Published: August 31 2009, 10:59 AM | 4 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

One of the primary themes of the Australian itSMF National conference held in August 2009 in Australia was how organizations should manage governance of their IT environment. IT Governance is defined by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) as:

Let’s face it, IT and business alignment is no longer enough. IT must work with the business to ensure integration and without governance you cannot ensure this. Think for a moment about performing a banking transaction. Whether the transaction is preformed using an ATM, via Internet banking or at a branch, without technology the transaction will not be placed and you will be unable to receive your money. The technology component of that transaction is crucial. I recently  read about a supermarket where the system running the cash registers failed. The failed system formed part of the transaction system interfacing with the debit and credit card system. Ultimately, the failure led to hundreds of grocery carts being abandoned in the store and much ill will with customers. The store manager was forced to close the store until the IT services were restored. 

Implementing a good ITSM environment will indeed assist you in your quest for good service delivery. Keep in mind, however, that to integrate with the business, sound governance is critical. Based on my extensive work in the arena of IT Governance, I developed my TOP 5 LIST of deadly sins to avoid in your governance journey and over the next few weeks I will be sharing these with you for your edification.

 IT Governance Focus Area’s Diagram

Source: COBIT 4.1 ©1996-2007 IT Governance Institute. (more information available on the IT Governance
Focus Area’s in COBIT 4.1 available from ISACA.org).

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Published: August 31 2009, 09:00 AM | no comments
by CA Community

In July, Google announced their second operating system, Chrome OS, but somehow this got a lot more attention than their first (Android). I am sure this has to do with the fact it now seems an all out war between two giants, both doing Search, both doing Mobile, both doing Office Suites and now both doing OS’s. All four are multi-billion dollar markets, but strangely this battle seems to point back to the browser, a market where, so far, nobody managed to make a buck.

In fact, the idea of a portable browser came originally from a third billion dollar idea. Back then it was called Thin Client. Now we may call it a Netbook, iPhone or AppPhone, but the premise is still to put as little clutter (waste) between the user and the app or the content (the value). Which starts to sound like (minimize waste, maximize value a.k.a. …) Lean IT.

Now, if you live next to a bakery, it makes no sense to fire up your oven every morning for some fresh bagels (or croissants depending on which part of the globe you live). But if the nearest bakery is so far away you cannot get there in your pajamas, then having your own oven (and a supply of conveniently ready-to-make bagels) starts to make sense.

So what might Chrome OS eventually mean for the industry? It could mean end users go out and buy standard access devices (netbooks, phones, smart TVs and even desktops), which they use to access applications (Gmail, Google Apps, but also business apps like Salesforce or other SaaS providers) that run outside their place of work. Welcome to Consumerization!

There were a couple of reasons this did not happen earlier:

1) the network was too slow for a good (graphical) user experience and

2) Business apps were not available outside the enterprise.

But even with one and two fixed , users would still be going from site to site acting as their own integration engine by cutting and pasting or retyping all the time. It is here where the OS can help. It took Windows 10 years to go from DDE, via OLE to COM, COM+, DCOM, etc. etc. but today two browser sessions - also due to of security concerns – do not have the same level of integration as desktop apps. Because the Chrome OS is “starting over” they have a chance to tackle this. It will be cool to use a CRM application from one provider and a financial application from another and have them work seamlessly together on the desktop (meanwhile other companies, with Salesforce.com in front, are working hard on getting the apps to also work seamlessly together at the server/database level).

Now will this make our enterprises leaner? Well, only if we use this to replace some of the complexity we already have, not if we just add it to the stack (so instead of 3 OS’s, we support 4 or 5 ). Also we will need to decide what types of bread we want to bake in-house and what types of bread we source from the Cloud. And if we are smart, we make our remaining in-house bakeries into little private Clouds, so the user sees no difference and we can source these later.

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Published: August 27 2009, 02:21 PM | no comments
by CA Community

Whenever I tell someone I work for an IT company, you see a little spark of fear pop into their eyes while they quickly check their watch. Probably because they know from experience (with other IT people not with me) that there is a big chance the conversation will become complex, lengthy and likely even incomprehensible. So lately I just tell them I work in marketing, which leads to longer and more engaged conversations. But it did make me wonder how IT got into this position, and more importantly, how we can get out of it.

