The Service Organization Part 1

THE TRAGIC RESULT OF TASK SEGEMENTATION Since the early industrial revolution and the advent of modern manufacturing processes pioneered by men such as Henry Ford for his famous Model T Ford. Organizational design has focused on breaking apart complex processes into the smallest individual tasks. The result of which manifests itself as silo or stove pipe based organizational charts focused on groups of like activities where the right hand has little knowledge of or concern for what the left hand is doing.

Pink Going in to 2007

Today we're a very stable, successful and growing company with our HQ in Toronto and operations in the USA, Mexico, Brazil, UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. We also do business through partners in China, South Korea, Japan, the middle east, and central & south america....

Theory of Constraints & Continual Process Improvement

In “The Goal” Eli Goldratt presents the Theory Of Constraints (TOC). TOC introduces primary measurements for the analysis of systems based on productivity and ultimately, profit. The core truth of TOC is that every system or process has at least one constraint or bottleneck, and that the identification of this constraint should be the focus for any improvement activity.

Pink in the New Millennium

The RCC operation in the Netherlands continued to enjoy great success through the 90s. There were, by now, a growing number of businesses being acquired and initiated - each with their own brand and market, but all in the areas of IT outsourcing and related services such as consulting & education....

Process Ownership Combinations

When reading the ITSM books, the reader can be led to assume that each process has a unique Process Owner; however, while it may be possible to do this in a large organization, it is far more likely that a single individual may be required to oversee and champion two or more ITSM processes. Care must be taken in the selection of what combinations work well and which represent a conflict of interest based on the process objectives.

Pink in the Pacific Rim

The old Mayflower International business had developed many relationships and customers in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia & Indonesia in the early 90s, and soon after we became a Pink Elephant company we took the opportunity to discuss the potential for these markets with our Dutch parent. As a result, a...

Pink Elephant and itSMF

Just before that first NA conference in 1997 we got a call from a gentleman named Ken Hamilton who said that he was planning to launch itSMF in the USA. We invited Ken along to make his pitch to the Pink attendees, and a number of organizations ended up joining itSMF...

CMDB as a Resort Condominium

Looking at the traffic on the blog we seem to be getting a lot of hits on the posts related to the CMDB. So I thought you might be interested in an analogy I developed for an article I recently had published in a BMC Viewpoint Magazine. Let's compare the current state of data management to every IT domain group managing its own data on a separate island, accessible only by rowboat. Imagine that each group has built a home for this data. In some rare cases, this home is represented by an exclusive, state-of-the-art resort. However, on most islands, these data stores are represented by less impressive structures that meet the needs of the local residents, but prevent easy connection to the world beyond.

IT Governance and Employee Compliance

Last August we presented a special Symposium focused on IT Governance. One of the speakers was Lisa Welsher from Right Process. She talked about the challenges of getting people to take accountability for policies and procedures, especially when legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is requiring organizations to do the...

Developing A Service Based Cost Model

Adopting Service Management means that a company will eventually have to define services which are documented and published in a Service Catalog. However, have you ever stopped to think about what the very next question from your customers will be once you trot these new service definitions out? How much do these services cost?