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Archive for the ‘Around The Interwebs’ Category

ISO want to get certified

November 17th, 2010

Lately it feels like we’ve been hearing less about ITIL and more about ISO 20,000 certification.

I wasn’t completely clear on the difference between the two, but according to this very useful site:

ITIL is usually the starting point and in practice is often used by organisations wanting to address a particular “point of pain”, such as a process that is obviously failing. Once one process has been implemented successfully it soon becomes obvious that the related processes would also be worth implementing…and a service improvement journey begins.

Achieving ISO/IEC 20000 is undertaken when organizations want to test and prove they have adopted ITIL advice effectively. It is used to develop consistent, integrated processes across organisational and national boundaries. Customer organisations also use it to compare providers.

This sort of suggests, then, that if more and more people are talking about ISO 20000, it must follow that the maturity of ITSM processes is improving across the board. Right?

Except that’s not what we’re seeing. Undoubtedly, IT has been hit as hard (if not harder) by the recent economic turbulence as any area of business. And when budgets are cut, the first things to go are areas perceived as luxuries – things like systematic improvement of processes – and the areas that remain are the critical, can’t-do-without things: fighting fires as and when they appear. The irony, of course, is that proper process improvement would reduce the need to fight fires, and so an effort to reduce costs ends up costing more.

The other thing we’ve noticed as a result of the downturn is that IT departments are being asked to justify themselves to their customers – more so than ever. CIOs now have to demonstrate the value of IT, and the return on investment that the business can expect from increased IT infrastructure. It’s something that we at Westbury are very interested in, because the easiest way for a CIO to demonstrate value is through producing cold, hard metrics – and that’s where SMI Suite comes in.

So maybe this move towards ISO 20000 is nothing to do with maturity, but rather an attempt by IT departments to protect their budgets – the idea being that the certification proves the worth of the department.

If so, it’s a shame. We’d rather see real progress in maturity and real commitment to efficient, productive processes. But whether that means ITIL or ISO 20000, you won’t get anywhere without the data, and that’s when you’ll want to start talking to us.

Tom

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Posted in Around The Interwebs, Processes

Tags: ISO 20000 ITIL ITSM maturity process

Human-centric BI & The Wall

October 28th, 2010

For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it to predict the future, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical.

The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed. All of the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall.

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Highlights from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=820

And at the same time we enable effective data sense-making by providing choices of data being cleaned, transformed and integrated when that’s absolutely necessary to increase the possibilities of exploring and analyzing.

With Westbury there’s no wall!

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Posted in Around The Interwebs, Products

Tags: ABC of ICT BI HP Human-centric reporting self-service BI ServiceCenter SMI Suite

What your manager will demand from you coming months: create a glass box!

September 16th, 2010

A new Forrester Research report, From Black Box to Glass Box: Case Studies in IT Financial Transparency, urges CIOs and IT shops to shift from being technology asset managers to internal service providers—who can demonstrate that value.

Non-tech people typically still have little insight in the value and activities of IT. IT is being correlated to as “stuff”, facility management… IT spending is based on % of the revenue and IT costing is based on the investments in assets instead of services. That makes it a black box and the comparison with competitors impossible; the competitive disabler.

But we are heading for change. IT changes from asset management to being an internal service provider knowing and showing true value.

You will be asked to:

Translate assets into insight in meaningful services (don’t pick-up your ITIL book from behind your desk but study your organization – http://westbury-it.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-itil-processes/);
Expose and communicate those services (service catalog and start measuring the quality of the service and compare it with the service conditions);
Deliver a bill and/or report to your customer;
Start controlling services instead of assets.

In general you should be prepared for change in the way you are discussing IT processes and assets from a customer centric approach.

Your IT manager and CIO will have the following problems or disadvantages if they can’t deliver:

As long as IT costs are not related to the organization services and products it will lead to false assumptions. Such as having too much overhead leading into a new round of cost savings (perhaps at your department?). In the end it might direct you to a competitive disadvantage no one knows of.
It could cause managers to make wrong decisions in allocating more investments in certain fields believing it is more profitable.

To start IT cost-transparency, the following is learned from real live experiences:

Start by making IT more credible;
Don’t underestimate the magnitude of the effort;
An organization change with new roles, skills and based on customer focus.

Are you ready? Why wait? It could start with you!

We are and know the field experts.

Just drop us a line:

http://westbury-it.com/about-us/office-locations

Others:

http://www.cio.com/article/608063/Why_IT_Costs_Must_Come_Out_of_the_Black_Box_Now

http://westbury-it.com/blog/report-openness-our-window-dressing/

Martijn

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Posted in Around The Interwebs, Processes

Tags: CIO Forrester reporting Service Manager Value to the business

How to improve your ITIL processes

September 14th, 2010

How to improve your ITIL processes?

Measuring is knowing, but without real understanding no use.

I just read a good article which sums it all up: “Before you can improve a process, you have to understand the current process. You have to get out from behind the desk and walk the process …”

So we are not talking about only knowing but also about understanding. “… how a process currently works is often very different from how you think it is (or should be) working.”

