Troy's Blog

Friday, March 05, 2010

Supplier Managers and Olympic Hockey

The Supplier Manager Is Like the Coach Of An Olympic Hockey Team

Its funny how our current focus areas are usually the product of several streams of consciousness. I suppose it all comes back to the old saying about the product of our efforts being greater than the sum of it parts.

As a Canadian I am still enjoying the afterglow of the most successful Winter Olympics in Canadian history, with a record breaking Gold Medal win. This feat was topped off by the entire nation watching the Canadian Hockey team win the final medal game in sudden death over time. (What a rush!)

My second stream of thought has been focused on the topic of Supplier Management. A subject I decided to research and write about early in the new year as it began to dawn on me that there is a growing strategic requirement to successfully integrate external suppliers of both classic and cloud based IT services into our IT value chain and management models.

I understand fully that we have been in the business of outsourcing both operational and strategic services to external suppliers for some time now. The question of course is how successful have we been at this up to this point. This is further complicated when we treat them like outsiders versus adopted family members. A challenge I have written on before:  Your IT Outsourcer - A Brother of Another Mother

The difference I see today is that this landscape is about to get a lot more complex now that we are also moving to off premise cloud services for both business and technical services.

Having just returned from a very successful Pink conference where I spoke on the topic of ITIL in the Clouds I made a statement that I had initially written on this blog: Choosing to use cloud services is a choice to outsource multiple slivers of your IT value chain. In my article on this subject as well as in my session I made the case that it is critical to integrate our suppliers into the ITSM Management processes for delivering services to our business partners in a secure, reliable and cost effective manner.

For this reason I personally believe that Supplier Management is the most important / strategic Service Design process for companies to get right for the next decade and beyond.

So how does the concept of Supplier Management relate to Olympic Hockey you might ask? (I was hoping you would )

Consider for a moment how an Olympic Hockey team is formed. A Senior Management group selects players from multiple teams and assembles the best possible talent from all of these different sources to create what they hope is a team cable of great success. However, the challenge that an Olympic hockey coach faces is that while they have assembled star players into this new team they come from very different hockey clubs. Each club has its unique style, culture and ways of getting the job done. What they have to do is to take these individual talents “suppliers” and get them to start playing as a cohesive team with a common play book. (Enter a company’s IT Management Framework)

In my weird way of looking at life the Coach for an Olympic Hockey team performs the same role as a Supplier Manager in multi-sourced IT Management environment. The Supplier Manager helps an organization to pick the right players for the value network and then ensures and contracts that they agree to operate by the common play book (ITSM Processes).

Otherwise what you get is a lot of individual talent moving the puck towards the goal as a team of isolated individuals. Any Olympic hockey team that cannot make this transition from talented individuals to a cohesive team approach will never get close to a medal round let alone ultimate success and glory.

If you think about it for a moment this scenario is exactly what we are faced with every day in IT organizations that have multiple suppliers that are not integrated well. 

To close this article let me share with you a case study that I picked up at the Pink conference this year.

As I was running from one of my speaking sessions to the next I was stopped in the hall by a person from a company that we had done ITSM consulting with in the past. He was very excited about telling me about a project related to Supplier Management that he had recently been involved in and asked if I would have some time to sit down and discuss it. Not being able to stop on route I made a lunch appointment with this person and I am so glad I did.

At lunch he let me see a manual that he and a team of people had created to help manage and consolidate over 81 separate supplier contracts in a sane and consistent way. In this manual they had created common Service Definitions. (Eg. Database Administration) Instead of each supplier providing their own definition and set of attributes for this service they were asked to bid on a single common definition. This allowed the organization to multi source the same service to several provides without risk or variance between serve offerings.

Also in this manual was a detailed description of the core ITIL processes that the organization had defined / deployed and the expectations of involvement that were required of all suppliers around policy, process, roles and key performance indicators. Example: Incident, Problem, Change, Service Asset & Config, Release and Deployment, etc) In short a common play book for all parties regardless of what team they originated from.

