Sunday, August 29, 2010

How To Use IT Governance To Drive IT Business Alignment

Continuing our series on the Real Professors of the 15th Annual IT Management Conference, Dr. John Beachboard is a professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) at Idaho State University (ISU).  He has more than 25 years experience implementing large-scale information technology and telecommunications systems, and has received an AIS Award for Innovation in IS Education for his work incorporating IT Service Management concepts in the CIS curriculum. ISU has been recognized by the National Security Agency as an academic institution of excellence for its teaching of information assurance and computer security.

At the conference, Dr. Beachboard will present an actionable executive-level IT governance framework specifically designed to align IT investment and practices with business strategy.  His presentation includes: an overview of contending understandings of IT governance, which includes COBIT; a discussion about why and how an overly broad definition of IT governance can undermine substantive executive-level participation in key IT governance decisions thus diminishing strategic IT alignment; a review of the elements comprising the development of a strategic IT vision and actionable IT principles for governing the development of IT strategy and investments.

The IT Skeptic talked to Dr. Beachboard recently:


You mentioned “...an overly broad definition of IT governance can undermine substantive executive-level participation” - indeed!  I’ve railed against the terminological debasement of “governance”.  Do you think ISO38500 did a good job of getting us back to a more precise understanding of governance of IT?  it looks to me that COBIT 5 will better clarify the distinction between management and governance, and I’m crediting ISO38500 with at least some of the impetus for that.

Yes, I think that it does… but with some inevitable limitations.  These include:

1. The definition and approach adopted in ISO38500 does align with the more common understanding of corporate governance and I think that is very important with respect to distinguishing IT governance from IT management.  The “inevitable” limitation is that, at least in the US, the actual independence of corporate boards is questionable.  ISO standards can’t fix that, but the reality is that corporate executives have more influence over governance decisions than is probably desirable.  So in my view, a “workable” understanding of IT governance (at least in the US) must recognize the role of executive-level management as well as the “official” governing body.
2. To some degree, the ambiguity between IT management and IT governance will remain unavoidable because both deal with management control.  Granted, IT governance works at a meta-level, presumably establishing management controls processes over lower-level management controls.  But then if you look at risk management, much of the detailed analysis would be conducted by business process-owners and IT and security specialists.  Yet we look for corporate directors to make ultimate risk management decision.  It is not surprising that many practitioners will categorize the analytic effort as constituting an IT governance activity.  It is not clear to me that such fuzziness need be resolved; it is probably more important to recognize that some boundary conditions are fuzzy and attempt reach a common understanding in the enterprise. 
3. Finally, policy and principles do not necessarily address the underlying problems that they are intended to address.  I will explain this more when answering a later question.  But the short answer is that fairly good policies and principles have existed for quite some time but enterprises do not necessarily implement them well.  As Pfeffer and Sutton suggest in their book “The Knowing-Doing Gap,” too often we confuse know-what knowledge (the policies and prescriptions) with actual know-how.  This does not mean that the policies and principles are uncalled for.  It does mean that we probably should be humble in thinking about what we have actually accomplished writing them. 

“…a workable understanding of IT governance must recognize the role of executive-level management as well as the official governing body”: Is that “wrong”?  The Executive are delegated executors of day-to-day governance on behalf of the Governors themselves so they have both a governance and a management role - they represent the overlap or intersection of the two.

No, this overlap is necessary, particularly when some executives may also be board members.  But the messiness needs to be acknowledged.  The same individuals may wear IT governance and IT management hats.  In my writing I have adopted the term executive-level governance and attempt to finesse the issue.  I support ISO38500 emphasis on identifying board level responsibilities but feel that in the US, the boards will continue to rely heavily on corporate executives to perform IT governance (if its truly performed at all). 

I agree about the fuzziness at the boundary between governance and management.  In my up-coming book BSM: Basic Service Management, I am using the term “governance support” to distinguish from governance:

In order to have governance, the managers and staff need to provide governance support: policy enforcement, strategy planning, measurement, audit, reporting. These aren’t governance – they are the parts of operations that support and “plug into” governance: take direction, provide monitoring. They often get referred to as governance but not in this book.
Governance support cascades down: you have policy specific to service management, and reporting specific to it. But the governance itself always flows back to the organisation’s governors. There is no such thing as service governance. Put simply, the Board are responsible for service: the accountability cannot be delegated, only the management, and the governance support.

I dislike the continual debasement of the word governance so I’m making a stand by introducing “governance support”.  On the graphics of a presentation for the itSMF Australian conference, I called it “governance enablement”.  To me “enablement” is more accurate but too ponderous.  For an even snappier name, let’s call it “policing”.
But I suspect all is lost and governance is always going to be used more widely than is ideal.  Do you think giving a name to the “fuzzy zone” would help or is it too late?

Well, I am on your team on this and am willing to adopt the term as well.  I guess where the wrinkle inevitably remains, at least in my opinion, is that the governance support activities have long been a part of good IT management practice. 