I want to deliver you the following takeaways as important steps you should take before you start improving processes:

About processes, control and truths – The very first thing you have to do is accept that no one really knows what is going on and how people perform their work, neither workers nor managers. Regardless of what you think you know, the work really getting done, and how it gets done, is different.
Workflow: what is real and what imaginary? – The only way to actually discover what is really getting done is to get up from behind the desk, walk out of the office, and literally walk around, observe, and take notes. You cannot practice ITIL from behind a desk. This sounds simple, but as in many things, the doing is not so straightforward. To practice ITIL you have to walk the process, literally. Keep in mind that your goal is to collect and model the existing process as it works today; not what you imagine it ought to be, but rather the actual tasks and workflow in place.
Walk the walk – It takes time to learn the workflow with the right accuracy and detail. You need to capture the “who, what, when and where” of the process, and should skip the “how and why” to start with.
Than model the workflow – Based on the new info you will probably be surprised about the actual work and time involved. Now you are ready to map your processes with ITIL standards and to my opinion other best practices and your own experiences.

Be aware of:

It takes work, time and attention to detail
Get up and leave your office!
Accept that you don’t really know what is going on, but that you are heading for an exciting journey
It’s sometimes difficult to observe unbiased
During your analysis your goal is documentation, not improvement
Improvement in: the time it takes to do things. You should capture how long it takes to perform the work before you can answer the question “should this be changed”. That’s an important measure (consider our start-up reports on actual duration)
The value of an accurate process model cannot be underestimated. You cannot improve anything without understanding it first.

Read on

http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol6iss32.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DoITYourself+%28Do+IT+Yourself+%28DITY%29+Feed%29

Martijn

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Posted in Around The Interwebs, Implementations, Processes, Tips & Tricks

Tags: Continual Service Improvement CSI improvement improvement projects ITIL ITSM process reporting Service Manager SMI Suite

Report Openness our window-dressing?

August 25th, 2010

I feel we are about to enter a new area of Openness. How are you responding to that? How are you using those opportunities in day-to-day practice? Are you catching that train on time?

At Westbury we’re entering a new stage of Openness by means of Yammer. We use it for expressing feelings, ideas, vision, and performance and to just celebrate victories internally at this first stage. It will prepare us using this culture of Openness for the next stage in which we will be sharing with our allies outside our organization (partners, customers, industry specialists …). Openness provides new opportunities of idea generation, vision commitment breaking through all hierarchical settings and it (will) attracts customers, partners and talent. Some regions like Australia show where we are headed. And it’s more and more influencing fields of expertise like communication, leadership, competitive advantage, idea generation … Just notice the headlines and different articles.

On the other hand window-dressing seems almost normal behavior in the world of finance (products, financial stability …). Don’t we all know the examples by now? In an other field like IT Service Management we often notice the same kind narrowness and fear to share figures and ideas on the performance of processes and units. It’s a heavy burden for those involved and they often strangle with new improvement initiatives (processes, products, services) which in the end should lead to new competitive advantages. It results in static, nothing saying reports instead of reports being information drivers for improvement and idea generation to get there.

It’s difficult to move forward. Sometimes it seems we need a crisis and new social developments to open our eyes to really start providing data en stages to discuss these problems and data into the Openness.

How to start in the field of service management? Ask questions and provide openness. I think it’s just as simple as that. Questions like: Are our reports really reflecting the correct picture? Are we providing the right data at this moment? What does that data actually say? And if we compare this with other data, what does it mean to us and our customers? And discuss those kinds of questions with managers, colleagues and customers. Perhaps by using network tools like Yammer?

Be aware that we can’t keep up window-dressing taking into account that more and more real improvements and authenticity are counting in this world within the social context in which more and more of your performance, data and comments on your organization will be available and free accessible on the Internet (benchmark sites or sites like http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm).

Are you prepared to clean the window and share your lights?

Also check out:

http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/clean-window-if-you-want-more-light

http://www.yammer.com

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/08/the_future_of_w.html

Martijn

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Posted in Around The Interwebs, Processes

Tags: Network Openness window-dressing

HPSU attendees speak: why is reporting awesome?

June 16th, 2010

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Posted in Around The Interwebs

Tags: HPSU HPSWU reporting video

What is BI? – Tweetjam!

May 6th, 2010

On May 13th, 2010, from 2-3pm EDT, Forrester will host a tweetjam on the topic: “What BI is Not”. Blogs about the event can be find here and here, and the hashtag in use will be #dmjam, if you want to follow along.

There are two main reasons why I’m very curious about this event. First of all the topic itself. A solid definition of Business Intelligence is useful and helps vendors in their discussions with customers. I remember that it took Westbury several sessions with HP to make sure that our operational reporting solution for HP Service Manager/Center is fully complimentary to BI analytics solution HP has in this area. In the end a good understanding of all the various aspects of BI helped us to determine how the joint value proposition of HP and Westbury provides our customers a unique BI-solution for Service Management.

I’m also curious to see how a Tweetjam works out. I’ve never been in one and any new marketing tool using Social Media is exciting to me. So, if you like the topic or/and just fascinated by Social Media, this is the place to be on May 13th.