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November 2011 - Posts

The communication gap between IT and the business

Published: November 28 2011, 11:25 AM | no comments
by Rich Graves

I recently created the following video for a session at CA World 2011 in Las Vegas on Business Technology Management. The goal was to spice up the presentation and hopefully get a few laughs with a video that pokes fun at both IT and business executives. The ultimate point of the video is that IT isn't communicating with the business in terms that the business actually cares about- cost and value. The business doesn't care about the specifics of uptime, availability and service level agreements. They care that IT is ultimately helping the business achieve their goals of driving growth and innovation while also reducing costs.

So enjoy the video and feel free to share with friends. I'm looking forward to creating more.

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By: Rich Graves
Rich Graves is a Senior Principal Product Manager at CA Technologies. Rich works on a team focused on strategy and innovation for the Service & Portfolio Management Customer Solutions Unit. During his eleven-plus years at CA, he has focused entirely on the Service Management and support market segments...
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Digital Natives, Social Tools and Collaboration - All Seen at CA World 2011

Published: November 22 2011, 08:21 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Crystal Miceli

Coming out of CA World 2011 last week in Las Vegas, the energy is high. There was a lot of excitement about technologies moving to the cloud, the changing role of the CIO and IT becoming ever more entrenched in the business lines it supports.

A common theme in discussions I had with business and technology leaders at CA World this year was the preponderance of technology in every aspect of our lives.  Now that users are more tech savvy than ever before - probably because of interactions with technology at home, at work and at play -  they expect more from every IT experience.  This raises the bar on the levels of service IT has to provide to remain competitive and to ensure customer and end user satisfaction.

One advantage to having this new breed of digital native on board is their willingness to share their knowledge and expertise.  Meet the new IT experts: business users who know their systems better than IT generalists, who can share their knowledge with peers to deflect calls from the help desk and reduce impact to their own organizations.  When this new breed of experts is empowered, and their institutional knowledge captured for perpetual use, an organization can enable users to help themselves, avoiding expensive calls to the service desk, and effectively reducing response times to the users. The growing use of social media is a key way you can get these users to interact with one another, sharing critical knowledge and experience, and reducing support volumes.

We saw it at CA World, where attendees shared their experiences, answered questions and made agenda recommendations on the MyCA forums, via Twitter and LinkedIn.  Attendees were empowered and felt like part of the process, and that enhanced their satisfaction.

At CA World we demonstrated CA Open Space, the easy-to-use collaboration add-on to CA Service Desk Manager that brings people and knowledge together to brainstorm, solve problems, and share information, even on mobile devices. You can learn more about CA Open Space at http://www.ca.com/us/collaboration-software.aspx.

 

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By: Crystal Miceli
Crystal Miceli serves as Sr. Principal Solution Marketing Manager for CA Technologies, specializing in Project & Portfolio Management, IT Asset Management and Service Desk solutions. Crystal has over 15 years of experience in designing and implementing IT Service Management solutions across a range...
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Do you “Design” your service management implementation?

Published: November 21 2011, 01:09 PM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

I blogged last week on the ITIL 2011 Service Strategy update and noted both its value and its gaps. Today I am turning my attention to service design, the second volume in the series. Throughout the updated ITIL Service Design publication, there has been particular focus on alignment with ITIL Service Strategy. With design being the first instantiation of the updated strategy it is logical that some broad updates were required. The publication attempts to provide guidance across the broader IT organization, no just operations. Personally I don't believe that ITIL has permission to do so but the new era of IT mandates a focus on "service" and the delivery of "service" so it is a correct posture. Other aspects of service design include processes such as "supplier management," "capacity" and "service level." And it's important to point out that with supplier management, the idea is that it is proactively pursued rather than after the service is in production (this was a change in V3 that most implementations simply ignored).

The volume better articulates the flow and management of activities throughout the overall service design stage with the addition of the "design coordination" process. This is simply common sense and we have been doing this, only now it's a documented process and I encourage you to take a look.

