The Pink News Blog

Monday, September 27, 2010

Margarita pilot evaluation

My friend Antonio Valle Salas of G2 (Gobierno y Gestión de TI), a Spanish ITSM consultancy, can’t be at the Pink11 conference but he ran some initial proof of concept trials on the Louisville margueritas*margaritas at the recent Fusion conference.  They look not to be trifled with

Antonio said “Won’t be able to be at Pink, but read the program and seems amazing!!”

You’d think after years as a professional cocktail barman I’d have learnt to spell “margarita”

Did you know you are already doing Service Management?

I wanted to start this conversation with “Three consultants walk into a bar…” but it would be politically incorrect and may offend many people in many parts of the world. It may even be perceived as contemptuous as not all consultants go to bars. But, enough of this nonsense.

Instead, let me go directly to the conversation which is held in the company’s auditorium.

The Boss: We are going to do ITIL®.
The IT Personnel: “ITIL?”
The Boss: We will implement ITIL so we will be better at ITSM
The IT Personnel: “ITSM?”
The Boss: “ITIL is short for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and ITSM means IT Service Management.”
The IT Personnel “?”
The Boss:: “We are going to do ITIL®. It is best practice, our competition is doing it, our suppliers are doing it and the consultants we hired told us we had to do it.
The IT personnel: “????????????????????????????????????????????????????”

The Boss (slightly frustrated by now) goes into this long explanation and overview of all that is ITIL and ITSM.

The IT personnel is by now texting, playing games on their mobiles, listening to music or are engaging is side conversations. In short, they heard it all before, another make work project.
“whoop-pee-doo”

The Boss: …effective…efficiencies…productivities…business and IT alignment…the business finally respecting IT…blah, blah, blah...

The IT personnel: …zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

But, enough of this nonsense

As I have mentioned in this blog before, at conferences and in articles, we are doing ourselves a MAJOR disservice by calling everything “IT this” and “IT that”.

ME – YOU ARE ALREADY DOING SERVICE MANAGEMENT.

YOU – HUH?

ME – You are working for an organization, the organization uses technology, the organization has many departments. It does not matter if you work in the private sector, public sector or for a not-for-profit organization. It does not matter if you are doing it internally or if you have outsourced it.

YOU – HUH?

ME: A rose is a rose is a rose; right? It does not matter if you work in the private sector, public sector or for a not-for-profit organization. Every organization has to manage the information it needs to operate and keep operating.

A long time ago, the technology was rock and chisel, and then came papyrus, vellum, paper, and finally, computers. They are all different right? No they are not. They are all various technology used to record and store information.

From now on, I want you to banish the following:
 ITIL®
 ITSM
 Best practice
 Business and IT alignment
 Us vs. them
 It will never work here
 We are different
 We don’t need this

WHY?
 Because you cannot implement a library
 The business customer is the only customer that counts – hence service management
 There is no such thing as “best” practice, it is “good” practice and more often than not, good is good enough
 The IT department has been part of the business since humanity invented writing
 You are all in this together. Listen to you coworkers from other departments and don’t offer a solution until you know exactly what they are saying
 You are already doing it so it is working in your organization
 No you are not
 Yes you do since you are already doing it

If you are still reading then your reaction is probably “?”

Do you know what your problem is? You are caught up by the hype. If it is not done by the book, then it’s no good. You simply have not recognized that someone, somewhere, is performing one or more of theses activities. That person may be an internal employee or you have contracted it out. Moreover, you or that person may not call it like the book does.

You know what? It does not matter what you call it.

Let me show you a way to prove to yourself that you are doing those activities. Please refer to the ITIL® Core book Service Operation, chapter 5 for details. I am not including the section numbers or the page numbers as these numbers may change in the near future.

 IT Operations
 Mainframe management
 Server management and support
 Network management
 Storage and archive
 Database administration
 Directory services management
 Desktop support
 Middleware management
 Internet/web management
 Facilities and data centre management
 Information security management and service operation
 Improvement of operational activities

Please refer to the checklist provided at the link below

Next: Activities from processes

Service_Management_-_an_operational_checklist.doc

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Las Vegas Hello (sung to the tune of “Jamaica Farewell”)

Down de way where de nights are ..um.. fun
And de sun shine brightly on de desert floor
I’ll take a trip on a flying ship
and when I reach Las Vegas I’ll make a stop

An’ I’m glad to say I’m on my way
Won’t be back for several day
My email is down
My head is spinnin’ aroun’
Gonna dance a little whirl in Vegas town