There doesn’t seem to be much written about practical implementation of the links between governance and IT management.  Lots of fine words but what does it actually LOOK like in reality?

I very much agree with your statement.  I think that Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill have done some very good work in this area but it still leaves a fair bit to be desired from a practical perspective.  I was working in this area and a conference paper of mine on the subject was forwarded to Mark Toomey just this summer.  Mark wrote a kind email to me and my co-authors acknowledging our work and gently chastising us for not having specifically referenced the ISO [38500] standard or his book Waltzing with the Elephant [no connection to Pink ones].  Sort of embarrassing actually, but due to the cost it took a while to actually get access to the ISO standard.  Mark provided the first three chapters of his book to me for evaluation and they align very well with the thinking and writing I had been doing.  I have not had a chance to read the full book yet. 

Had I stumbled across his work earlier, I might not have pursued this line of research with as much diligence.  Yet, I believe that my colleagues and I will still be able to make a contribution with respect to writing “actionable” approaches to IT governance and management.  While no written work can substitute for actual experience, we are trying to provide specific suggestions and background knowledge to help managers more effectively employ the IT governance/management frameworks that are available. 

Waltzing With The Elephant is the only systematic treatment I have found of practical implementation of governance of IT.  Is there anything else out there? 

I agree that Mark probably has the best books out there (expecting that the remaining chapters are as good as the first three). 

I think a major problem is that there is a lot of good information published but it is spread throughout numerous books and articles.  Each author addresses a particular set of issues and the overall synthesis of ideas is lacking.  For example, Weill and Broadbent wrote a “Leveraging IT Infrastructures” in 1998.  There are some interesting insight in that book that could have been usefully brought forward to his more recent work with Jeanne Ross, but it wasn’t. 

James Martin’s 1984 book, “An Information Systems Manifesto” has some good ideas that are still relevant today as does Paul Strassman’s 1995 “Politics of Information Management.”  In truth, I can find points to argue with in all of these books, but they all contain useful ideas that have informed my thinking on IT management practice.  But it’s a lot of reading for practitioners to wade through and it takes some real effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

I am working with some colleagues on a monograph tentatively titled “IT management for Non-IT Managers” in which a practical approach to IT governance is offered.  Much of the content is not really new content; we are trying to provide a useful synthesis of the literature in a concise and readable form.  While I have been using early drafts in teaching my MBA courses, the work is not ready for publication. 



The world needs that monograph - we’ll look forward to it. 

Look for the rest of our fascinating discussion with John Beachboard in another post soon…

Friday, August 20, 2010

ConfBOK: Luggage Validation and Testing

Several decades ago I flew from Melbourne to Washington DC for a database conference in the Hilton, not long after Ronald Reagan got plugged outside the same building.  (By a curious symmetry of history, I’m flying to an itSMF conference in the Melbourne Hilton tomorrow.  If you don’t hear from me…. ).  It was a cheap Continental flight, so it stopped in Sydney, Honolulu, LA, Denver, New York and then Washington.  Forty-something hours as I recall.  Of course I got there and my bags didn’t.  Despite buying some nice GAP shirts back when that was a novelty, the resulting discomfort was enough of a lesson that I always carried my bathroom-bag and a spare pair of undies in my carry-on after that.  Until the “liquids and gels” thing.  That put an end to it.  It was probably a good thing anyway - I never enjoyed the look I got from the neckless LA security thugs when they found a pair of underpants in amongst my magazines.

Of course 9/11 put an end to carrying a laptop too.  Travelling well is all about making the journey smooooooth.  Unpacking a laptop so they can see it isn’t ticking is one more hassle I don’t need.  Now of course Google Docs has liberated me completely from that little black back-wrecker.  Since airport shops charge more for bottled water than they do for cognac, that put an end to my water bottle as well.  And I outgrew the sarong that served as sheet, bathrobe, flannel and beachwear.  Suddenly there was very little in my carry-on.  Just a New Scientist and some emergency chocolate rations, a passport (no tickets any more), a memory stick with my presentation, and some US bills.  Despite its imminent displacement by the yuan, the greenback is still the lubricant of choice for the traveler who likes to travel smooooth.  Many countries still have a “late fee” or “special processing fee”.  In some places they’ll recognise a buck before they recognise their own currency.

But it feels so un-natural getting on a long flight with next to no hand luggage.  When it comes to packing, I’m a natural Boy Scout.  I want to be prepared for anything.  What if a waiter drops a glass of red wine on me (again)?  Will I have enough spare pants?  It took years to talk myself out of the lunacy of taking along gym gear (anyone who knows me knows how pointless that was).  Spare battery AND a charger for my PDA.  A small pharmacy.  Two extra shirts for evenings.  Shorts and golf-shirt in case someone takes me out on their yacht.  An umbrella (no a small folding one.  What do you think I am?).