This was the most beautiful ITSM thing I have seen in a long time. (Sigh: I know but it’s the life I lead) I wish I could declare who this was but he asked for anonymity. My hope is that he can present this project at next years Pink’s 2011 Conference.

So in closing I would ask you if you have an Olympic Hockey Coach / Supplier Manager working on your team that is not only focused on getting the best players for the cheapest price but also defining a strategy to take individual talent and build it into a team with a common vision, goal and play book for success!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” ~Andrew Carnegie

Friday, January 29, 2010

ISO 20k The Idustrial IT Password

The Value And The Misunderstanding of ISO 20000

I am writing this blog post on my way back from a 2 week Pink Expert Forum Roadshow with stops in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Dubai and now have a 14 hour flight to capture some of my thoughts around what I heard and saw and reflect on the interesting interactions I had with various people in South East Asia and the Middle East.

One of the most memorable discussions I had was with a CIO who declared to me very proudly at a networking event that his organization was going to adopt and implement ISO 20000 in their IT organization. I thought this was a curious statement and proceed to ask some clarifying questions. I probed with a few gentle leading questions about whether what he really meant to say was that he was going to adopt ITIL practices for his organization and then go for an ISO 20k audit to verify and validate the improvements.

However, he was not going to be deviated from his declared goal and insisted that his organization was going to Implement ISO 20k and that he had no business case justification for ITIL. Hearing his insistence on this goal I did my best to explain the relationship between ITIL the Best Practice Framework and ISO 20 the Code of Practice (Check list) used by auditors to assess an organization’s compliance to 14 IT Service Management processes but there was no shaking this gentleman from his dogged focus on ISO 20k as the goal.

Interested in why he wanted this goal so badly I asked him why he was so interested in ISO 20k. His reply was very candid and frank. He told me quite clearly that his goal was to obtain the certification as proof to his customers that their IT processes were mature and followed best practice. After unsuccessfully trying to explain the difference between an ISO audit for compliance and a process maturity assessment (ISO audits do not measure maturity) I finally said with some regretted exasperation. “So what you really want ISO 20k for is a marketing tool for your clients” his answer to me was “yes that’s correct”

Feeling that this conversation was not being very productive for either of us I took one final stab at trying to explain the difference between ITIL and ISO 20k. I told him that the real detail was to be found in the ITIL Library and that the ISO 20k Code of practice was only 42 pages long and that it could not possibly have enough detail in it to provide guidance on how to adopt the processes and elements it describes for audit purposes. Perhaps this statement was a bit over the top and for that I am sorry since it ended our conversation quite abruptly and the gentleman walked away towards the food and beverage tables. A third person that had been part of this exchange looked at me and said something to effect. “What many Executives wan’t out of ISO 20k in this region is the industrial password that will get them new business or increase their organization’s status.”

Now don’t get me wrong, neither of these goals are necessarily bad in and of themselves but my personal belief is that the goal should be to improve your IT organization and services first and then if you have done the heroic feat of actually adopting and implementing 14 IT Service Management processes described in ISO 20k across the full scope of your IT organization then by all means celebrate this achievement by having an ISO 20k audit validate all the hard work your organization has done.

There is a purpose and use for process frameworks like ITIL as well as ISO standards but it is important not to confuse the ends with the means.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. ~Douglas Adams

Thursday, December 03, 2009

ITIL Castles In the Cloud

Launching A Cloud Computing Strategy Means Outsourcing Multiple Slivers of Your IT Service Value Chain

[Young Cosette - Les Miserables]

There is a castle on a cloud,
I like to go there in my sleep,
Aren’t any floors for me to sweep,
Not in my castle on a cloud.

Rhetorical Question: But wait I thought that cloud computing strategies are meant to simplify IT service provisioning? I cut the supplier a check and they take care of rest right?

Response: In one sense this is a correct, since you are paying an external supplier to provide a complete service outcome. The service can come in the form of an account for a hosted software service, a development platform or a set of virtual infrastructure components without you having to own or manage the physical assets.  However, on the other side of coin it is critical to understand that what you are also doing is introducing a new set of players into your existing IT management processes. Just as Young Cosette discovered in the musical Les-Miserables we still have to sweep the floors and take care of business even when we live in the clouds.

