Published: January 29 2010, 11:38 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

For me, travel is "business as usual," so I tend to view a cancelled or delayed flight as just another annoyance. Subsequently, in my mind, usually the rescheduling is simply a resolution of the incident. So imagine if you will, that I have just settled into seat 9F, head against the window, the last rays of the sun making the seat cozy and warm. Suddenly I am woken by the flight attendant and told that the flight is canceled and I must de-plane (yes I can get on a plane and be asleep before the emergency briefing)! So I de-plane (who made up that term anyway?) and in doing so I forget my overnight bag. Of course, I realized this as the plane was being towed away.  At this point, I am cranky (always am when I am abruptly woken), I have no idea of what's going on (my own fault for falling asleep) and I have to retrieve my overnight bag (given all the fees and charges airlines are coming up with, I wonder if there is a fee for that?).  I reported to the airline that my bag was on the plane and surprisingly, I ended up having a great customer service experience. The airline had me wait in the lounge and told me that my bag would be delivered within the hour and that they will rebook me (free of charge) on a flight that allows me to collect my bag first. This is an excellent example of customer interaction and this great experience makes up for many of the poor experiences that I have had. 

Customer delight is the mantra of this particular airline and the reason why they choose to extend beyond their boundaries of process. The key aspect is although they are all experts in their field the organization is instilling a value system that understands that although they deliver service, the services are for the paying customer who are the lifeblood of the revenue stream and the survival of the business. 

Unfortunately, for many of us involved in ITIL implementations are focused on the process, it's efficiency and metrics and not the value to the business and the consumer.

This was not the case when I was in banking. Before I worked in an IT organization I spent time working in a large branch where I was asked to perform many activities of the branch worker. This included serving customers in the roles of customer service, teller, assisting with loan applications and so on. All of this gave me with an excellent understanding of branch processes, a skill set that was regularly updated with opportunities to spend time in the business. This led to a excellent knowledge of the business processes and how it allowed the bank to develop solutions that met business requirements, especially when we established Service Levels that were business based.  For instance, when we established a Business Service Catalog (yes we had one over 15 years ago) we knew primary service for retail banking would be the application name service name would be "ONLINE." ONLINE had a service level which we all knew was measured each month in terms of total availability for the service. The beauty of this top-down approach was that we could identify the hardware, software, network, contract and people resources and the batch requirements; it also allowed us to identify the security and backup requirements and more importantly, the cost to deliver the service. 

Benefits to both IT and the Business wer facilitated with a real-time reporting structure to both Senior Business and IT Management who can see immediately how ONLINE wer being delivered. Metrics wer the service delivered versus the SLA metric, the cost of the service (which we measured on the cost per transaction) and we also supplied 6-month trending averages of the incidents, problems, changes and project status. This summary of these metrics also formed the basis of the monthly review meeting, which was a critical communication vehicle for the business, enabling a relationship with IT that has been improving and the organization has rolled this out to multiple lines of business.

ITIL and process is about supporting and ensuring the delivery of service but if you lose sight of the top of the value pyramid--the consumer--it will all end in grief!

Now back to the airport for another flight.....

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Published: January 29 2010, 09:44 AM | 3 Comment(s)
by Peter Doherty

So how do you measure your ITIL Service Management Program?

The first trouble with measuring ITIL is that you need a certain level of maturity to gather baseline metrics and a good deal of organisations are not in a position to capture those metrics. The second trouble is that most of the metrics they capture are worthless as they are simply marks on a chart.
Where the true value is from metrics that:

• Inform
• Support Decisions
• Prompt Action

Sadly we are lucky to see ones that mainly fit into the top category. After all, metrics are just the dashboard of the car, they are neither the car nor the destination. So how do you measure Service Management? Well we really do need to take a balanced score card approach.

There is no doubt that you need to run your process metrics with a high level ofgovernance as without this your processes could lose their effectiveness. For example; failed Changes which end up causing Incidents, etc. These will often only have a quantitative component to them and should roll up to an overall process conformance score.

You also need to monitor the efficiency of the process by comparing the effort or elapsed time it took to perform core functions prior to the Service Management Program and comparing to what they take after the program. This should be rolled up as an efficiency score but you can also start doing cost comparisons based on this. These will have a qualitative component to them.