After thirty years of adult flying I’ve slowly weaned myself off almost all of it.  But the stress of checking and rechecking never leaves me.  I’d hate to get there and find I needed something I didn’t bring.  A thirty-second act of packing before you leave can save hours of hassle when you get there.  If you are the same way inclined, here are some things to consider for the next Pink Elephant conference:

• books (buying anything with a reading age above 12 is almost impossible in or near the Bellagio)
• flipflops or Crocs or deck shoes, beach shorts and a suitably Caribbean shirt (trust me on this)
• sunnies (on the rare occasions you get outdoors before sundown, it HURTS)
• Vitamin B
• your most outragous set of clothes, so you can blend in when you go for a walk on the Strip
• a Segway

 

Monday, August 09, 2010

ConfBOK: Learning 1.1.1

ConfBOK: the Conference Body of Knowledge.

1. Learning

1.1 Staying Conscious

1.1.1 Environment

I once participated in a sleep deprivation experiment.  They didn’t call it that, they called it International Sales Training.  It was in DFW Airport [I am not making this up].  Since a psychopathic VP was prowling the dark airless hall firing anyone asleep [still not making this up] I took to stabbing myself in the stomach with a ballpoint [and still not making this up] every time my head did that violent drop-and-jerk thing where you slide down the slope and haul yourself back to consciousness reflexively at the last moment.  It worked but I still have little blue tattoo dots on my pot.  Of course I have no idea what the session was about.

Another time, the same company loaded hundreds of staff from everywhere from Australia to Sweden onto a cruise ship and sailed them across the Caribbean with a few hours of classes each day to make it tax-deductible.  Of course I missed that one [I wish I was making this up].  I bet they don’t recall much about those classes either.

The ideal learning environment is somewhere between the two. 

The venue should be comfortable but not too distracting, relaxing but not soporific.  Something like the typical American conference venue decorated in that we-shot-the-only-designer-with-any-taste style that looks like a French Renaissance brothel crossed with a Sicilian gangster’s furniture showroom.  It is certainly not bland and it is now and then so startlingly bad as to jolt you.  Casinos excel at this.

Location is important for mental stimulus.  If the venue is in Loiusville Kentucky or Ede Netherlands then the attendees are likely to succumb to boredom.  Hold the training in Atlanta Georgia or Rio de Janeiro and they may not survive the week at all.  Put it in Sydney or ...say… Las Vegas and folk can revive their spirits without becoming one.

 

 

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Last Few Session Slots To Be Filled!

August-September is always a very busy time for Conference planning at Pink. Between now and the end of this month we need to have all remaining session slots filled. That allows us, in September, to get working on preparing, publishing and distributing the brochure - in paper and electronic formats.

In reviewing where we are with the overall program and the huge variety of topics we want to have covered, we would like to add a handful of sessions on:

• IT Governance & the Cloud
• COBIT
• Chargeback
• Supplier Management

All, ideally, from a practical perspective - someone who’s been there and done that. If that means YOU, or anyone you know, we’d love to hear from you. But hurry, we need to close the program building phase very soon.

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Management Of Change For ITSM:  Hitting The Sweet Spot

Dr. Sue Conger is Associate Professor, Director of IT & IT Service Management Programs, University of Dallas.  Dr. Conger is on the university’s faculty where she manages both IT and ITSM programs, she also has served on itSMF’s Academic Executive Committee and the Steering Committee for itSMF Dallas LIG.

According to Professor Conger, industry best practices, including ITIL, offer what sounds like great guidance until you start to actually do something.  The problems of where to begin seem easy when you begin to ponder exactly what to do and how to do it.  Dr. Conger has learned through her research that some common themes emerge based on an analysis of 12 case studies in the U.S., Germany, and Australia.  The themes relate to how ITSM project managers contextualize their work to optimize its chances for success. 

Her session at the 15th Annual IT Management Conference, Management Of Change For ITSM:  Hitting The Sweet Spot will discuss different approaches taken and why they worked in their particular environments, and will provide guidelines for contextualizing projects based on organizational characteristics.  We asked Dr. Conger a few questions about it to help you with your Session Strategy



What does “contextualizing projects based on organizational characteristics” mean?  Is that about fitting in with the culture?

Contextualizing means customizing whatever is done – project goals, schedule, and design, individuals involved, process designs, policies, software choices, etc. for its specific designed use.  Many organizations do not need to implement all of ‘ITIL’ if they have working processes and are happy with them.  It is important to define goals – e.g., centralization, standardization, or even reduce outages, then meet that goal using whatever processes and services are needed.
Contextualizing also means doing everything to ensure success, including attending to and dealing with political issues as they arise.  Complete agreement with design or the way changes are implemented is unlikely so don’t bother.  It is more important to consciously design and manage processes and services than to worry about doing every ‘shall’ in ISO 20000 or ITIL v3. 

I have a personal passion for getting ITSM to focus on the people aspects of getting things done instead of getting hung up on process, or worse still technology.  Does that resonate with what you have seen in your case studies of change?

