After a lot of deliberation and rethinking and after about 20 days of preparation, I finally made up my mind to take the ITIL v3 Foundation Course. A rainy afternoon welcomed me to put my plan into action. As I went to the test centre, I kept reminding myself that this is a perfect business case wherein I have to concentrate on a break-even for the investment than arriving at huge ROI.

For all those who have been used to ITIL v2 concepts, v3 Foundation would come as a shower after the drizzle. And the best way to enjoy this downpour is to get drenched in it. What I mean is that while v2 concentrates only on Service Support and Service Delivery, v3 comes with a whole lot of concepts ranging from Service Strategy, designing the Service Design Package to transitioning them into Operations, complete with a framework for Continual Service Improvement. A humble request to all the prospective test-takers – Do not have a schoolboy approach of preparing only a handful of key concepts because the 40 questions will literally take you through every nook and cranny of these 5 service lifecycles.

So, where do I stand in this debate? To me, the very point that we are debating about the good vs bad of ITIL shows that there is a much darker and deeper underbelly of IT operations that has got exposed because of ITIL. Call it what you want, if you understand what yor business problems are and are implementing "next practices" to sort these out, you are well on your way to getting there.

While it is true that ITIL has a comprehensive set of best practices which cover all aspects of service management, this is also true that adopting best practices and achieving best practices results is not a fast track approach, nor is a quick win option for any IT organization.

And intent straight from the heart speaks far louder than words. Here's one such example. Introducing Gautam - "I started my IT career selling Apple computers to pre-press & publishing outfits in India in the year 1993. That experience taught me that technology can be simple yet extremely powerful. I firmly believe that common people especially in our country can benefit significantly from the use of information technology but are being “crowded out” by the private sector. My dream is to start a company which would focus on developing simple, inexpensive & useful solutions for the common man of our country."

“IT can transform your business”
“IT working with you as a strategic business partner”
“Achieving competitive advantage in business with IT”

Innovation is another term that we all love to use. Innovation to me should be more than just good quality creative solutions based on industry practice to suit the client environment, it is transformative. Why not read more and join my POLL...

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.

So on taking orders and delivery, the food industry has got it pretty much right, but so have several others. Think Retail – where prices of products are clearly marked, product features described etc.

Apparently a lot of people and from all over the globe. And they are not your customers. Today’s conviction of 11 persons for the one of the largest ever data breach in terms of records is an indicator of this. What’s so interesting about this? Here are some facts:

I have always found the term Software License Management to be quite ambiguous with regard to the features of the tools available in the market for this.  Some vendors offer very exciting features like license harvesting, and consequently cost savings. However, in the last two asset management tool implementation projects I handled for clients, Software License Management was nothing more than maintaining the records of all the software licenses of the organization in a central Asset Management tool. In one case, we integrated this with the procurement tool so as to get the financial information directly into the Asset management system. Is that all?

In the section "Managing the Money Pit", Carr talks about how the basic assumption of IT spends going down - and not up - is becoming a reality. Nothing earth-shattering there, but a simple reminder to all of us ITSM practitioners and consultants on the need to constantly sweat our ITSM investments. And where better to start than your existing ITSM tools.

In that context, I would like to introduce Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal.

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).

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.

Some kind of dependency on one person is a way of life in most IT departments in small and mid size organizations and its not uncommon even in large organizations. We are all used to that ‘wizard’ in IT department who knows those key systems like no one does and who can do everything. Every once in a while these guys turn rogue and we start debating how imperative it is to be not dependent on one person but do we ever try going beyond this reasoning!