Discovering How and Why empowers you to Succeed


Ron is a highly trusted and respected technology management consultant with over 20 years of industry experience working for companies such as Microsoft, Accenture, and Deloitte LLC. As an IT management consultant Ron has guided some of the world’s largest corporations through difficult worldwide integration and standardization projects resulting in greater operational efficiencies while dramatically improving the way IT staff work together around the globe to address and solve the world’s toughest IT management challenges. Ron earned the coveted IT Service Manager certification in 2001 while at Microsoft and earned the coveted ITIL Expert certification in 2007 while working as an Examiner creating qualification exams in the ITIL Professional Qualification Scheme for the APM Group.

Smart people change the world by first discovering how and why the world works the way it does. Knowledge and understanding is power! If you are looking for paint by numbers solutions or simple check lists to follow, you are in the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you are driven to understand; if you are driven to know how things work; if you can’t rest unless you understand why things occur the way they do then you are in the right place.

This site focuses on two specific areas because they fascinate me and provide my livelihood. Is this site for you? It is if you care about IT Service Management or Strategy.

IT Service Management – the idea that IT departments exist to deliver value to the business in the form of technology enabled services and should be run very much as a business-within-a-business.

Strategy – defined by the author as the process through which living things bring desires and action together to produce success.

You can get results in these areas without spending the fanatical amounts of time thinking about, researching, and working with these concepts that I have committed to. Your time is valuable. My job is to research, synthesize, and summarize difficult and complex subjects so that you can quickly put these tools to use. You can leverage my work to produce real-world results as a practitioner in the trenches and to more rapidly achieve your personal goals.

I’ve earned my living since 2001 training, consulting, and writing about IT Service Management. The articles you will read come from many years of hands on experience in the field training and consulting for fortune 100 companies and from portions of my book that was based on ITIL version 2. With an emphasis in Economics, I am able to get to the heart of the value discussion and position IT as a business operating within a business in a way that is uniquely different from the traditional technical approach. Get first hand evidence of how I approach resolution of real-world IT management and strategy problems by following me in the forums on LinkedIN.

Complexity is NOT solved with more complexity!!!

As you read you will find unique responses to complex problems and universal systemic approaches to understanding the problems and ways to apply structured rules toward solving those problems. This approach provides highly repeatable, fast and efficient methods for solving difficult and complex problems. Many people believe that you need complex solutions to solve complex problems but this thinking will lead you into a trap. Solving complex problems requires a combination of simplification where possible, powerful (not complex) tools designed specifically for complex problems, and an ability to find leverage points that deliver big successes for little effort.

Systems theory and complexity theory heavily influence the ideas presented. However, you don’t have to be an expert in any of these ideas to get the benefits from my explanations. Complex problems can often be solved by applying straight forward action at strategic points. And frameworks provide structure for applying these straight forward actions in a coordinated fashion for even greater results. Go beyond the academic discussion and get to these strategic leverage points.

Don’t be one of those people who continues to insist that managing enterprise IT in a large or global organization is not a complex problem. These people bury their heads in the sand and attempt to solve complex problems with solutions designed for simple organizations. Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Recognize that enterprise IT is complex and change your approach.

How do you cope with a world that is growing more and more complex and unpredictable?

Do you know how it is when you start what you believe to be a simple project and it turns into a huge effort? That’s what happened to me in 2001 except that the huge effort turned into a burning passion. I simply set out to get a clear definition of strategy, tactics, and operations and to better understand how the three concepts work together. I quickly learned that there were no simple answers and that nobody seems to agree about any of this.

That realization began my quest to either discover the answers or to develop a conceptual framework that would provide some answers. The results of my quest surprised me and are being developed into a book. Get a glimpse of what the book will deliver by following me in the strategy forums on LinkedIN.