Yes, at the end of the day, nothing matters if it doesn’t work for the company or the people involved.  That is part of the contextualizing.  There is a great study published through McKinsey & Co by Dorgan and Dowdy (2004) that clearly identifies bigger payoffs from intense process management over technology management.  Process must precede technology and technology needs to be molded to fit the process in the ideal world.  Therefore, being practical and realistic about what will work in this organization at this time are key concepts.

Some process areas are easier than others.  For instance, sometimes it seems introducing better Change Management is all stick and no carrot: you have to push it through and people only see the benefits once they start participating.  Do you agree?

Yes, as an academic, I’m very aware of research that prescribes attention to culture before change.  But, as an ex-IT manager I’m also aware that you have to get product out the door.  The best implementation I’ve seen (described below) paid zero attention to culture and essentially said ‘change or leave.’  The project mantra was ‘failure is not an option.’  This position was very effective. I’ve always thought adults were children in big bodies.  Therefore, at some point the kids have to be ordered to do what is needed (and own it) whether they like it or not.

How badly wrong can it go?  What sort of range have you seen from best to worst cases?

Well, complete failure is pretty wrong.  Most companies and three of five case companies in the US, three of four in Australia, and 2 of four in Germany all had failed projects before they were successful.  The failures all suffered from combinations of wrong people on the project, lack of organizational commitment, lack of resources, focus on technology rather than process, l, no management support, poor or poorly executed communication plans, change took too long, unintegrated processes,  training and change dates so far apart that people forgot, no followup or post-implementation audits, etc.  In every successful case (the 13 cases in US, Germany, Australia) all of these problems were dealt with specifically by the project teams.  Not all of the dealings were completely successful, but with a range of activity in the ‘sweet spot’ the failings in the successful projects were not fatal.
The best case I’ve seen is a multi-national outsourcer that obtained ISO 20000 certification for 7 locations in four countries in 12 months (including 3 of those months to develop evidence of success).  They then added another 7 locations the 2nd year.  In my opinion, this was like a clean hoop shot from, center court (of course if you don’t know basketball, this analogy is not useful).

How would you sum up your advice to those managing introduction of ITSM improvements?

• Be careful how you define your goal because that is what you will get.  i.e., ‘Failure is not an option’ forces attention to the changes.
• Require an executive team to provide policies, oversight, regular communications, and a kick in the rear when needed.
• Keep the central change group small and ensure diverse skills (i.e., coordination, process design, and change implementation).
• Use participative projects with reps for the project, each process, and staff who do the process from every affected location.  Process owners from affected locations should be responsible for guaranteeing the workability of the process for their location and for ensuring implementation.
• Communicate often about status and expectations.
• Worry less about culture and more about making the changes fit the work context.
• Require every staff member to be trained, be responsible for knowing his/her job and how it fits within the ITSM scheme.  This implies a web-based repository for all policy, process, and work instruction documentation as well as other related ITSM documentations.
• Change the executive and management compensation schemes to include compliance with ITSM changes as part of any compensation and/or bonus schemes.
• Change all job descriptions to use ITSM language (that fits the organization) and institutionalize the changes by rapid movement from ‘my job’ and ‘my ITIL job’ to just ‘my job.’
• Continuous monitoring and improvement are critical to avoid entropy and regression to the earlier state.

Looks like this is one session to add to your list!

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Real Professors

Perhaps the IT Skeptic is a little slow on the uptake [no comments necessary at this point] but when I was asked to interview some of the professors for the 15th Annual IT Conference, I thought this was one of those cute terms marketing folk come up with. 

Let’s have a “school” and lets call the presenters “professors”, better still “iProfessors”

You know the kind of thing.  But I did the Pinkers an injustice.  Sure Track 4 of the conference is called “IT Business School”, but it includes real live professors from actual business colleges and universities.  This isn’t spam, it’s beef.

Check it out:

Dr. John Beachboard, Professor of Computer Information Systems, Idaho State University

Dr. Sue Conger, Associate Professor, Director of IT & IT Service Management Programs, University of Dallas

Dr. Stuart D. Galup, Associate Professor of Information Technology, Florida Atlantic University

Prof. Tony Gerth, Clinical Associate Professor, Operations and Decision Technologies, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Dr. Howard Gitlow, PH.D., Executive Director, Institute For Study Of Quality & Professor, School, Of Business Administration, University Of Miami

Dr. Ramesh Venkataraman, Chair MSIS Program, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Dr. George Westerman, Research Scientist, Center For Information Systems Research, MIT Sloan School of Management

This is one high-octane line-up of content, further boosted by two of my favourite Pink-Thinkers: Gary Case, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant; and Troy DuMoulin, AVP, Product Strategy, Pink Elephant.  Troy and Gary may not be official professors, but the title sits lightly upon them as all who know them would agree.

Maximising your ROI on the conference has to include some sessions from Track 4.

