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

- What tracks or events are you most excited about?

- With so much social media available these days, do you plan in advance which sessions to attend, or do you listen to what other attendees are excited about before making up your mind?

- What’s more important; the things you learn at the track sessions or the things you learn by networking at the event?

- Which exhibition vendor is going to have the best giveaways?

Comment below or tweet at us (@westbury_it).

Tom

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

Service Manager offers dashboards that can give you a real time overview of possible SLA breaches, open incidents by service, priority or location. This gives management a clear overview on how it is doing right now.

SMI Suite offers you a service management reporting solution that extends this dashboard feature in such a way that reports can be shared with others with a user friendly intuitive interface with drag and drop functionality. They can be incorporated in documents, PowerPoint presentations and even can be refreshed on the fly. Additionally one can drill down to the details of the underlying records a report is based on. To avoid heavy queries on the database during working hours, SMI Suite offers automatic scheduling and distribution of reports.

Luc

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

In the world of massage, anatomy is a very important part. Anatomy is the biological science concerned with the structure of the human body, including the human bones, muscles, ligaments and other structures. The most common functions are to hold the body together and to make it possible to move the body. The processes of how every structure of the body works together are very complex. Luckily we have a brain that’s taking care of all the complexity and a nervous system that’s taking care of all kind of communication between all structures. This saves us a lot of energy.

When I look at the HP ServiceCenter / Service Manager (SC/SM) database I see a similarity in the complexity. Maybe not that complex but when you think of reporting on the SC/SM database you need high skilled people (sort of like surgeons) to make reports and even then it’s not always possible to report on the subject you want to report on.

Westbury has created the ‘brain’ of SC/SM. This ‘brain’ is taking care of organizing the data from the SC/SM database into a relational database with a standard structure so you can easily report on it. Furthermore the ‘brain’ is doing all kind off calculations to enhance the ease of reporting. The ‘brain’ also contains a universe layer on top of the structured database. Next to the ‘brain’ Westbury created a nervous system. This nervous system is taking care of informing the right people at the right time by scheduling and publishing the reports.

And like the real brain, Westbury’s ‘brain’ and ‘nervous system’ can save companies that want to report on SC/SM a lot of energy, along with time and money.

Anyway, the news is that HP has a great blog all about IT Service Management, which features a few different contributors and a nice mix of news items, opinion pieces, tips and tricks and so forth.

The blog seems pretty active – three entries on Tuesday alone. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

On a vaguely related note; we’re increasingly using Twitter (I know, I know… sooo 2009!) as a means of opening up communication channels with partners, ITSM experts, potential customers and other interested parties. So please follow us @westbury_it and retweet anything we mention that piques your interest.

Tom

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

Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:

Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager

Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?

The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you  – by just dragging and dropping the objects  – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.

Check out our Test Drive to experience the ease of use of SMI suite yourselves: http://westbury-it.com/solutions/service-management-intelligence-suite/smi-suite-test-drive

The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.

Floris

At Metricnet the current metric of the month is First Call Resolution.

This metric is one of the metrics that’s in use at almost all of our customers and if your not measuring it yet, you should!

Check out http://www.metricnet.com/metric_month.html for their coverage of the metric.

Of course we ship a start up report around First Call Resolution with our SMI Suite product and we actually provide an easy to configure computed boolean as there are numerous variations in determining whether or not a ticket has been resolved at first call.

David vH