Knowledge and Power
The novice says “knowledge is power,” and takes pride in their saying going viral. The master reflects on “the proper application of knowledge creates...
Ron Palmer
Ron Palmer
Adobe InDesign TOC Tab Leaders with Spaces
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...
Ron Palmer
The Key to Services is Simplicity
Where organizations start thinking of services in terms of the complications or complexity of delivery they approach services from the wrong direction. Where organizations...
Ron Palmer
01-3 Define and explain the concept of a service (SS 2.1.1)
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...
Ron B Palmer
01-2 Describe and explain why ITIL is successful
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...
Ron B Palmer
01-1 Service Management as a Practice
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...
Ron B Palmer
The Four Aspects of IT Services, Aspect Two
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...
Ron B Palmer
The Four Aspects of IT Services, Aspect One
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...
Ron B Palmer
How to present value in business terms in the real world
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...
Ron B Palmer
IT support sucks but we made our metrics
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...
Ron B Palmer
The End-user’s Perception is Your Reality
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...
Ron B Palmer
IT as Strategic Partner
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...
Ron B Palmer
Configuration Management Database Introduction
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...
Ron B Palmer
Operations and Development Tear Down That Wall
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...
Ron B Palmer
Definitive Stores Reduce Costs
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...
Ron B Palmer
Great Release Management Requires Project Management
Release management impacts every process area in the production environment. In addition its effectiveness and professionalism contributes significantly to the general...
Ron B Palmer
Define Your Roles for Best Communication Flows
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...
Ron B Palmer
Create a Loop to Measure Change Management
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...
Ron B Palmer
One Change Management for all of IT
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...
Ron B Palmer
The CAB is NOT the Change Authority
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...
Ron B Palmer
Urgent Change Doesn’t Mean Bypassing Change Management
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...
Ron B Palmer
Problem Managers are Fire Fighters
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...
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Ron B Palmer Reveals the Sources of his Strategic Thinking
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...
Ron B Palmer
Going Directly from Strategy to Action is a Recipe for Failure in a Complex World
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...
Ron B Palmer
The Clash of Incident and Problem Management
The critical distinction between Incident Management and Problem Management can be defined by their contradictory goals. Incident Management is concerned with restoring...
Ron B Palmer
Incident Problem and Known-Error Relationships
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...
Ron B Palmer
What is a Service
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...
Ron B Palmer
Key Considerations for Service Desk
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,...
Ron B Palmer
Goals for Service Desk
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,...
Ron B Palmer
Introduction to Service Desk
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...
Ron B Palmer
Managers are responsible for the system
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...
Ron B Palmer
Why focus on Process?
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,...
Ron B Palmer
Who Cares what a Process is?
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,...
Ron B Palmer
Service Focus Trumps Technology Focus
Every IT organization is familiar with the natural boundaries for communication and cooperation that arise from organizing IT around technology specialties, which are often...
Ron B Palmer
Services Have Types?
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...
Ron B Palmer
Customers Want Business Services from IT
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...
Ron B Palmer
IT is Dead, Long Live IT
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...
Ron B Palmer
The Strategy Framework
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...
Ron B Palmer
Service Catalog Maxims
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...
Ron B Palmer
IT Business Fundamentals Part 3a
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....
Ron B Palmer
IT Business Fundamentals Part 2
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...
Ron B Palmer
IT Business Fundamentals Part 1
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...
Ron B Palmer
Creating Strategic Thinkers
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...
Ron B Palmer
What is more vital to success, executing strategy or achieving goals?
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...
Ron B Palmer
Where to Start
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...
Ron B Palmer
The IT Manager in a New Era
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...
Ron B Palmer
Defining success for ISO 20000, Section 9.1
There is significant confusion in the ITIL community about the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Configuration Management. Some people believe that the CMDB...
Ron B Palmer
Companies Should NOT wait
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...
Ron B Palmer
Putting Configuration Management in its Place
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...
Ron B Palmer
The CMDB: A Money Pit That Creates No Value?
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...
Ron B Palmer
What’s next for ITIL and IT Service Management
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...
Ron B Palmer
Can an MBA become a programmer in two weeks?
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,...
Ron B Palmer
ITIL’s Journey of Acceptance
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...
Ron B Palmer