Sounds of laughter everywhere
And the aqua shirts swaying to and fro
I must declare that my heart is there
With Pinkers from Maine to Mexico

An’ I’m glad to say I’m on my way
Won’t be back for several day
My email is down
My head is spinnin’ aroun’
Gonna dance a little whirl in Vegas town

At the sessions you can hear
Presenters speak while on their head they bear
Hangovers bad from tequila they had
Margaritas are good any time of de year

An’ I’m glad to say I’m on my way
Won’t be back for several day
My email is down
My head is spinnin’ aroun’
Gonna dance a little whirl in Vegas town

From the original Jamaica Farewell by Erving Burgess, ©Cherry Lane Music Co (ASCAP)

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Part 2 of How To Use IT Governance To Drive IT Business Alignment

As part of our series on the Real Professors of the 15th Annual IT Management Conference, we are talking to Dr. John Beachboard, a professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) at Idaho State University (ISU). 

At the conference, Dr. Beachboard’s session How To Use IT Governance To Drive IT Business Alignment will present an actionable executive-level IT governance framework.  In a previous post we had a most interesting discussion about governance, which we continue here:


Your focus in this presentation is IT strategy and investments.  I have a client that wants a framework for IT policy, which seems to me to be another one of the key connectors between governance and management of IT.  Once again there seems to be no guidance out there (see my blog).  Any thoughts?

Hmm, policy strategy:  two useful words that tend to make me uncomfortable.  They are subject to such misunderstanding and misuse.  I spent over 20 years working for the US Department of Defense (DoD) both as a federal employee and as a contractor.  The DoD had IT strategies and, boy, did they have IT policies.  In my twenty years I had the misfortune of working on three different programs, each of which wasted hundreds of millions of dollars, and several others that were nothing to brag about.  Pain avoidance as well as curiosity led me to a life of academe.

In short, policy and management frameworks bring out my skepticism.  But… I think ITIL v3 framework introduces the most useful approach for aligning organization and IT strategy.  Guess I might offend some folks with this, but I don’t have much use for much of Volume I [Service Strategy], but I think Volume 2 [Service Design]makes a real contribution for achieving IT strategic alignment, primarily through the processes governing development of the service catalog and associated service level agreements.  Although, I think the contribution must be considered provisional because it remains to be seen whether the business-side of the enterprise will truly engage with these activities. 

Without getting into a long discourse, the contribution lies in clearly linking IT services to the business processes they support and delineating IT service warranty from utility.  My personal observation is that enterprise management is often willing to pay for desired business functionality but has rarely had a good understanding of the infrastructure investments required to support quality delivery of that functionality.  ITIL provides vocabulary and processes for educating business management.  The business process owners should come to understand the cost of raising their requirements (e.g., moving from three 9s to five 9s service availability). In turn, if the IT staff works with business process owners wrestling with justifying desired service level requirements, it should come to a much better understanding of the business issues driving IT investments. 

Perhaps I am over-simplifying the argument, but to me IT governance is less an issue of who does what, but who does what at what level of granularity.  At the executive level, an enterprise process architecture is created (consistent with Ross, Weill and Robertson’s enterprise architecture strategy).  Executives and directors need to understand how IT services contribute to strategic processes and establish at least in general terms appropriate service level requirements (including security).  These guidelines (call them policies, investment guidelines, or whatever) then serve as criteria for evaluating business (sub) process improvement and risk mitigation initiatives (whether organizational, procedural or technological).  Lower layers of management perform the process and service decomposition needed to achieve the macro-level performance guidelines.
To me, the challenge is getting the business community to truly play its part (Mark [Toomey, see part 1 of this interview] appears to recognize this as a significant problem as well).

It still strikes me as odd that I can validate my processes and roles against COBIT, and even some of my reporting artifacts, and but I can’t test my policies to see if I have a complete set, and to get advice on how to structure them.  As far as I can tell there is no such thing as a policy framework for IT. ISO38500 bangs on about the need for policies. ITIL and COBIT mention legions of policies. But I can find nothing that gives us a comprehensive list of necessary policies, let alone describes what a policy structure looks like and what the priorities are.  Come to think of it I can’t do the same for strategies or plans either.  Aale Roos [who will be speaking at the Pink Elephant conference] identified an extraordinary list of 44 ITIL policies and strategies, which ITIL casually mentions in passing scattered throughout the five books. COBIT is much the same.