Photo: canstockphoto.com

Thursday, July 22, 2010

The IT Swami has a vision of the 15th Annual IT Management Conference

Broad predictions of conference themes are all well and good but I wanted the IT Swami to make some more concrete predictions for us of what we might see at the upcoming conference.

So I fired up my Kingswood (the ultimate New Zealand road-trip car), and loaded the boot (that’s trunk to my American friends) with his favourite trance supplements.  The IT Swami’s trance recipe?  A quart of zinfandel, two bottles of Moet et Chandon, a jar of NoDoze, an ounce of gotukola, a packet of nutmeg, 100 grams of Lindt 70% cocoa chocolate, a jar of peanut butter, and 20 Marlboros - all perfectly legal I assure you.  I headed over to Wainuiomata to the suburban commune the IT Swami established with a beach volleyball team.

After I had sat through the usual lecture on the spiritual merits of beach volleyball, we got on to the topic of IT in general and eventually (very eventually) to the IT Management Conference in particular.  Once he worked out that the zinfandel was coming to an end if he didn’t come up with some visions, the IT Swami ate and drank everything else I had in the boot - including the Marlboros - and sank into a stupor.  Apparently stupor is another word for trance in Wainuiomata.

I told him the conference will be in Las Vegas and that perked him up - one of his favourite cities apparently, except for another of his many failed business ventures.  (Something about an unfortunate misunderstanding in a combined marriage chapel and dog-grooming parlour - I’m happy to say I missed the details).

Whether the ensuing groans were part of the visioning process or due to the peanut butter I don’t know.  Between alarming sounds he started to see future visions.  Most of it made little sense to me, make of it what you will: people with parrot-heads, pink crustaceans, volcanoes, cheeseburgers and pirates.  Personally I put it down to the anti-freeze in the bulk zinfandel.  Other bits were more coherent (more or less).  He saw:

• a classroom full of people learning how to tweet (not parrots)
• a perfectly ordinary-looking conference except everyone was dressed in flip-flops
• margaritas in tiki bars (oh dear, my head hurts just thinking about it)
• a lean green elephant (OK that’s not entirely coherent, but then neither is a Pink Elephant)

I did ask the IT Swami about what he foresaw outside the conference itself.  He was evidently too startled by what he saw on the streets of Vegas to be able to describe it, but then that’s any day of the week in Las Vegas.  Some days it looks to me like a zoo without bars.  Well not that kind of bars - you know what I mean.  The zoo is in the bars.  I’m sounding like him now…

So I left him to the ministrations of his beach-volleyball acolytes who nurse him through his peanut-butter-and-chocolate withdrawals.  As I left I heard his faint voice say he could hear “Gulf and Western”, though what they sound like is beyond me.  And something about him being buffeted by it??  Even by the IT Swami’s standards it is strange stuff, nothing I can unravel.  Hopefully somebody out there can make sense of it.

 

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

IT people saying we are doing governance - it is so cute

When I hear IT people talking about governance, I’m reminded of a small boy wearing his dad’s carpentry belt and boots and pretending to be a real grownup.  Governance - real governance - is performed by the governors of an organisation, most of whom don’t work for it.  That’s why we call it governance. 

Over the years, governance has come to mean the management activities that: (1) put into effect governors’ directives; (2) collect data for governors’ monitoring; or (3) make proposals or escalations for the governors’ evaluation.  We’re all - including this writer - guilty of slapping the label governance on these activities, where ideally they would be labelled something ponderous like governance-enablement or governors-management, or something snappy like policing.

I yield to the inevitability of yet another example of terminological debasement, but when we use the word “governance” in an IT context, let’s try to keep in mind that what we are really doing is managing; that true accountability flows right to the top; that the directives come from outside IT; and that’s where the resulting reports should go.  What we do is very cute, but it’s only a plastic hammer and real governance tools - OUCH! HURTS! - belong to grown up governors.

Image: canstockphoto.com

Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Conference just got naughtier and nicer

A while ago I talked about how the 15th Annual Conference is going to be naughty but nice, thanks to the “unbalanced team” of subversives,  Chris Dancy, Aale Roos, James Finister and me…and the folks from Pink, especially David.  Things just got more extreme with the addition to that team of Ian Clayton.  Ian has a crystal clear vision of service management, which he articulated brilliantly in his masterwork USMBOK, the Universal Service Management Body of Knowledge.  This is the definitive description of service management (not IT-specific SM), a book I fall back on when I need clarity in my ITSM consulting.  With his encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, Ian is not afraid to point out when something doesn’t fit, is logically inconsistent,  or doesn’t make sense.  The vigour of the debate at the upcoming conference just went up another notch.  I can’t wait.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The IT Swami predicts the themes of the 15th Annual IT Management Conference

Entering the new decade (the millennium is already old), IT is in an even more extensive and rapid state of change than it normally is, which is really saying something.  The change is not really technology driven, though virtualisation and the internet play a part.  Nor is it process driven, whatever the ITIL wonks like to think.  The change is in the business models of IT and in IT’s relationship with the business.  The IT departments that are still back in the mindset of keeping the lights on, keeping a tight rein on change, and carefully cutting code, are looking frankly bemused. 

