Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

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July 18, 2008

Accelerating an ITSM Transformation

Posted by Shraddha Tilloo, Consultant, Infosys Technologies.

While on my way to the airport, I noticed the fast growth taking place in and around the city in terms of the infrastructure, facilities and technology as well. With the new Bangalore International Airport located 40 miles away from city, my journey was a big long 2.5 hrs, cutting across the city gave me an opportunity to closely watch this change.Smile

Soon I realized that in this agile environment, there is no place for slow movers. It applies to the organizations as well where all the initiatives, products and services have to be just in time, quick and at an accelerated speed. It is more prominent and prudent for IT organizations which are coping up with unprecedented pressure of being a cost effective, innovative, agile and customer focused service provider. In the course of meeting these business demands, IT organizations take on the IT Service Transformation journey.

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July 10, 2008

Delivering IT Service Management Consulting from Offshore – Part 2

By Bruno Calver

In my last entry I discussed some of the benefits of the offshore consulting model, of which there are many, and concluded that overall it was definitely advantageous to the customer. In this posting, I want to open the door a little into some of the challenges I came across when working offshore and what I did and suggest could be done to address them...
 

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Posted by Bruno Calver at 04:46 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

July 08, 2008

Delivering IT Service Management Consulting from Offshore – Part 1

By Bruno Calver 

So, it has been some time since my last post, that’s because I have recently been working on an IT Service Management project from Offshore, not that that should be an excuse to suspend blogging! The project was to design an IT Service Management audit framework for a U.S. finance customer.

In this post I want to talk about the specific experience of working offshore, as well as some general observations regarding working in a company with an offshore/onsite consulting delivery model. I think the picture is slightly different when it comes to high value services such as consulting in comparison to operational support and delivery activities.

 

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June 18, 2008

The Matrix of Corporate Meetings

Posted by Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

Purpose – Accomplish more from corporate meetings

The Matrix is my favorite movie. It has an advanced technology depiction with an underlying philosophical message. Technology and Philosophy, what a cinematic combination! Morpheus, Neo's spiritual leader and guide tells us in The Matrix "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony”. I have seen that organization meetings have a fate and the irony is in the participant behavior.
Being a consultant I organize meetings and I am invited to a quite a few Business and Technology meetings. There are many instances where I feel that meetings can be organized better and then they could have achieved better results. One theme that I have found particularly challenging is the chameleon factor.

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June 10, 2008

Metrics and Communication

- Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

How do we create a common language of Communication and create Team Synergy using metrics?
America’s first billionaire J. Paul Getty said it “I would rather have one percent of efforts of a hundred people than a hundred percent of my own efforts”

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May 19, 2008

Offshore Consulting – a foreigners view of living and working in India

Guest Author: Bruno Calver 

 

So, now it is time to get to the juicy part, in my opinion, of my series of blogs. What is it like living and working in India? How is it to be over a 1000 miles (or 1609km in metric terms) from the customer? Are things done differently offshore? Is it a professional and cultural shock?

 

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April 21, 2008

An intercontinental tools implementation proposal - part 2

Guest Author: Bruno Calver

In my previous blog entry I spoke about some of the general aspects of what to consider when specifying an ITSM tools implementation project, as well as some of my experiences working offshore. I also highlighted that it was imperative to show you understood some of the client’s challenges. I want to explore this area in a little more detail and discuss some of the questions and challenges that our client was facing.

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April 17, 2008

A CMDB for your CMDB

"I want to implement my Service Management tool out of the box. Minimum customization absolutely."

Given the ballooning costs of maintaining highly customized products, associated vendor lock-in worries and the nightmare of product upgrades on customized product sets, more organizations prefer to go out of the box or with minimum customization with their ITSM product implementations.

Wonderful so far. But how do you decide how much customization is enough? What is that minimum customization threshold value? And more importantly, how do you know when you breach that threshold?

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Posted by Arvind Raman at 03:52 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April 07, 2008

Positioning IT Service management in the V3 context

Traditionally, ITIL was considered as a best practice framework for operations team who support the IT functions of an organization. There was limited credibility around IT strategy, planning, portfolio management, enterprise architecture, or solutions delivery. ITIL V3 has changed this perception by providing a lifecycle view of services and ITIL is no longer seen as an isolated process framework.

To enable V3 transformation, service management (SM) organization needs to develop a broader outlook. Can SM enable this transformation on its own? Whom do they need to partner with?

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Posted by Renjith Sreekumar at 05:35 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April 02, 2008

An intercontinental tools implementation proposal

Posted by Bruno Calver

Recently I was asked to assist an effort in putting together a proposal for an IT Service Management (ITSM) tools project for one of our UK based clients. I am currently working offshore for a while to get a feel for organisational life in India, having recently been transferred from London.

So, what does a process consultant have to do with a technical implementation of an ITSM tool?  Maybe a better question is, ‘Is an ITSM tools implementation just a technical deployment?’ The answer is a positive ‘NO’ (if that’s not a contradiction in terms).

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February 29, 2008

Factors affecting magnitude of effort required to implement ITSM

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 ?

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February 22, 2008

How much effort is 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?

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February 21, 2008

ITIL Implementations - How long? ... Introducing Atul Porwal

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.

Posted by Arvind Raman at 05:28 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 10, 2008

Service Governance - a vital step?

Here are 3 questions to kick off 2008 and your organizations' IT Service Management strategy

How old is your enterprise / IT governance model?

Is it relevant to Services and scalable to a wider audience?

What is its measure of performance?

With ITIL V3 being all the buzz and Service Strategy being a core element of this framework, a scalable, stable and performing Governance model to govern services cannot be too far.

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Posted by Ramshankar Ramdattan at 01:03 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 06, 2007

Defining the Service Owner role - Part 1

With V3.0 shifting the focus of ITIL from its traditional process centric approach towards a service lifecycle approach, there is an increased need for defining service centric roles within IT organizations. This paradigm shift of focus from IT systems & processes view to IT services view, which drive creation of values and influence positive outcomes to the customers, have made services the most dynamic “asset” with in an IT organization. As organizations progress towards the “Service-centric” model, the question of "who owns a Service" is being asked within an organization perpetually at various levels and at various times.

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October 23, 2007

Web 2.0 and ITSM: Long & Winding Roads?

Does web 2.0 hold any meaning from an IT Service Management (ITSM) perspective? RSS feeds, wikis, blogs - do they hold any promise of transforming ITSM as we know it?

Over the last couple of years, there has been an explosive increase in the adoption of web 2.0 concepts fuelled by the internet community. But how much of this has trickled to the ITSM space? Web 2.0 aspects including this blog have largely focused on commenting about ITSM and not really in the actual service delivery.

So are these two huge phenomena going to give each other a skip? Or are their paths destined to cross somewhere? And if so, what does that really mean?

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Posted by Arvind Raman at 01:08 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

October 18, 2007

Have you built the right foundation for your ITSM tool? - Part 1

I was recently watching a re-run of Apollo 13, arguably one of the most successful space expedition movies based on an actual event. One sequence that caught my attention was when Tom Hanks and his crew are faced with the challenge of fitting square CO2 filters from one module into the round hole of the other module in order to bring the CO2 level down in the space craft. To everyone’s relief the ingenious NASA engineers find a solution to the incompatibility problem and save our Heroes. What is the relevance of this story to an ITSM blog….read on.

 

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