An authorative systematic approach to policy is essential to get some control, management and usability.  This area cries out for a systematic treatment to assist practitioners working with strategies, polices and plans - in analysis, design, and audit.  I’m hopeful that the new version of COBIT - COBIT5 - will help.  Perhaps you could get some post-grads onto it for us?

In fact, we are trying to take a stab at this in our work on executive-level governance.  The challenge as we see it to keep it really executive-level is to emphasize that at an IT governance level, we probably need to talk about the creation of meta-policies rather than the actual policies needed to manage IT on a day-to-day basis.  There is important guidance needed from executives, but I believe that if they feel that they are being dragged down into the weeds, they will resist the effort.  If we can identify some fairly discrete policy decision, I like Weill and Ross’s use of the term IT principles, then we will improve our chances of achieving meaningful executivel-level participation.  However, in truth this remains an untested proposition. 

What brought you to this topic? 

Wanting to understand how smart people attempting to follow essentially reasonable policies and guidelines managed to screw up so consistently.  IT governance failures can certainly be considered part of the problem.  But in truth, I am primarily concerned with the overall management of IT and view IT governance as one piece of the puzzle.  But my real interest is less about developing policies or frameworks than trying to identify the deeper knowledge required to successfully apply them.

What are the people aspects of governing the development of IT strategy and investments?  Where does resistance arise and how best to address it?

I think some of that resistance results from a simple lack of faith or trust in the development of IT strategy.  Looking back at my experience with the military, we spent tremendous resources planning, evaluating and governing projects… and we still failed.  At some point, one might reasonably but fallaciously conclude that one could do just as well shooting from the hip and fixing problems as they occur.

I think the difficulties associated with effective project oversight cannot be underestimated.  I think it too simplistic to conclude that project failures are failures of management.  That may be true by definition, but my experience leads me to conclude that the management failure often occurred at least in part due to a lack of technical competence to appreciate the technical problems being reported.  So is that a management failure or a technical failure?  We try to avoid this type of “managerial failure” by writing more policies without addressing the underlying issue of technical competency of those performing the oversight.  I do not think management should or can know as much about technology as the technical staff.  But they do need a fairly refined technical BS detector if they are to successfully perform IT oversight (or governance).  (And beyond the issue of technical competency, there will always be the issues of information filtering or simple refusal to accept or pass along bad news.)

As indicated above, I also think business managers are too often unwilling to effectively engage with supporting IT staff and management in specifying business-appropriate service-level requirements.  I care less about whether formal service level agreements are negotiated than whether meaningful face-to-face discussions occur.  I want business process owners to think seriously about the business consequences of various types of IT service failures. 
As indicated above, I think ITIL v3 provides some potentially useful tools for addressing issues outlined above.  But I certainly do not see them as providing anything approaching a panacea.  I have been working to help create educational content that helps business managers and executives understand why their participation is useful and allows them to participate more effectively.  But quite frankly, it has been a hard sale and I and my co-authors continue to polish the content and its presentation.



It has been a great discussion on Governance of IT, which I look forward to continuing at the conference.  You too, readers: add this session to your strategic plan for the conference.

Monday, September 13, 2010

let us be constructive…

There seems to be a lot of noise these days about the death of ITIL and certifications being useless.

Without rehashing what is being said or trashing people for there opinions (and I do agree with most of them) let us try to be positive and constructive.

See Aidan Lawes’ blog if you have not done so yet… And don’t forget to read parts 1 and 2 as well as the comments.

Aidan Lawes’ Blog - Criticizing ITIL Part 3

The way I see it, the solution is simple. We all stop using the word “ITIL” and simply use Service Management, not ITSM, not IT Service Management, simply Service Management.

After all, IT is part of the business. It is not us vs. them.

I know what you are thinking; this is oversimplifying. You are correct. However, what we need instead is to promote a more encompassing body of knowledge, which includes governance, compliance, assessment, frameworks, architectures, project management, cultural change, personal skills, soft skills, management skills, etc.

Yes, these courses exist. All have been tried with more of less success in the past. We at Pink Elephant did have management skills and soft skills courses. I am not saying we need to dust them off but we need to look at the way we present things to the world. ITIL is but one of the building blocks.

I understand the business world is not ready for this and may never be. I know what I am proposing may be a pipedream. What I see as one of many issues is that people want the “magical cure” or the “silver bullet.” They want us (the education, consulting, and software and hardware vendor community) to say to them, “read this book,”, “take this foundation course,” “deploy this product” and all will be well.

Sorry, Rome was not built in a day.