Everyone is struggling as fundamental rules are challenged.  Organisational changes come faster than IT can analyse them let alone execute them.  Production changes come in machine time not human.  Data is never 100% accurate, and may differ depending on how and where you ask.  We don’t control all our assets - we’re lucky if we know where they are.  Systems are too complex to ever describe completely, let alone debug what just happened. We no longer control our staff’s desktops - they bring their own.  We no longer control our user community - they meet on forums. Development is the integration of off-the-shelf-products and we contribute development to off-the-shelf-products. We need to be lean and green and cheap and agile and mobile and robust and sustainable and competitive.

I think there is a new mindset slowly emerging to come to grips with this chaos.  Much of the momentum is coming from Cloud, which isn’t the real issue at all.  We are learning to deal with imperfect information in an unpredictably mad world.

We talked recently about how Service, Governance and Assurance are strong themes in IT management for the twenty-teens (I like to use the word assurance to bundle risk, compliance, security and audit).  In the context of what I’m ranting about here, look for a faster ITSM where change is the norm not the exception, where the steady state is change.  Look for tighter governance to deal with looser (and buffeted) management.  And watch out for more frequent and rigorous assurance that things are holding together.

As part of his mid-winter solstice rituals several years ago, the IT Swami* had a vision that “The …Three …Castors …Of …The …Seat …Of …IT’s …Future …are …are …Governance, Service and Compliance” which he later amended to ‘Governance, Service and Assurance” after a questionable research trip to Amsterdam.  Come along to the 15th Annual IT Management Conference and listen to all the sessions to see if he is turning out to be right about Governance, Service and Assurance being emergent themes.

I’m off to ask him to go into a trance for us and predict some of the things you might see there at the conference.

*The IT Swami is the IT Skeptic’s alter-ego. While the IT Skeptic uses known facts to draw inference or predict outcome, the IT Swami is not so constrained. He uses instinct, second sight, crystals and patchouli to wildly speculate on the present and future.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Hidden musical talent walks amongst us

Pink Pres David alerted us to a remarkable talent in our ITSM midst.  Michael Gill was at an earlier Annual IT Service Management Conference and other events - he works with ITIL at Transcept Pharmaceuticals.  But this post isn’t about the interesting stuff Michael has to say about ITIL.

He is also a talented composer, arranger and musician with a new CD out.

Michael is clearly a sci-fi fan, with a few tracks being based on classics like Time Enough for Love, Dune and Neuromancer.  Not surprisingly some of it sounds a bit Alan-Parsons-esque (“see your face on a stranger”) but Parsons was clinical and a bit soulless.  Blues for Lazarus is full of soul: there is a hint of the Tom Waits whiskey-and-cigarettes sound, with lashings of cool jazz piano and lovely haunting vocals from Callie Lou Thomas.

Mostly though there’s that progressive rock sound of Emerson Lake Palmer, Genesis, Yes ...  Michael says an early influence was seeing a Yes concert - the Relayer tour.  I’m about two years older than Michael and I recall the profound effect that Relayer had on me and my mates.  My original vinyl no doubt got stuffed up some punk’s jumper at a party, or maybe my first “missus” took it when we split the records.  But I still have Tales from Topographic Oceans in crackling 33-and-a-third.

You can hear samples here and buy any tracks you like, or better still buy the CD here.  Then look out for Michael on the ITSM circuit.  My question is: where can I go hear Michael play?  A dark cabaret bar with good scotch would be perfect.

And another question while we’re at it: who else has hidden musical talents - especially amongst those coming to the 15th Annual conference ...???  Come on, own up you musos: ServiceSphere and I will ply you with drinks if you’ll play for us in Vegas!  Maybe we could arrange a jam in the Exhibit Hall…

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Pink never misses a party

With impeccable timing Pink Elephant held their Latin American conference in Mexico on the day Mexico won their World Cup match against France.  For the benefit of North American readers, that’s the soccer World Cup, a world series that does actually cover the world.  Mexico seemed quite pleased…

It was a red letter day here in New Zealand too - we like seeing the French beaten at anything (except wars, where we help out - something that slips their mind from time to time).  But what is this uncanny knack of Pink to be in the right place for a party?  It’s hard to believe they predicted the win, or even the draw, when the conference was planned, but surely there can be no other explanation.  It is pushing the bounds of probability too far to suggest it was just luck.

The local uniform of Pink Elephant Mexico also bears a remarkable resemblance to the national soccer outfit.

At least I assume the local Pinkers dress like that all the time?  Mauricio? is this true?

Seemingly all the other Pinkers were in aqua blue.  David Ratcliffe, the Pink Prez, showing solidarity with the sisterhood:

ConfBOK Session Strategy

A conference with the number and diversity of sessions of the 15th Annual IT Management Conference can be daunting.  Here are some tips from leading Pinkers (and me) about how to choose which sessions to go to. 