Strategy is one of those complex problems that people have been debating for at least 2,500 years, since the time of Sun Tzu, and yet there still isn’t a definition of strategy that most people can agree on. Where most people address issues of strategy from their specific areas of professional interest such as business, war, politics, or self-help, I address strategy in its most fundamental and universal form. The driving belief is, everyone should be able to benefit from using strategy especially as the world becomes more complex and unpredictable. You need to benefit from using strategy now, immediately in your day-to-day personal and professional life. Get the competitive edge that comes from taking a strategic approach to life.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in Business Information Systems and a minor in Economics from Utah State University (USU). I also spent a year doing graduate work in Economics at USU before the real world intruded and gainful employment beckoned. My passion for Economics came from a desire to understand one of the most complex challenges we face, the worldwide economy and began as early as pre-teen discussions that I had with my grandmother about the Great Depression hardships she lived through.

IT Service Management, Frameworks, and Strategy are tools

I’m also fascinated by tools and became interested in computers as phenomenally powerful tools for solving business problems. Unlike so many people in my profession who are engineers who happen to find themselves in a business role, I consider myself a business person who loves computers as business tools. While I have a deep understanding of the technology and years of hands on experience as a systems engineer and programmer, I approach these skills from a different perspective. This, I believe, gives me a powerful ability to teach business concepts in IT management to people who began their careers as engineers and were not exposed to these business concepts through their engineering or computer science education.

I hold the ITIL Service Manager certification that I earned in 2002 and the ITIL Expert certification that I earned in 2009. I was actually among the first group of people, APMG Examiners, to earn this certification and was on the team responsible for creating the initial four Service Manager Bridge exams. I have to admit that helping write the exams gave me a slight benefit in taking the exam but somebody has to be first. Before this, I spent three years as part of an EXIN team of experts who reviewed, revised, and wrote ITIL Foundation Exam questions.

Universities should embrace IT Service Management in their Curriculums

A close friend and I proposed the first ever graduate program in IT Service Management to the graduate school at the University of Dallas and we were instrumental in getting that program up and running. The first course was based on my certified foundations course materials and a pre-release copy of my book IT Service Management Foundations: ITIL Study Guide was used as the course book. The book had just been submitted to the book printer and not actually printed yet, so I printed copies for each student and placed them in three-ring binders. That program is still going strong today and provides academic validation of IT Service Management concepts.

My book was subsequently used in universities all over the world from places as far apart as San Antonio Texas, Dallas Texas, Helsinki Finland, Australia, and even China. One of my greatest personal rewards from writing that book was to have it used by so many professors as course material for their academic courses.

At approximately that same time through the itSMF Academic Sub-Committee and in conjunction with the University of Dallas, I helped facilitate the first ever annual academic conference in IT Service Management which was a great and recurring success. That effort earned me an Industry Knowledge Contribution award from the itSMF in 2007. I am a supporter of quality academic organizations, education in general, and particularly life-long learning. I hope to one day continue my formal education, get my PhD. and teach at a university. In the meantime, I will contribute as a practitioner through my free blog articles and additional books.

Since graduating from Utah State University, I have worked for organizations both large and small. The easily recognizable large companies are Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Accenture. I have held a number of roles from network administrator, programmer, senior engineer, customer service representative, technical account manager, operations consultant, managing consultant, and director of IT operations. In each of these roles, I have learned a great deal about successfully delivering Enterprise IT services. I have also owned and operated my own business primarily delivering ITSM training and consulting.

Self Publishing has become easier than ever

Even though the premier publisher in the ITSM community offered to publish my book, I chose the entrepreneurial approach and self-published. Building and operating a successful small publishing company was a uniquely challenging and satisfying experience both for its personal and financial rewards. While I wouldn’t recommend self-publishing for the faint of heart, it is becoming a much more realistic and respectable option for the entrepreneurial minded.

Prior to graduating from Utah State University, I served in two different branches of the military bringing perspective from both the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army. I was lucky to serve in a relatively peaceful window of time, joining the Marine Corps just after the Marines were attacked in Beirut Lebanon and leaving the Army on terminal leave just as the First Gulf War started. I was in the Army during the Panama invasion but did not participate. My time in the military gave me first hand experience accomplishing large things by repeating simple actions over and over with purpose. It also gave me a perspective on strategy as a valuable tool for people in all ranks, not just the generals.

 

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