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June 2011 - Posts

COBIT 5 - Public Exposure Draft available for comment until July 31

Published: June 30 2011, 09:51 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

I am pleased to announce (just in case you missed it) that the COBIT 5 Public Exposure materials were published on Monday this week during INSIGHTS 2011, held in Washington DC. It was an honor to announce to the attendees at lunch yesterday following the address by Howard Schmidt, to which there was a lot of excitement and interest.

COBIT 5 is a major evolution of the globally recognized COBIT guidance, incorporating the most current thinking in enterprise governance and management techniques. Enterprises of all sizes around the world have implemented COBIT to reduce IT-related risks and increase confidence in the information provided by IT, enable clear policy development and good practice for IT management, and increase the value they attain from IT and manage compliance. The value of COBIT is due primarily to the collaborative development process that brings together the talents and expertise of industry leaders around the globally and it has been an honor to be involved.

The COBIT 5 initiative builds and expands on COBIT 4.1 connects with other major frameworks, standards and resources, including ITIL, ISO, ISF, OECD, AICPA and NIST, and additionally integrates ISACA guidance including Val IT, Risk IT, the IT Assurance Framework and the Business Model for Information Security (BMIS)-into one cohesive and comprehensive framework.

The COBIT 5 website pages have been updated to reflect the latest position and plans for final publication, including a new presentation with the new graphics and updated supporting audience messages and most importantly access to the materials so you can download and comment.

The exposure draft consists on 2 documents; The Framework and COBIT 5: Process Reference Guide and both are available for download at www.isaca.org/cobit5exposure

I will write more on the COBIT 5 exposure draft over the next few days and share some of my opinions. Remember you have until July 31 to comment!

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By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
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Focus on the target is critical!

Published: June 28 2011, 03:48 PM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Day 1 of INSIGHTS 2011 is in the books. Woven through the many and varied conversations today were comments about the amazingly motivational session by Afterburner. "Empower with Flawless Execution" was their theme and it resonated brilliantly with the entire audience at the event. 

"Flawless Execution" has four logical steps (Plan, Brief, Execute and Debrief) that form part of the continual service improvement lifecycle that drives culture, behaviors and most importantly targeted objectives.

After listening to Afterburner's "Lips" speak at both the event and the evening prior, it turned out that the topic that resonated with many of the attendees was "task saturation." Task saturation is common to all of us in IT where we often have more demand on us than other parts of the business. We all know that task saturation leads to mistakes, primarily as focus is lost from the target or the objective of the mission. Often I find that the objective in mind is often lost or not clarified or we have not thought through a plan for contingencies. One example that comes to mind is when an IT professional talks about their objective as implementing a framework such as COBIT, RISKIT, PMBok or ITIL, when their mission should be specific to the value proposition. For instance, the mission could be to implement an organizational risk assessment process to determine when to accept risk. Now along the implementation path if a missile is targeted at you and has "radar lock" if you don't take evasive action the outcome will not be pretty. It's the same thing in this case. Learning how to deal with the radar lock scenario is not one that you want to learn in battle. You will want to have leveraged the wisdom of those who have been successful before you and train.

One of my biggest challenges in the use of and implementation of best practices is that many in the industry do not want to learn from the past, think through contingencies or even understand the mission objective, leading to failure, rework and the business considering IT a failure.

I for one will leave this event with laser like focus on the objectives after planning, briefing, executing and then debriefing to understand what I can do to ensure "Flawless Execution."

To follow the developments and sessions at the conference please follow us on Twitter with the hash tag #ISACAWORLD.

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By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
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INSIGHTS 2011 - ISACA World Congress is underway!

Published: June 27 2011, 09:53 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

If you send me an email for the next 3 days you will get my out of the office (OOTO) message. My mission for those days is chairing the Insights 2011 the ISACA World Congress. Unlike most conferences you attend where you are "Power pointed to death" we have senior leadership sharing information on how to "identify your mission, plan execute and debrief" to assist you in driving your organizational value.

In fact, as I write this blog I am waiting for Jim "Murph" Murphy from Afterburner, Inc. and his wingman "Lips" to kick the event of and guide us to "Flawless Execution".

My mission is to chair the conference and drive the successful execution of the sessions. We have planned for months and we are now executing with a team that has clear objectives and are laser focused tasks. At the end of the event we will debrief and plan for 2012 in San Francisco, where I hope you will join us.

I can hear the reverb of an F18 so its time to start the conference, sorry mission, below is my introduction to the event for a little more color!

Dear World Congress: INSIGHTS 2011 Attendees,

Welcome to the ‘IN' crowd!  On behalf of ISACA International and my esteemed colleagues and volunteers on the program committee, your peers, we would like to welcome you to this exciting business and technology leadership conference!