Setup

First things first; get yourself a blank diary for the days of the conference, to do your planning on.  I’m not a fan of electronic devices (phones, PDAs, laptops) for this.  If you think you can record alternatives for each time-slot and make notes, then good on you go for the gadget.  Personally I prefer a bit of paper but then I’m a notorious Luddite.

Now fill in any time block-outs: required business and personal commitments that still must be honoured even while attending Conference. 
Hopefully this includes sessions where you are speaking!  Everyone should try contributing to a conference: it builds personal confidence, it clarifies and develops your own thinking, it looks good on a CV, and of course you give back to those who give you so much.

Priorities

Somebody taught me once that if you get your priorities clear, then the actual deciding becomes easy.

Sort these criteria into your own order of priority:

Sessions by friends/colleagues who won’t forgive me if I’m not there

Sessions I need to know immediately to do my job

Sessions covering topics of personal interests related to what’s top of my mind

Sessions from the same Industry Vertical, e.g. if you’re with a Financial Institution are there some Financial Case Study presentations that would be specifically applicable to your own initiative, mapping to similar goals with similar business constraints

Things I know I have to understand for mid to long term job objectives
    What is part of our next 3-12 months roadmap? (short term vs. long term)
    Lessons learned by other organizations relating to my roadmap
    To validate work I have done to date
    Addressing questions that may be coming from key stakeholders

Speakers I or my friends think will be good. A quality, content-rich speaker will usually have some wisdom, funny story/illustration that will bring an aha moment that can be applied and used in one’s own SM initiative

Sessions that look to be a real opportunity for knowledge transfer as compared to a sales pitch

Speakers who are cute

Choosing

Fill in your diary with sessions that meet your first criterion.  Note the room!

Now go back and fill in sessions that meet your second criterion, and so on. 
If there is a clash with another session already in your diary, still pencil it in.  Should someone warn you off your first choice or it is cancelled, you can have your second choice ready.
Continue until your diary is full or you don’t care any more.

In the case of a tie, consider whether you want a heavy concentration in one topic or a diverse conference experience.  Personally I always like to throw in at least one wild-card session: something completely new to me to broaden the mind (e.g. my electrical engineering degree included a paper in Ancient Asian History)

Don’t look at only one track.  Look at all tracks to identify sessions that would expand your thinking and knowledge.
On the other hand, if the reason for attending is in support of a project or program, the conference agenda is very diverse so it might be wise to think in terms of the phases of the project/program and pick sessions (or assign a phase to a team member) that would be a best fit for that element of the project/program.
Try not to completely fill your diary otherwise you may completely fill your head. Also, reserve some time to visit the Exhibit Hall when the crowds aren’t there.

You can always flag sessions to listen to post-conference when the audio is available.  It is never as good as being there, but with the slides and audio it is valuable.

Teaming

If there are two or more of you from the same organisation, it helps.
Coordinate so you can share later.  Don’t have two of you turning up to the same session.  Strategise before the event and assign responsibility to attend sessions in various tracks based on who is attending and what their interests are and responsibilities are. 

Also define certain objectives to be captured during the event and then have meetings throughout the conference to compare notes and determine if adjustments needed to be made to the scheduling of who is attending what sessions.  Then there should be a debrief once back at your organisation.

Reporting

I wrote last year as part of our EHOBOK (Exhibit Hall Optimser Body of Knowledge) about extracting maximum value from the conference.  Remember this when choosing sessions:  “Reporting is the top priority activity after attending any conference.  In a previous life, colleagues used to wonder how come I got to go to the world conference year after year?  The answer was simple: the first time I went, I sent back breaking news while I was still there, ferreted out answers to particular issues we had in our region, and I produced a long report and a “brown bag” lunchtime presentation as soon as I got back.  And I continued that every time I went.  The bosses knew they got a return on their investment of sending me (I made sure they knew).”

So after all the preceding selection methodology, another of your selection criteria for sessions should be how useful the information will be when you report back!

Thanks to Brenda, Gary, Jack and Troy for contributing the sensible bits!

 

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

ConfBOK Strategy: How to get to a conference

Wondering how to get your attendance to a conference paid for?  here are two strategies:

1) Check if it comes out of your boss’s training budget.  If so you could be on a winner. 

I’m sure there are some organisations that delight in their staff being away on courses and who burn their way through the annual training budget within six months because they are devoted to the development of their company’s most important asset. 

More often there is money left in the bucket each year either because staff were too busy to be trained or because the boss was thinking about more important things.  This does not go down well with balanced scorecard reporting or HR-related audits.  As a responsible employee you should alert your boss to that risk.  You can offer a solution: a conference trip burns those dollars much quicker than a local course, thus minimising the lost productivity while maximising the ...er… risk reduction.

