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

A new Forrester Research report,

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:

1. 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/);
2. Expose and communicate those services (service catalog and start measuring the quality of the service and compare it with the service conditions);
3. Deliver a bill and/or report to your customer;
4. 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:

1. Start by making IT more credible;
2. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of the effort;
3. 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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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

Interesting research from TDWI among BI adopters shows the following popular strategies to squeeze more out of existing BI investments:

1. Use more BI Self-Service as this offloads reporting from IT and empowers users to get the data they need & when they need it;

2. The implementation of a BI Competency Center and/or the use of small-inter disciplinary teams;

3. Reduction or elimination of spreadmarts;

4. Using existing tools instead of purchasing new ones as well as cutting-edge approaches such as the application of agile or spiral development techniques.

5. BI tools consolidation.

Especially 1 and 2 were rated as the most important strategies to do more with less. From our engagements we notice the same. Our product is a typically a self service solution and attracts more and more attention this year. We earlier choose the path of self service and based on experiences and customer requests most of our development efforts are heading that way.

An interesting downside mentioned in this research is report chaos which occurs when BI teams implement self-service BI without governance or controls.

Together with the second important strategy mentioned above it more and more shows that the organization and processes around BI are crucial. This underlines our vision that successful reporting and day to day BI practice should be embedded in a governance structure (BI strategy, reporting process, organization and roles).

Are you ready to Do more BI with Less?

Feel free to respond or to contact us.

Source: TDWI report – Getting the Greatest BI Bang for Your Buck http://tdwi.org/Articles/2010/08/04/BI-Bang-for-Your-Buck.aspx

Martijn

The session was well attended – not only in terms of numbers showing up, but also in the quality of discussion and input from the attendees.

The goal of the session was to identify challenges that people were having in reporting from ServiceCenter and Service Manager, and then to look at the solutions available, including Crystal Reports and – of course – SMI Suite.

David vH led the session, assisted ably by Richard and David dSA. We’d like to thank everyone who attended for their participation and input – and we hope the session was useful.

Tom

You will find the supported platforms lists and the support policy of the Westbury products. In the near future we will have a supported platform list for all third party software (For example HP Service Desk, HP Service Manager, HP Service Centre, Business Objects etc.) available. We hope you will benefit from this Westbury service!

Martin

This is the same way it works for SMI Suite. A lot of organizations are suffering within their IT organization hoping it will be an temporary problem and will be solved by time. And for all that they know they are suffering, they do not know exactly where the pain is coming from. After a while they realize that  a solution is not going to fall out of the sky. To find the cause of the pain they need to report on their IT environment and processes. Luckily for them, SMI Suite can help with finding the cause of the pain so the suffering organization will be relieved.
Martin

For Westbury closing the gap between business and IT for IT Service Management is what we do! Like Boris mentioned in his blog, BI vendors like Westbury take care of the back end (ETL, reporting database) of the BI solution and provide the end user (IT process owners) with an easy to use, non-technical user interface (see diagram)

The main challenge for our customers (the IT process owners) in getting the data out of their Service Management tooling is that they are fully dependent on either their internal BI team or some external BI consultants. This dependency is expensive and causes a huge delay  in getting the right reports out to the requesters (the business). Exactly like Boris predicts in his blog, the end users (again, the business) want to create or modify the reports themselves. IT (in our case Westbury) delivers the technical environment and out of the box BI tooling (SMI foundation) that moves the reporting power in to the hands of the end user.

Self Service Reporting for IT Service Management delivered!

Floris

All too often we see organizations where countless IT reports are generated each week, month etc.. Often such reports are based on Andy’s clever Crystal Report or some other SQL query, the data is then exported to MS Excel  where it is massaged so that pretty charts can be exported to MS PowerPoint. Although these reports take a huge chunk of time consuming manual labor, it is important to question how good these reports really are. Ask yourself the following questions for each of the reports:

-          Is there a clearly defined and communicated goal and purpose for the report?

-          Who is the audience for the report? Who is receiving the report? Why?

-          Do you know who actually looks at the reports?

-          Are there any formal communications conducted that use the reports as their basis and do the reports ever lead to concrete follow up actions?

-          Is there a feedback loop in place to validate the purpose and contents of the reports?

-          Are you able to respond and keep reports current and valid in the goals they are trying to meet?

It takes a considerable effort to be in a situation where the above questions can be answered in a positive and mature manner. However with the right reporting solution and the correct approach it is possible starting tomorrow.

So what’s it going to be? Are you going to continue ‘banging glasses in flashy suits’ or are you going to make some music?

David dSA