Troy's Blog

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

Thursday, November 19, 2009

ITSM / ITIL Program Leadership

Transformation Efforts are Always Most Successful When Led from Top Down

Here we are in the middle of November with the US Thanksgiving just around the corner and I find myself thankful for a very busy 4th Quarter leading into the holiday season.
While it means that I and my team are on the road, it also is very encouraging to see the evidence of our Economy turning in a positive direction.

Over the last few weeks I have been meeting with the Senior Leadership teams of several of our customers across the continent who are all re-starting their ITIL projects or finally taking the first steps into the ITSM adventure. My observation it that the Senior Leadership responsible for an ITIL program really benefit from a 1 day working session with their peers where the people, process, technology and governance considerations are discussed and addressed. This type of kick of session serves to put everyone on the same page so to speak as well as provide the leadership with a vision of how to accomplish the Service Management program they are envisioning.

The Agenda for this 1 day Executive Workshop typically looks like this:

Learn about the IT Service Life cycle as well as the business drivers for service management and key trends that are impacting IT Service Organizations. This one day executive session focuses on what senior managers need to understand about the life cycle approach and how it links to business value generation and IT strategy.

Workshop Agenda

Strategic ITSM Overview

• Introduction To Service Management & ITIL
• ITIL Benefits
• Business drivers for ITIL adoption
• Linking IT Service Management and business value

The IT Service Management Lifecycle

• High-level overview of the structure, components and processes of the five core ITIL books (Service Strategy; Service Design; Service Transition; Service Operation; Continual Service Improvement)

Process Governance & Organizational Considerations

• Process Governance / Ownership / Management
• Service Ownership
• Business Engagement Roles

Roadmap To Adopt ITIL

• Suggested ITSM Roadmap

IT Management Tools & Process Automation

• Process automation and integration considerations
• Industry trends and vendor positions
• Developing a tool architecture strategy

Facilitated Discussion About Next Steps

In fact we believe so strongly in this workshop we are offering it at our annual conference in February as a pre-conference 1 day Executive Session:

Link: https://www.pinkelephant.com/ITM10/Workshops/PreWorkshops.htm

Other News of Interest:

While the past couple of months have indeed been busy I have had the opportunity to participate in a couple of interesting Multi Media sessions.

Interview by Rob England (The IT Skeptic): Follow this link to listen to a recorded interview and for a preview of a conference session I am doing on “5 Tips For Developing An ITSM Strategic Road Map”

Speaking of Rob England and keeping in tune with the Theme of this blog post I highly recommend Rob’s book “Owning ITIL: A Skeptical Guide for Decision Makers” which has specifically been written for those individuals who have been given an ITIL project to sponsor or run and are now wondering what they have gotten themselves into!

Service Catalog Certification: At Pink we are proud to have participated in the development of the new Service Catalog certification and the following link will take you to a short video clip where I am interviewed as part of this new certification launch.  http://www.uk.kaliinteractive.com/

Well onward and upward my friends as we power though November and into December!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are yours?

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do. ~Lucille Ball