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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
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The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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The IT Service Management Forum
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The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
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Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
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Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
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Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
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BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
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Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
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There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
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Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
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CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
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You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
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Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
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As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
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Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
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Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
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Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
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Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
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Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
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The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
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Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
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The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
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Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
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To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
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George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
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Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
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For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
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This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
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Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
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ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
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Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
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There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
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Galen Gruman
March, 2007
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The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
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James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
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Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
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A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
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Jed Simms
September, 2007
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Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
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with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
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Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
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The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
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As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
|
|
|
The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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The IT Service Management Forum
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The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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|
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
|
|
Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
|
Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
|
BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
|
|
Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
|
There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
|
|
Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
|
CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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|
Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
|
You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
|
|
Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
|
As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
|
|
Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
|
Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
|
|
Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
|
Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
|
|
Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
|
The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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|
Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
|
Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
|
|
|
The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
|
|
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
|
|
Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
|
To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
|
|
George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
|
Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
|
|
|
For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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|
Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
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This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
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|
Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
|
|
Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
|
There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
|
|
Galen Gruman
March, 2007
|
The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
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|
James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
|
Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
|
A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
|
|
Jed Simms
September, 2007
|
Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
|
|
with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
|
Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
|
|
|
The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
|
As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
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|
|
The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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|
|
The IT Service Management Forum
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|
The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
|
|
|
The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
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|
Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
|
Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
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|
Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
|
BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
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Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
|
There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
|
|
Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
|
CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
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You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
|
|
Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
|
As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
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Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
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Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
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Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
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Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
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Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
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The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
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Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
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The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
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Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
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To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
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George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
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Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
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For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
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This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
|
|
Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
|
|
Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
|
There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
|
|
Galen Gruman
March, 2007
|
The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
|
|
James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
|
Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
|
|
N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
|
A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
|
|
Jed Simms
September, 2007
|
Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
|
|
with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
|
Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
|
|
|
The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
|
|
Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
|
As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
|
|
|
Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
|
|
|
Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
|
|
|
Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
|
|
|
The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
|
|
|
The IT Service Management Forum
|
|
|
The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
|
|
|
The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
|
|
|
The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
|
|
Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
|
It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
|
|
Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
|
Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
|
BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
|
|
Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
|
There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
|
|
Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
|
CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
|
|
Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
|
You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
|
|
Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
|
As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
|
|
Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
|
Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
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Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
|
Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
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|
Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
|
The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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|
Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
|
Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
|
|
|
The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
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Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
|
To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
|
|
George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
|
Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
|
|
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For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
|
|
|
This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
|
|
Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
|
|
Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
|
There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
|
|
Galen Gruman
March, 2007
|
The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
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|
James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
|
Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
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A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
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|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
|
|
Jed Simms
September, 2007
|
Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
|
|
with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
|
Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
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|
|
The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
|
As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
|
|
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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
|
|
|
The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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|
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The IT Service Management Forum
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The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
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Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
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Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
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Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
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BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
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Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
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There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
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Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
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CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
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You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
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Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
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As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
|
|
Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
|
Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
|
|
Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
|
Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
|
|
Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
|
The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
|
|
Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
|
Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
|
|
|
The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
|
|
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
|
|
Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
|
To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
|
|
George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
|
Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
|
|
|
For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
|
|
|
Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
|
|
|
This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
|
|
Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
|
|
Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
|
There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
|
|
Galen Gruman
March, 2007
|
The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
|
|
James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
|
Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
|
|
N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
|
A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
|
|
Jed Simms
September, 2007
|
Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
|
|
with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
|
Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
|
|
|
The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
|
|
Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
|
As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
|
|
|
Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
|
|
|
Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
|
|
|
Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
|
|
|
The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
|
|
|
The IT Service Management Forum
|
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|
The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
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Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
|
Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
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Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
|
BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
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Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
|
There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
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|
Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
|
CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
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You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
|
|
Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
|
As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
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|
Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
|
Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
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|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
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Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
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Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
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Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
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The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
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Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
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The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
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Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
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To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
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George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
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Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
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For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
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This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
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Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
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Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
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There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
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Galen Gruman
March, 2007
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The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
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James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
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Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
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A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
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Jed Simms
September, 2007
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Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
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with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
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Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
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The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
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As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
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The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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The IT Service Management Forum
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The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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|
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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|
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
|
It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
|
|
Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
|
Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
|
BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
|
|
Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
|
There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
|
|
Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
|
CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
|
|
Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
|
You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
|
|
Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
|
As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
|
|
Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
|
A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
|
|
Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
|
Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
|
|
Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
|
Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
|
|
Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
|
Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
|
|
Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
|
The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
|
|
Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
|
Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
|
|
|
The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
|
|
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
|
|
Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
|
To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
|
|
George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
|
Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
|
|
|
For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
|
|
|
Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
|
|
|
This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
|
|
Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
|
ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
|
|
Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
|
There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
|
|
Galen Gruman
March, 2007
|
The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
|
|
James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
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Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
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A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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Jed Simms
June, 2007
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If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
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Jed Simms
September, 2007
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Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
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with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
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Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
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The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
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As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
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Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.