The much-needed clarification surrounds the service catalog (or service catalogue as the book refers to the topic). In fact the volume significantly enhances the whole process of design through instantiation of the service in the catalog.

In summary, I found the update practical and useful, if you have read the volume, let me know!

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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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Service and portfolio management adapts to the cloud

Published: November 16 2011, 02:00 PM | no comments
by Erik Hille

Cloud computing has fundamentally shifted the way that IT interacts with the departments and business units that we service.  We have the choice to consume the supporting solutions that we use to manage our service and portfolio environments in software as a service or managed service form factors.  We can provision many of our "services" in an internal cloud environment, and IT faces increased competition from external cloud vendors that sell services into these same departments and business units...often without our knowledge.  In short, service and portfolio management professionals face unheralded new challenges from this fundamental shift.

As many of you are aware, CA World has been going on this week.  At the conference the service and portfolio management focus area addresses the issues above.  The track area addressed "incorporating cloud into your service and portfolio management practice" and covered a set of topics that pertain to how organizations are adapting their service management environments and their project and portfolio solutions.  Attendees have heard how the standards and their peers are leveraging solutions that are delivered in an "as a service" environment and internal cloud environments.  They also learned how the IT role is changing to incorporate a broader eco-system of capabilities from both internal and external sources.

Some highlights of the track included:

  • How is the ITIL standard that many organizations utilize as their primary operational framework for service and portfolio management adapting to incorporate "cloud"?  Experts from Pink Elephant and CA Technologies' own ITIL Ninja took this on in a couple of great sessions:  Floating through the Clouds with ITIL Ninja and a Pink Elephant and I Can't Believe My Customers are Cheating on Me with a Cloud.
  • Sessions that addressed how CA Technologies solutions help you manage your service catalog, your contractual SLAs and your project portfolio.
  • Examples of how companies are incorporating cloud based delivery methods into their operational environment and ROI benefits that they have realized as a result.
  • Thought-leading approaches to governing SLAs with your outsourced vendors:  both traditional and cloud based.

If you missed any of these or other sessions found on the Agenda Builder at CAWorld.com and are interested in learning more, let us know by commenting on this blog.

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By: Erik Hille
Erik Hille joins CA Technologies as part of the acquisition of Oblicore in January 2010. With Oblicore, he was the company’s Marketing Director since July 2006. As an authority in the area of ITIL’s Service Level Management, Service Portfolio Management and Service Catalog Management processes, Erik...
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ITIL 2011 – New version or a simple update to v3?

Published: November 15 2011, 07:28 PM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Were you asleep earlier this year and missed the announcement that ITIL has been updated?  I know from my recent discussions with enterprises many have no idea that the guidance many of us use for service management has gone through an update cycle.  Over the next few blogs I will deal with each book in a digestible form.

In summary the guidance reads more easily, processes are more readily linked together and the roles and role definitions are clearer for the traditional service manager. 

Interestingly, the guidance defines just about everyone's role in the IT Operations area as a "service manager." I'm not sure that is true or of much value, although it highlights the number and variety of roles required to effectively deliver IT-enabled business services and reminds me of the number of opportunities for automation.

As I read through the guidance, I was concerned by the lack of direct guidance around cloud computing (other than hidden away in an appendix). I know that the author team will argue that the guidance is applicable "to the cloud" or organizations choosing to leverage cloud, and it is. Supplier and vendor management are well covered, as is incident, problem and change, but in a multiple cloud provider environments, these will transform from the guidance and require considerably more thought to effectively implement. In my opinion the authoring team have simply missed the point that if the direction is cloud computing then users want simplicity not five huge volumes that take hours to filter through to derive any substantive value. With my rant complete, I am certain that some "cloud" guidance is just around the corner.

On the plus side, the rewrite -- sorry update -- to the Service Strategy book is fairly good, the new and updated processes are more relevant to service managers and are easier to digest. 

More on Service Strategy and the remainder of the volumes to come!

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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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