The trends that made the difference - Posted by Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal
The past decade has sparked several noteworthy developments in Infrastructure Management Services (IMS), like the acceptance of ITIL , Remote Management of Datacenters and Off-shoring of Services, and new models in computing. Let’s examine some of these key trends.
Continue reading "Infrastructure Management Revolutionized" »
Posted by Gaurav Uniyal, Consultant, Infosys Technologies
Posted by Gaurav Uniyal, Consultant, Infosys Technologies
ITIL V3 (IT Infrastructure Library - Version 3) celebrated its first anniversary last month, and the authors would be reasonably pleased with the way industry has accepted the new concepts introduced by the framework. One of the interesting changes introduced by ITIL V3 is the Configuration Management System (CMS), a more realistic and realizable version of ITIL V2's CMDB (Configuration Management Database).
The Configuration Management database (CMDB) is the most talked-about, failure-prone and cost & effort consuming implementation among all service management systems. The ITSkeptic goes as far as to call it ITIL's Dead Elephant. Given the dependence of all other service management processes on CMDB, it has unquestionably attained the status of the “must-have” but "no-idea-how-to-get-there" system for most organizations.
With the introduction of the Configuration Management System (CMS) in ITIL V3, is it time for organizations to revisit their implementation strategy? Can an organization really hope to deploy and manage a CMDB / CMS? And what does a CMDB / CMS look like - a monolithic database or an integrated multiple federated solution?
Here's introducing Gaurav Dutt Uniyal.
Continue reading "CMDB Implementation ... Introducing Gaurav Uniyal" »
It's been over a year now since the ITIL V3 publications came out. The recently announced new V3 certification scheme has been much awaited. The format and style for the V3 Service Manager exam is expected to be announced in the near future. That however, doesn't seem to have halted folks from continuing with plans for taking the ITIL V2 Service Manager Exam. I have been recommending my colleagues who have been putting off their V2 Master exam to take it up quickly. After all, a known "beast" (read V2) is easier to tackle than an unknown one (read V3).
So, to those still planning to go ahead with their ITIL V2 Service Manager exam, here's my compilation of nine tips to see you through. Let me know what you think.
Continue reading "The ITIL Master Exam - V2 Service Manager" »
"IT is not a great atmosphere for those with families and women with children are constantly having to compromise." Says Deloitte's CIO Mary Hensher, in a recent edition of CIO. And for women in consulting that pressure is far higher. Being flexible about work locations and being willing to relocate on a short notice are what characterize a typical process consultant's life.
Just three years ago, I remember even our consulting group had less than five women consultants. However, things have changed for the better now. That number today stands at a healthy 30%! One giant leap that. As one of the long-standing consultants within our group, Shraddha Tilloo should know all about the ups, downs and pressures that come along with the job of being a traveling consultant with a family.
Continue reading "On diversity ... Introducing Shraddha Tilloo" »
So what are the different touch points where IT needs to re-think their language with Business? And what kind of changes are we talking about? Are these changes easy to make?
Continue reading "Language differences between IT and (the rest of) Business" »
Everyone is aware these days of the advantages of using a blended or best-shore model for a whole range of IT and business services. Most people associate the core offering of this model with business process outsourcing (BPO) or IT operations, i.e. highly repeatable and stable process based activities. Not many people, however, are aware of how higher value services such as consulting and aspects of the sales process might be delivered offshore for global clients. Does it work? What are the advantages and what are the disadvantages? Are things done differently offshore?
Continue reading "Offshore ITIL Consulting - Introducing Bruno Calver" »
Many of those in the Process Implementation space would readily assent if i were to make a statement that "Every process framework is an Island". Several best-of-breed process frameworks have evolved to the extent that some of them are now an industry (certifications, trainings etc etc). Even "Missionaries" are trained to "spread the faith" ( For ex: 'Black Belts", "ITIL Masters", "CISSP" etc). In my experience, i have come across several situations where discussions on which is the best process framework to adopt, in a particular situation, sometimes tend to border on the ideological-side and practitioners tend to adopt a "My way or the highway" stance.