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Pink Elephant is the world leader in IT management best practices, offering conference, education and consulting services to public and private businesses globally. The company specializes in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognized best practice frameworks, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Pink Elephant was the first organization to deliver ITIL training in North America and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
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Larry Pritchard says it’s always been the bane of his IT department’s existence to have to articulate a return on technology investment. Sometimes, says the CIO of Schaeffler Group North America, it’s simply difficult to establish a return. However, returns can be measured quantitatively, as long as IT goals and projects are aligned with business objectives.
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The industry’s first independent network of ITSM solution providers focused on helping IT organizations acquire the skills, certifications and support services to:
- Create actionable ITSM plans using well accepted best practice frameworks methods and standards
- Integrate these plans into a multi-source IT service delivery environment
- Operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain
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The IT Service Management Forum
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The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by Computer Aid, Inc (CAI) to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. The ITMPI seeks to accomplish its mission through the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
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The Internet.com Network is comprised of some of the best known and highly acclaimed sites in the technology publishing business. Our more than 200 journalists, analysts and editors produce award winning and actionable information around the clock and from around the world. Our sites are organized into five channels to enable marketers to reach targeted audience segments easily and efficiently.
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The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
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Hank Marquis of Enterprise Management Associates
March 24, 2008
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It's complicated but, taken together, these three could decrease IT budgets by 70%.
As we march down the road towards business service management (BSM) it is clear that traditional project management techniques have not been successful in IT. It’s time to elevate IT project management to the level of required skill for all IT workers. Why? Because just 30% of IT projects come to a successful conclusion.
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Paul Burns, Enterprise Management Associates
March 10, 2008
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Unless you’re well on your way, it should be a small one. While there are surely countless classifications of current and future adopters of business service management (BSM) solutions, let’s just focus on two: the salad and buffet groups. Okay, so these aren’t traditional, Geoffrey Moore, market-strategy oriented classifications like early adopter, pragmatist or conservative. But given the high probability that readers understand the concept of a salad as a meal versus an all-you-can-eat buffet feast of appetizers, entrées, side dishes and desserts, this simplified metaphor should suffice.
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Dennis Drogseth and Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates
January 28, 2008
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BSM isn’t about a single technology but how and why you do what you do. Business service management (BSM) is one of the more significant but also one of the most confused areas in the management marketplace. There are a lot of reasons for this. Chief among them (like many terms directed at IT management) BSM means different things to different people. Even within EMA, BSM has required some rather heated debates from two camps: those who view BSM as a discrete market segment that evolved from SLM, and those who view BSM as a model—virtually a level of maturity—for managing services in dynamic support of business requirements.
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Katherine Spencer Lee,
Robert Half Technology
March 28, 2008
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There's no reason why you need to do it all. An important responsibility for many CIOs today is aligning IT with the overall business. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have made this a priority as companies evaluate how their IT systems can be more secure in the context of larger organizational goals.
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Galen Gruman
October 08, 2007
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CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.
For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets—a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties. Now IT budgets are beginning to grow again... but under an intense level of scrutiny by executive management that wants proof that all those IT dollars actually redound to the bottom line. The risk is that while CIOs struggle to provide the business with evidence of IT’s value—as well as its fiscal responsibility—they may cut through any remaining fat in their budgets right into the bones that support their enterprise’s enabling technologies.
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Frank Bucalo, CA
March 27, 2008
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You can't measure everything, so don't. This article takes the ITIL implementation principles we presented in earlier articles on rightsizing service cost models and applies them to the challenge of service level monitoring.
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Thomas Wailgum
November, 2006
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As the demand for real-time data increases, as more and more information flows into the enterprise and its systems, the challenge of understanding and managing it grows proportionately. And sometimes, more is just too much.