A second major issue is money. Courses are expensive. People don’t know what they don’t know. They certainly don’t know whom to send to which course. How many need this course or that course. Do they really need the certificate? What will they really learn; how to do it or how to pass the exam? Let us not forget the time people spent away from their job when they attend a course or conference. I have been a trainer a long time and I am saddened by management’s attitude that they can pull out their people out of a class on a whim.

Yes, I know, business is business and I cannot tell you how to run your business. I don’t want to run your business anyway.

Let’s face it folks. The OGC, APMG, TSO, the EIs, the ATOs, the independent consultants, the software vendors, the hardware vendors are in business to make money. There is nothing wrong with that.

What is wrong is the hype.
What is wrong is the negativity.
What is wrong is not offering solutions.
What is wrong is that we are spending too much time complaining about all that is wrong with the world.

It is like disaster relief. It makes for great news for a few days or weeks. Then the event falls off the news and people forget about it. Except those that are living with the aftermath of the disaster. It pains me that with all of the know-how, abilities, and organizations dedicated to helping others that it always boils down to “lack of money” and “special interest groups”.

Well, it was like that 10,000, 5000, 1000, 500 years ago, last, last week, yesterday. It is the same today and will be the same tomorrow.

If people spent as much energy in building service management instead of pointing out what’s wrong, the possibilities are endless. I know politics are involved, lots of good will, many nice speeches, and little action. People talk a good game, but when it comes time to act…

Where am I going with this? Here is a solution to help our customers. Here is a radical idea.

Why push certifications?
Why push the certification immediately after the course?
Why not let the students take the course, absorb the material, and use it?
Why not let them attend a review session and take the exam later on?

In short, why don’t we push the idea of learning and acquiring the knowledge that will help their organizations?

Passing an exam is nice. Having an exam at the end of a course makes people pay more attention in class. However, the exam is distracting. This is especially true for adult education. The discussion with the students about how to address issues and how to use various components of what you are teaching makes it all worthwhile. That’s when you tell yourself “that’s what I love about my job. When I see that light pop up over their head, it means I have done my job well.”

Until someone burst the bubble by saying something like “but does ITIL has to say about it?” or “but what about the exam”?”

Bummer

stay tuned…

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Recovering from Margaritas

This may be the most important survival advice you will get for the 15th Annual IT Management Conference, Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes ...

Nowadays tequila and I are estranged.  We nod to each other when we meet but we don’t get on.  I won’t tell the story here - many tequila drinkers have a similar one.  Suffice to say it was the same Christchurch that is currently recovering from an earthquake, the effects were similar, and luckily the hypothermia didn’t kill me. 

Those were Tequila Slammers.  Margaritas are a marginally more civilised way to imbibe tequila, if “tequila” and “civilised” can be used in the same sentence.  Tequila is a brute of a drink, that clearly has active ingredients other than alcohol.  The effects bring to mind Troy Du Moulin’s favourite book, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and its drink, the Pan-galactic Gargle-blaster.

The effect of drinking one of these is rather like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large gold brick. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will tell you on which planets the best ones are brewed, how much you can expect to pay for one, and which voluntary organizations exist to help you recover afterwards.

Yup, that sounds about right.  I reckon Douglas Adams had tequila in mind.

My own cure for a hangover used to be a Prairie Oyster:

• One shot bourbon or rye
• One unbroken yolk of egg
• salt, pepper, dash of Worcester sauce

Place gently in a shot glass, then swallow whole (not the glass).
If you can keep it down, you’ve recovered.

...but that way lies alcoholism.  My preferred therapies these days are:

• Lots of water before sleeping
• Strong doses of vitamin B (brand: Berocca)
• Diet Coke
• Greasy carbohydrates (brand: Burger King.  Macca’s is not going to work)

...none of which is good for you (You know what fish do in that water, right?)

My memory of Margaritas is hazy, especially the recovery phase, so to get Margarita-specific therapies, some research was in order:

One site suggests fish tacos with mango and jalepeno, or with white cabbage and cilantro. Both have black beans and marinated fish.  It has the carbos and some vitamins so it sounds plausible.
On the principle of “a hair of the dog that bit you”, deep fried frozen margaritas have potential (not recommended by the Heart Foundation).
Another source suggests Margaritas are themselves a way of recovering from excessive exercise (“Margaritas contain LIME and SALT. Vitamin C + Electrolytes. SO IMPORTANT. “)

The best way to avoid the effects of tequila is not to drink it, but I suspect the majority of us are going to fail to follow that good advice.

Enjoy!