It is in this context, my thoughts goto John Donne, the famous English poet, who, four hundred years ago, said - "No Man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent (1)" And that is exactly what we are looking at when we talk about integration of process frameworks as a solution for IT services in a holistic perspective
Over the last year, we put together a crack team of several process experts and practitioners in Infosys to work on creating an integrated Process model. After several months of intensive efforts, heated discussions, experience sharing etc etc we have come up with a coherent process model that incorporates the mandates of different frameworks such as CMM, ITIL, COBIT, ISO27001, eSCM and a couple of other popular process frameworks augmented with our IT service management experience as a service provider.
Our objective when we started this exercise was in a figurative way "to build a continent" (ref the poet above!). We figured that by building bridges between these process frameworks we will be able to provide to our customers an integrated and efficient way of delivering on our IT Service management promises. In this journey of creating this integrated perspective, the insights that we had was extremely rewarding and took us into some very interesting areas of research.
Posted by - Atul Porwal
Not all organizations are same and neither is the effort required to implement ITSM. In my last blog I talked about the ITSM implementation stages and activities, which provided pointers towards areas “where” the effort is required. “How much” of that effort is required is driven by some of the Organization-specific factors. So what really are those factors ?
Continue reading "Factors affecting magnitude of effort required to implement ITSM" »
Posted by - Atul Porwal
With more and more organizations moving towards adopting ITIL as the best practices framework for IT Service Management, there is growing curiosity from organizations as to what it will take from effort and cost perspective to reach that coveted ITILized state. Is the ITSM implementation like any other initiative or are there special considerations? What are the different phases during ITSM journey and what are the key effort heads? How to plan meticulously to ensure that there is no “surprise” effort during the implementation? Is there a structured way of estimating effort and is the magnitude of effort required proportionate to the scope and size of the Organization?
Continue reading "How much effort is required to implement ITSM ?" »
As the popularity and adoption rate of ITIL moves up, it brings along with it the challenging task of estimating ITIL implementation costs and timelines across the organization’s internal units, geographies, service providers and diverse technologies. Like any other project, an ITIL implementation project also needs to be planned meticulously both in terms of tasks as well as implementation duration.
While planning for ITIL implementation, have you wondered - how long does it take to implement ITIL? Are there a defined set of parameters to be considered to calculate efforts? What are the factors influencing effort estimation? What parameters should you tweak if you have some pre-defined time/budget constraints? When should you involve an external consultant? What type of role-profiles should you consider for a particular activity to calculate effort? Does selection and sequencing of processes and tool(s) affect the implementation duration?
If you have asked yourself these questions, here's introducing Atul Porwal. Atul is an IT Service Management and Information Security Consultant. He has been involved in various engagements ranging from consulting and implementation to management of infrastructure and security projects. Atul's experience includes providing process and technology solutions for fortune 500 companies across the globe. He is also a certified ITIL Practitioner. He was recently involved in framing a reference model for calculating effort requirements for ITIL consulting and implementation engagements for Infosys. I am inviting Atul to share his thoughts and experiences through these blogs.
Service Lifecycle, Service Portfolio, Service Catalog, Service Asset, oh dear. It goes on. And ITIL V3 just exponentially increased the IT vocabulary around the Service front, it seems.
So, how does someone navigate through this Service Conundrum? Well, here's introducing Renjith Sreekumar -
Through these blogs, I have requested Renjith to share his experience of designing and managing Service centric processes. Renjith is a consultant with the IT Service Management Process Consulting Group of Infosys. Over the past few years, he has helped several ITIL driven process engagements with clients including global fortune 500 companies.
Over to you, Renjith.
"... Digital Business is littered with success stories. But a supplementary question concerning a lack of celebrity IT presenters on television sent me away thinking about IT’s image." A while back Financial Times Digital Business supplement carried a rather interesting editorial from Peter Whitehead on celebrities in IT - or rather the lack of them.
Think about the internet and there are a host of celebrity names that spring to your mind. The first wave dot com celebrities had a substantial number of celebrities - Jeff Bezos of amazon, Pierre Omidyar of ebay, Sabeer Bhatia of hotmail fame. The story becomes even more spectacular with the web 2.0 wave - Mark Zuckerberg of facebook, Larry Page & Sergey Brin who co-founded google, oh well I could go on all day.