When you first meet CIO Ron Rose, he's more than happy to tell you about the 70,000 or so things that can go horribly wrong at Priceline.com, the consumer travel company built solely on a website that, in 2006, gets 10 million page views a day and books nearly $3 billion worth of travel transactions annually.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITIL v3 has radically redefined Configuration Management and scrapped the CMDB as we know it. Oh, and this is a really, really good thing!
ITIL v3 is out, and the authors have done the entire industry a very good turn. They have re-defined the term CMDB and dropped Configuration Management as a process.The CMDB is one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL. This is partly part because the previous ITIL authors used the term “configuration management” and “database” in its definition.
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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ITSM Industry powerhouses have stopped fighting and are now working together. They recently released a joint whitepaper describing how they plan to work together to solve the thorniest CMDB technological hurdles...
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Hank Marquis, Director of IT Service Management Consulting, Enterprise Management Associates
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A CMDB is a nebulous thing, and can exist in the minds of the organization, 3x5 cards, or any other medium. However, an enterprise CMDB is different. For large organizations only software will do, but not traditional relational database software, what we need is a new breed of software products...and they might be coming...
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Janel Metcalfe, Consultant, Seitel Leeds & Associates
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Just 2,000 employees with just two devices per user can result in 20,000–60,000 CI lifecycle, status, and/or attribute modifications in a one-year timeframe! Manual CMDB population and maintenance is a nearly impossible endeavor -- automation is the key to success with a CMDB project.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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New IT methodologies and business realities are breaking down IT's silos, writes CIO Update guest columnist. As this is my first column for CIO Update, I’d like to introduce myself, and then explain the notion that the IT management industry is at a tipping point. The kind of change that is so pervasive and complex that it’s especially hard to see or define.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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The CMDB is at the heart of a radical transformation of the business/IT relationship. Last month I introduced the idea that the IT management industry is at a tipping point in which Lego-like integrations of management investments are forcing new architectural innovations as well as adaptations in IT processes to support more collaborative, cross-domain environments.
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Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates
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Last month I introduced EMA’s approach to more effectively planning for CMDB system adoptions by introducing three key terms: CMDB system, core CMDB, and citizen CMDB.
The systems are overall inclusive models for multiple trusted sources with meta data and policy organizing consistent usage and access. Core CMDBs typically provide process control support for review, including ITIL’s notion of a change advisory board, and reflect desired state as mapped to discovered state.
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Thad Hunter,
February 16, 2007
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Change management reminds me of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole where you bat down an ever increasing supply of creatures that pop up. A large organization may install 300 changes a week and consume vast resources to do so, yet rarely turns its attention to more efficiently knocking down those rodents. We just swing harder and yell louder. But many improvements are possible. Change management can be and must be better executed before your organization can progress to the next level.
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Kim S. Nash
August 03, 2007
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The law's requirements for financial auditing and regulatory compliance have made IT systems more visible to top executives and integral to core business processes.
Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley have left Congress, but they’re never far from the thoughts of CIOs responsible for making their companies’ financial systems produce accurate data. Everyone’s favorite kvetch is the high cost to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, but now chief information officers are, in some ways, better off.
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Elena Varon, Executive Editor, CIO
April 8, 2008
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Unless you work in the financial services industry, the proposal Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson issued last week to reform U.S. financial institution regulations won't have much, if any impact on how your business runs. But it could benefit your IT strategy to pay attention as the debate over the proposal unfolds.
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The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL is a cohesive best practice framework, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It describes the organisation of IT resources to deliver business value, and documents processes, functions and roles in IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The original version of ITIL was developed at the same time as, and in alignment with BS 15000, the former UK standard for IT Service Management. BS15000 was fast-tracked in 2005 to become ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard in ITSM. OGC is committed to the maintenance of alignment between future versions of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The planning to implement service management is a set in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. This set is about the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. Besides, this set describes how to implement or improve IT Service Management within an organization and it describes steps to ensure that business needs and IT provision requirements will be met. Furthermore, the planning to implement service management set is mainly focused on the service management processes, but also generically applicable to other ITIL sets.
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Isabel Wells, Derek Lonsdale, and Anthea Jeffcoat, PA Consulting
April 2, 2008
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To succeed on the implementation journey, your roadmap and plan need to be realistic, achievable and grounded in practical experience.