Now, it was not always like this. On my first working day, fresh out of university, when joining the IT department of Akzo (now Akzo Nobel), there was coffee and cake. Not because I joined (it was the 70s) but because a colleague was leaving for Spain. He was taking a small server with Akzo business applications and a book "How to learn Spanish in 30 days" with him. Four months later he was back and had implemented all of Akzo's standard processes in the newly bought Spanish consumer products division. And he had lots of stories about the Spanish consumer market, the competition, the customers the food, the weather and about our new colleagues. He had spend most his time with users (sales people, logistics people, marketing etc.) and almost no time with other IT people (also because we did not have many in Spain) and as a result was consulted regularly by the European Management team on matters concerning Spain or other new markets. Back then we did not have Enterprise ERP, SOA's or Enterprise Serviced Busses, we just had specific applications for purchasing, inventory, order entry, invoicing etc. (guess we would call these silos now) and a good understanding of how Akzo wanted to manufacture and market consumer products.

Somehow that got lost. Now IT talks mainly about SAP, Oracle or Data warehousing and 90% of the time we talk with other IT people. Granted, IT is more important and there is a lot more IT around than in the past and because scale is larger and the level of (technical) integration is much higher, the complexity is often overwhelming, but there must be a way to get back to what really matters (business).

Luckily there are two recent developments that help achieve that. They are on the one hand Portfolio Management Techniques and on the other hand Lean IT. If you are new to Portfolio Management check out "Laws of IT" explores Service Portfolio Management, Lean IT builds on manufacturing best practices and has been discussed earlier in this blog, but make sure you do not miss this vintage paper The IT-dustrial revolution on Lean IT (literally Lean IT avant la lettre).

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Published: August 27 2009, 01:11 PM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

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Published: August 24 2009, 03:41 PM | no comments
by Michael King

I recently ran across this CIO article, "With Recent Outages, Big Data Service Providers Take Hits," and it got me thinking. Within the past 12 months, I have read a number of articles that have identified service outages by many Service Providers.  According to these articles, the reasons cited for the outages vary from human error to facility issues (i.e. power outages) to spikes in capacity.  The results of some these outages ranged from an apology to customers to millions of dollars in financial penalties paid by Service Providers to customers.

As I read through many of these articles, a question occurred to me, could Service Level Managment (SLM) have helped to avoid these service outages?  The answer that I came up with is quite possibly. The reason I believe this is that a good SLM process is dependent upon and enhanced by its relationship to other established ITIL management processes to enable its success. These processes include:

• Availability Management - This process monitors and measures the availability of systems and components that make up a service offering. This information is an input to the SLM process used to analyze, process and report SLA results
• Capacity Management - Similar to the Availability process, Capacity Management will provide input into the SLM process on service component capacity. This data will be used to analyze, process and report SLA results.
• Incident and Problem Management - The SLM process will provide input data to the Incident Management process when a SLA threshold warning or breach occurs. An incident ticket will be created when the warning or breach occurs. If multiple incident tickets have been created, they can be tracked to determine if a problem needs to be created in the Problem Management process.
• Change Management - If the SLM process has generated an issue and ultimately a problem has been identified, an RFC can be created to make modifications to the troubled service to correct the identified problem. This RFC will also trigger activity in the Configuration Management process as well.
• Services Continuity Management - The SLM process will also provide input data to the Services Continuity process as well. During regular service reviews, Service Providers can look at SLA statuses and trends to determine if actions need to be taken to prevent breaches before they occur or if the SLA needs to be renegotiated due to changes in usage patterns.

Simply put, if a Service Provider conducts regular Quality of Service (QoS) reviews of SLAs, OLAs, UCs (Underpinning Contracts), there is a good chance that service breaches and degraded service qualities can be caught prior to complete service outages occurring. These QoS reviews may also include the review of associated KPIs and/or metrics, and related incident/problem/change tickets because they can provide a more holistic view of a service.  By catching issues prior to complete outages, the Service Provider will ultimately save money by not paying SLA penalties, maintain good relations with their customers, and build their reputation as a reliable Service Provider.

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