...
One of my good friends told me of a challenge he and his manager were facing. They needed their people to think more strategically but were having difficulty achieving this...
Too many battles have been lost and business efforts failed because people are confused about these basic concepts. An excellent strategy does not guarantee success anymore...
One of the most common questions in IT Service Management is “where do we start?”
It is a very common understanding that the IT infrastructure and therefore the management...
To really understand the job of CIO you have to dig down to the fundamentals of why the IT department exists at all and build from there. Why do organizations find it...
There is significant confusion in the ITIL community about the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Configuration Management. Some people believe that the CMDB...
How can you reasonably suggest to a company that needs to improve their operations and achieve better alignment with the business that they should wait. Waiting is what they...
I feel guilty every time I teach ITIL Configuration Management. Even though I’ve taught hundreds of students the foundations of ITIL and more than 95% of them pass the ITIL...
The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the most expensive and wasteful dead end in ITIL. The name itself entices technology managers to ITIL implementation failure...
The ITIL community is in a state of confusion at the moment. No one seems to be quite sure what the OGC is attempting to do with this move. I personally am not sure what all...
If a very smart MBA with little or no computer science background took a two week intensive computer science course would they then be qualified to design, build, implement,...
Yesterday, August 21, 2005, we delivered the first day of the first class for the first US graduate program in IT Service Management. This significant event occurred without...