[At The End Of The Day - Les Miserables]

At the end of the day you get nothing for nothing
Sitting flat on your butt doesn’t buy any bread

What the IT Community is quickly coming to realize is that to deploy a cloud strategy within their organization successfully a number of processes and IT Service Management elements have to be defined - and better yet - automated from request through verified provisioning and then keep running as long as needed.

Take the following list as an example:

• Service Catalog: The cloud based service needs to be documented, managed and published in an actionable service catalog for IT customers to order from.
• Request Fulfillment: The cloud service has requestable components which require a process to support request approval and integrated workflow automation for request provisioning.
• Change Management: The infrastructure service is now a component service to other business services and changes to the virtual infrastructure must go through Change Management whether you or the cloud supplier makes the change.
• Service Asset and Configuration Management: While you may not choose to model a SaaS service within your CMDB, the infrastructure-as-a-service components play a critical dependency role in understanding component failure impact analysis and provides key information to many other processes.
• Incident & Problem Management: Congratulations! By outsourcing your IT services to a cloud provider they have now become part of your 2nd and 3rd level support organization and need to be integrated into your support agreements and internal operational level agreements.
• Release and Deployment Management: Many cloud providers make scheduled and unschedule releases to their offerings on a regular basis. This requires you to manage these new releases to your customers in a formal maner since the user interface, service functionality and underlying integrations can change at any point.
• Access Management: Just because your service is in the cloud does not mean you don’t have to be concerned about who can order a service component, what level of access / role the requestor / approver has to have, or support your employee on boarding and off boarding processes.
• Event Management: Your sourced cloud services need to be monitored and integrated into your NOC processes.
• Service Level Management: The SLA you negotiate with your cloud provider will need to support your customer SLA’s (This will be particularly interesting if your customer has executed a business process outsourcing arrangement based on SaaS/cloud and then turns to you to “manage” and integrate with the remaining IT infrastructure, data, and applications).
• Supplier Management: Using multiple cloud providers means managing a growing set of external suppliers as part of your internal IT value chain that all need to follow your established policies and processes to ensure consistent delivery of IT services. (see SLM)
• Financial Management: Thanks to the ease of use ordering up new cloud service units many organizations receive a shocking bill quite quickly. Keeping track of your financial obligations around accounts payable is critical. Else beware of “Cloud Sprawl”. Just because a cloud service has been purchased, doesn’t remove your old hardware and software or the lease payments, remaining maintenance, or book value associated with them. 
• Availability & Capacity Management:Thanks to elastic capacity and cloud support for failover and dynamic routing you can use cloud services to enhance both of these processes for service design, just be aware of the true external as well as internal costs. And what about that link you have to the cloud? How diverse/redundant is it? How dynamic is it’s routing and capacity?
• IT Service Continuity: Cloud services offer a great opportunity to support Disaster Recovery and off site storage requirements. However your strategy and process needs to be defined in order to use these services strategically (see Availability and Capacity)
• Information Security: Public or Private Cloud does not matter, Information Security remains a concern regardless of where your data resides. (Won’t even touch legislation and privacy laws)
• Etc. Etc. Etc......

The key message I believe you may be picking up from this post is that the more complex your value chain of suppliers becomes, the more necessary it is to have defined, repeatable processes to support them. In the end moving to Cloud Services is a form of strategic outsourcing and comes with all the challenges and benefits of what that means.

Don’t make the classic mistake of believing that once you outsource something you no longer have to worry about it (You are still concerned that the floors get swept). The old model of outsourcing your problem’s does not work in this model either.

By all means look strategically at integrating alternative suppliers into your IT value chain, just be aware of what that means. For more thoughts on integrating external suppliers successfully take a look t the article I wrote:  Your IT Outsourcer - A Brother of Another Mother

[Finale - Les Miserables]

Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” ~Alan Perlis