Think about IT Service Management. Now think about ITSM celebrities. Whose name springs to your mind? Any one? Any one at all? Sigh ...
Continue reading "Rockstar ITSM Celebrity - Anyone? Anyone?" »
As most managers involved in the journey towards ITIL and BSM implementations would agree, the toughest hurdle to cross is an enterprise-wide CMDB implementation. An effective and functioning Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or in ITIL V3 terms, a Service and Asset Configuration management Information system (CMIS), is particularly challenging for several reasons including:
It is in this context, the recent announcement by the CMDB federation (www.cmdbf.org) around the release of the draft industry CMDB standards for a CDMB is particularly welcome. Several product vendors such as IBM, BMC software, HP, CA and Fujitsu ltd have provided their support for the draft framework. (See http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=122436 press release for details)
It was not long ago, i remember, when the discussions around ITIL i would have with customers would be around where to draw the process boundaries. For e.g. where does change end and release begin? how do you distinguish the differences between the role of the release manager and the configuration manager for deployment of large IT rollouts and so on? One was always left with a very uneasy sense of enveloping process bureaucracy at the end of such discussions. The business requirements seemed to be somewhere lost under such weighty discussions.
The most creditable aspect of ITIL v3 seems to have been to bring out the forefront a new services focus. Emphasis has been made on the fact that strategy, definition and design of services are as important as the definition of the processes in a service management program.
The trend in terms of closer alignment with the business now seems to have moved from the department/empire focus of the 1990's to the process focus of the 200x's and is now moving to the services-era with an increased adoption into V3. One of my favoured representations of the shift below
That gets us to the centrality question. First there was the technology-centric implementation. Then came the process-centric operations. Moving into an services-centric framework, one cant help but wonder when are we going to get to the business-centric IT days. Or perhaps that is the topic of ITIL V4 :-)
Recently, I came across this blog from BMC's Ken Turbitt on Customer Focus. As Ken says (and of course ITIL V3 too), IT must have Business focus, with Business being IT's customer. While that is true, the main theme for Service Management continues to revolve around ensuring an excellent end-to-end Customer Experience. And having a Customer Focus is critical for that.
Over the last few weeks, I saw some amazing customer focus in action and experienced first-hand excellent customer service, that I wanted to share with you.
Continue reading "Customer Experience @ The London Bikeathon" »
The split of sales and delivery is well understood in traditional services organizations. The Sales team reaches out to customers, understands requirements, gets the order and then manages the customer relationship on an ongoing basis. On the other hand, the Delivery team is responsible for ensuring services are provisioned, as agreed in the Statement of Work. In some cases the Delivery team is dedicated for customers, in many cases it might be shared.
This concept is being adapted by quite a few IT organizations too where a split is created between a Demand organization which manages client relationships and a Supply organization which is a factory delivering the “goods”. David Mark and Diogo Rau of McKinsey talk about this on cio.com in this article.
A proven method of initiating an IT Service Management program is to identify a set of processes based on the challenges the organization is facing and perform a current state assessment. The impact a good assessment has on the benefits realized from such a program cannot be doubted. Knowing where you are is absolutely essential to understanding how you will get to the destination.
But how do you know your organization is “ready” to perform an assessment - Is it enough to identify the best practice framework you want to align to? Is it ok to call the consultant right away and put him on the job? Or maybe send some key IT staff for an ITIL training?
Continue reading "Starting the Journey - Aim, Fire, … Ready?" »
Many organizations, particularly in the last couple of years, have been chasing the el dorado of Business Service Management. This term that appeared first on a few analyst reports a few years back seemed to have an unstoppable momentum. Soon it was the darling jargon of several IT Consultants, system integrators and soon enough even some client managers warmed up to the idea. It seemed logically enough the Next Big Thing. Last year we even saw product vendors like BMC base their product rebranding of their new-version ITSM platform on the BSM theme.
Continue reading "Business Service Management - Are we there yet?" »