INSIGHTS 2011 is unlike any other ISACA event - it's geared towards progressive and experienced business and technology leaders from around the world.  In fact, our attendees come from over 30 different countries with 80% holding leadership positions.  And, these leaders have over 10 years experience in the industry.  You may see some unfamiliar faces, as we have many new attendees joining us this week for their first ISACA event!  We welcome you all.

INSIGHTS 2011 is INspiring.  You will be energized and ready to bridge the gap between business and technology.  The next few days are packed with high energy and thought provoking discussions as you experience a new INnovative conference format.  This one-of-a-kind event mixes formats - from engaging key note speakers to executive panel discussions; from roundtable discussions to one on one interviews; with networking opportunities in the HUB.  Together, we will learn how to accelerate performance through flawless execution with Afterburner.  We will hear from global partners from the ‘big 4' public accounting firms and industry analysts, and will close our event with thoughtful discussion of the future, and learning about what's around the corner with futurist Bob Treadway.  You will be INformed by learning from experts in our industry who will address business and technology issues at a strategic level.

Throughout the next few days we are encouraging your interaction.  Please ask questions, share insights and contribute to the conversation - here on site and via social media, where you can tweet (#ISACAWorld) or post on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/ISACAHQ) or LinkedIn (ISACA (Official) group).  We are counting on you to challenge our panelists, moderators, facilitators and interviewees/interviewers.

Thank you for your support of World Congress: INSIGHTS 2011.  My fellow committee members, ISACA leaders, and I look forward to meeting each of you.  Look for us in the HUB.

Enjoy the event!

Regards,

Robert Stroud, CGEIT

Conference Chair, INSIGHTS 2011

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By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
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Portfolio or Catalog first?

Published: June 21 2011, 08:37 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

As mentioned in my blog yesterday "Driving Business Integration, Service Portfolio or Service Catalog", many IT organizations confuse their IT service portfolio with a service request catalog. It has been my recent experience the acceleration of virtualization and private cloud has led to a rush to automation with the service catalog as the user or consumer interface. Rather than a business service catalog, typically the catalog is “request” system for technical requests with the automation allowing for reduction of errors and reducing time to delivery. Based on my discussions with organizations who have gone down this route it seems the end result is that they avoid the difficult debates with the business over the portfolio, its value, appropriate cost and decisions of timings for retirement of the environment.

The Service Portfolio is the manifestation of the IT organization's mission, role and capabilities. The Service Portfolio empowers the IT organization to develop the appropriate financial and service-level disciplines necessary to ensure appropriate investments, based on business value covering the business service from cradle to grave. On the other hand the catalog is the instantiation of the production service that is typically represented as an orderable item often in a self service catalog.

My experience confirms that most organizations overly rely on the service catalog as the communication mechanism to the business. This is a mistake as it is only a view of production services at a certain point in time. Forward thinking IT organizations are using the Service Portfolio to capture all demand. The demand includes all planned innovation, ideas, bug corrections, planned projects and so on. Then the demand is prioritized based on business appetite, risk, funding, business criticality, etcetera, and approved demand is tracked to delivery when it is made available in the catalog. Sounds simple doesn't it? Yet, over and over I see that having the business make the decisions is a difficult place to start.

My tip of the day today: If you are having a portfolio discussion with the business do not start with a blank sheet and ask them to define their demand or services, you may not like their response.

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By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
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Driving Business Integration, Service Portfolio or Service Catalog

Published: June 20 2011, 08:35 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations event in Orlando Florida (note to my Forrester friends - where is my invitation to your event?). There were several "hot topics" at the event and one that got a mention in the sessions, corridors and lunch table was the service catalog and the value it offers to the business. The topic resonated in parallel to the conversations with the leaders who were attempting to mature their service management capabilities to better synchronize with the business.

A fundamental confusion that people had at the event was the difference between the Service Request processes which are being delivered in many organizations though a service catalog and the often confused IT Service Portfolio. The Service Catalog is the place where the currently available production services are made available to the business and the IT Service Portfolio is the complete lifecycle of service from concept to retirement. The ITIL Version 3 glossary defines the IT Service Portfolio as "The complete set of Services that are managed by a Service Provider. The Service Portfolio is used to manage the entire Lifecycle of all Services, and includes three Categories: Service Pipeline (proposed or in Development); Service Catalog (Live or available for Deployment); and Retired Services."

In this market of rapid innovation and with growing requirements to deliver value and innovation, I believe that defining and managing the portfolio of IT services with their representation in the service catalog to business users is no longer an option-- it is mandatory.

For example, I spoke with a representative from a well-known financial organization at the event. He shared with me that they had recently reorganized their processes to manage their IT services throughout the service life cycle, including capabilities for service requests, automated service fulfillment, service-level reporting, service pricing and communicating the business value gained from IT services, and not just in the operational phase.

The key issue I am often asked by customers are why are IT Service Portfolio's so difficult to implement and I will deal with this in the next blog.

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By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
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