2) Exercise the Real IT Value Chain.  To explain this I need to share a quote with you from my book Introduction to Real ITSM (you can learn more about this book at my workshop on Making ITSM Real at the upcoming conference)

Vendor Management

Vendors generally manage IT departments well, and little intervention is required from IT.

The greatest difficulties arise when staff squabble over who is to be a vendor’s contact, since the role appeals to those who like desktop toys, or quality golf shirts or wind-cheaters, and those who like to travel.  Often a rotating roster can be established, or if this proves too cumbersome then senior management should simply usurp the roles.

In order to optimise being managed by vendors, it is worth seeking to be a reference site.  Being a reference site will bring benefits:
Love and attention.  This requires far more vendor resource than could ever be sustained in more than a few clients, so be one of them.

Glory.  Vendors will make you look a hero, in glossy brochures, advertisements, articles and best of all conference presentations.  They will put your CIO’s face on full page ads in magazines where their peers will see and then give them a poster-size framed version of the ad for their office wall.

Conferences.  Research on the number of reference sites whose CIO went to the vendor’s world conference at the vendor’s expense as a speaker or regularly appeared on speaking tours to warm sunny countries would yield interesting results. 
This works particularly well with a CIO about two years from retirement: apply love and glory, and then once they retire employ them on contract to be an overseas superstar keynote speaker at conferences in exotic places. 

Celebration.  In the face of defeat, declare victory.  This was an old British military tactic when faced with unshakeable guerrilla insurgence: walk away and hold a victory parade.  No need to admit the half-million-dollar project is a failure when you can bluff your way out of it with vocal assistance from the vendor.  Tell everyone how successful it was for long enough and even your own staff might start to believe it, especially if they start getting invited to conferences in exotic places.

The Real IT value chain:

So check out the list of exhibitors and get to work.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Continual Chunky Correction

What’s with Continual Service Improvement?  Oh I know I’m on dangerous ground here as Pink Elephant wrote the fifth of the core ITIL books, but really - hardly anyone gets to incrementally improve in this millennium.  Gary and George did a good job of what they were asked to do, but I think the whole ITIL framework misses the point.  The ITIL mindset seems to be that Change is all about getting things as stable as possible, and then CSI is about tweaking and refining and maturing the result.  CSI always brings to my mind an image of thoughtful engineers in white coats nudging knobs and watching the dials and making notes on clipboards, inching performance higher.  The IT I know and love is more about yelling people in boiler suits running by with fire extinguishers.  Or at best it is those white-coats trying to get to the knobs while builders rip up the floors and swap out the reactor core.

You know how it goes…

The business announce they’ve chosen an application for the new line of business.  It is written in the Eastern bloc by two graduates in a garage, Hulitz and Pakkardsk.  The manuals are in the Cyrillic alphabet, in a language nobody can identify.  Support in your country is provided by a refugee, their cousin, who used to install refrigerators and is studying English.  It runs on an AS400.

You’ve no sooner got the new system bedded down, 18 months late and only half functional, when it turns out the integration feeds to the other systems were coded by two graduates form a consultancy masquerading as expert programmers, who wouldn’t know business analysis if it stood up in their cereal,  and so your data is being quietly and progressively screwed.  Service desk calls go through the roof.  Emergency funds are allocated to do a data clean up and a code fix on the interfaces, but it is only half done when a recession hits and all the contractors are laid off, including the data transformation expert leading the cleanup and the project manager.  Service desk calls go through the roof but this time you aren’t allowed any more staff.  Eventually the service desk manager - the only one in the building who knows what all the services do - walks off the job.

You’ve dragged the incident queues back to four figures (by deleting everything over three months old) when the company acquires a startup that didn’t even have a service desk - the developers took the phone calls.  You have nearly got the run book written for the new system when the Board announces they’ve signed a memorandum of understanding with SAP and you’re to have the new system in for the next financial year.

Meanwhile a bunch of servers have gone end-of-life and the app won’t run up on any operating system known to your staff.  Just when you find a VM emulator and black-box it, a new CIO starts and decides budget can only be met by a sweeping program of Lean process.  The five biggest projects are put on hold, including the data cleansing you had restarted and the long-overdue service catalog, and the funds are diverted to a Lean Team to tear up fifteen years of operational processes and redesign them to strip out everything, plunging productivity to new lows.  Through long hours of team re-building and subversive process restoration, you get things almost back to normal, and then the company announces a merger.

You get the idea.  Who has time for knob-twiddling?  Who has anything around long enough to get it past a stable 1.0?  Who has measurements that are comparable to anything more than 12 months old?

The real world I know is more about trying to respond to change that comes in big crunchy chunks, not genteel thoughtful increments.  And it doesn’t advance up a hill, step by step towards the top.  Change lurches and swoops and tumbles - the only view you get of hilltops is as they are swinging wildly by far above.  Managing IT is more like a small boat in big seas than hiking up a hill.  It is not progression, just desperate correction to new destinations and changed circumstance.  Gary and George need to write a new book on Continual Chunky Correction.