Thirdly you need to monitor effectiveness which will be the outputs of the processes and generally defined in terms of cost savings and service availability improvements. This effectiveness metric is absolutely crucial for measuring the results of a Service Management Program. Why? Just about nearly all other metrics will give you soft savings, but you can finally put dollar figures around these metrics. These are the metrics that should be measured against the projected outcomes that were put forward in the business case. For example, if you are an ITIL V3 shop doing Service Portfolio Management these metrics will contribute to show the value to the business of the Service.

I often blog and write about how most organisations forget about the people side of Service Management and I have a number of ideas on how we can address this. A balanced scorecard must include customer satisfaction - is it the be all and end all? Of course not but as technologists we often get caught up with delivering technically oriented Service Levels which reflect ‘reality' - at least in our minds. But guess what, most of our customers perceive value in the expectation of the service experience so you need to track their perceptions. A happy customer is more engaged and able to be more productive!

In ITIL we sometimes misuse metrics for our own benefit and one of my pet hates is ‘Closed on First Call'. It really tells us nothing, unless it is really high in which case it is rarely true. This is a typical example of a metric that has a quantitative but no qualitative component. So what if you close 70% of Calls on First Contact? Have they been within SLA? Is the customer happy? What about the other 30% that's probably harder and more important to the organisation? That metric simply informs you that something is happening but with no insight into how well it is being done. What decisions or actions could that possibly prompt?

If you are asked how would you measure an ITIL Service Management Program you need to ask yourself a much more fundamental question; what are the business drivers for this Program? Have you defined those business drivers? Once you know the business drivers it is a simple matter of translating them to the business initiatives and collecting metrics to support this. And guess what? These are the metrics that I'd want to see on my Service Management balanced Score Card.

Do you agree? Comment below and let me know.

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Published: January 28 2010, 04:21 PM | no comments
by Crystal King

We’re excited to announce that our board has unanimously elected Bill McCracken as CA’s chief executive officer. Bill has been CA’s interim CEO since John A. Swainson’s retirement was announced in September 2009.

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Published: January 26 2010, 10:16 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

When you walk into a restaurant, typically most of us order something from the menu, then we sit back and enjoy the company of our companions while we wait for our service to be delivered.  In the back office, workers busily work to deliver our meal taking care that all the components are delivered at the precise time to ensure our satisfaction. Well, in most cases, that is!. We make our choices based on many things, including the price and our budget, type of service and the time we have to consume the service, in a way not dissimilar to how we make our IT choices! 

St. Patrick's Day 2010 will be celebrated by the growing Huntsville Alabama itSMF Local Interest Group at the Jacobs Conference Center (1500 Perimeter Parkway, Suite 100 Huntsville, 35806) where I will be presenting "Can I have cheese with my burger please? (Or the Service Catalog made easy!)"  This is a practical and interactive session discussing the development of a Business Service Catalog in your organization and is increasingly a topic that I am being asked to speak on globally.

For those of you who are itSMF members in the Huntsville area, are ITSM or ITIL® practitioners I hope you can join me and the local itSMF USA team for a St. Patrick's Day you will remember!

If you need more information on the session don't hesitate to drop me a note or visit the itSMF USA website events

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Published: January 22 2010, 08:51 AM | no comments
by Crystal King

We've had a lot of interest from customers and press about CA's acquisition of Service Level Management software provider, Oblicore. Twitter went wild the day of and in the week after the acquisition, with hundreds of people sharing the news. The buzz has us pretty excited, because it means the industry is just as thrilled as we are about the pairing. My colleague, Dave Wilt, talked previously about why Oblicore's technology will matter for Service Level Management in the Cloud so I won't rehash that here. But in the event you want to catch up on all the latest news related to the acquisition, here are a few links to get you started:

1. My colleague Jay Fry's blog post: CA buys Oblicore: contracts & SLAs are pivotal for cloud computing
2. CA Buys Oblicore to Bolster Service Management - CTO Edge
3. CA buys Oblicore to manage cloud services - Network World
4. CA acquires Oblicore, Inc. to aim at leadership in Cloud-based Service Level Management - Ptak/Noel
5. CA Continues Buying Spree, Acquires Oblicore - TechCrunch

You'll have the chance to meet the Oblicore/CA team at the upcoming Pink Elephant 14th Annual International IT Service Management Conference & Exhibition on Feb. 21-24 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. We hope to see you there!

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