Organizations are making significant investments in increasingly complex IT infrastructure and application services. In 2003 the average IT spend for a Fortune 500 company was $353 million.
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George Spafford, Pepperweed Consulting
March 21, 2008
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Your response to any IT emergency should be as systematic and controlled as any other activity in IT.
The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.
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For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT services have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver their products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase, so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability.
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved
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Pink Elephant ITIL self-assessment tools
© 2008 Pink Elephant. All rights reserved.
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This blog is dedicated to making sense out of the shifting landscape of IT Management. Just when we thought we had a good handle on managing technology, the job we thought we knew is being threatened by strange acronym’s like ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ect.. Suddenly the rules have changed and we are not sure why. The goal of this blog is to offer an element of sanity and logic to what can appear to be chaos."
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Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis, PA Consulting
April 1, 2008
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ITIL v3 builds on v2 greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist.
Historically, ITIL has been predominantly applied within the operational support (downstream) areas of IT. The focus has been on maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. In general, to do more with less.
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Reginald Lo
April 9, 2008
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There is a lot of confusion about “what is a service” and “what is a service catalog”. I have seen organizations say they provide less than thirty different services to ones that say they provide hundreds of services. What is the correct approach? What is the correct level of detail?
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Galen Gruman
March, 2007
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The new update to the IT Infrastructure Library could help you improve IT-business alignment and change your focus from fire fighting to service delivery.
ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don’t understand well. If they’re aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it’s in the context of two of the library’s books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center).
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James Yaple, U. S. Department of Veteran's Affairs
July, 2006
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Management under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is a strategic process associated with the delivery of new services and management of service levels.
The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally, the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and sustained system functionality (or “availability”) to support achievement of business (customer) objectives. [Art of Service]
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N. Dean Meyer
September, 2007
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A concept from ITIL could make a huge difference this budget cycle. Well, here it is budget season for many. And for too many, it's a frustrating game with little value added.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing a lot of buzz about the ITIL concept of service-based costing. Have we figured out the connection between that and an effective budget process?
|
|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
|
When looking at your project’s scope ask yourself whether you have a problem scope or just a solution scope and the necessary consideration of the bigger picture has been forgone.
In 2005 two major organizations were rationalizing their financial systems (having, through mergers, acquisitions and other events ended up with multiple systems). Both of these projects cost over $10 million — not an insubstantial investment.
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|
Jed Simms
June, 2007
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If you don’t get the business requirements right, however well you deliver the project, the client/business will be dissatisfied. (And, its no good blaming them for giving you the wrong requirements, you may be right, but you’ll never win the argument.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the business requirements were done by "analysts" who were from the business. There was no "IT industry" so everyone in IT came from the business. These ex-business staff were trained in "systems analysis techniques" and then expected to define the business's systems needs.
|
|
Jed Simms
September, 2007
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Why the business so often considers projects to have failed even when they’ve been delivered on time, on budget and to specification.
We conducted extensive, in depth research into 128 manufacturing organizations across Australia and 36 major banks across the world, and then further tested our findings in utilities, service organizations and retailers.
|
|
with Dr. Howard Rubin, Gartner Senior Advisor
|
Dr. Howard A. Rubin is a Gartner Senior Advisor and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also a former Board member and Executive Vice President of META Group. After years of experience and research, Dr. Rubin has managed to collect and organize data into what may well be the world's largest information technology benchmarking and trend tracking IT and business database. The database draws on data gathered through a network of more than 30,000 professionals across 10,000 companies and 50 countries.
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The common view of IT is that projects are notoriously late, over budget and fail to meet customer's expectations. These outcomes are supported by the Standish Group's CHAOS long standing 1994 report. In his article Robin Goldsmith examines what is really behind the Standish Group's 'statistics' and reveals some additional 'truths' about the state of IT. Most projects' schedules and budgets are not well founded to begin with so the issue of being late or over budget is not as critical an issue as learning what really causes projects to fail.
ROI is Deceptive Without REAL Requirements and Quantified Intangibles
ROI is intended to provide valid and objective information for making business decisions. However, not quantifying the intangible benefits leaves a gap in the ROI analysis that can lessen the value of the calculation. In this article Robin Goldsmith discusses the Problem PyramidTM which can be used to identify the real value of the business requirements. The combination of the Problem PyramidTM and ROI Value ModelingTM can prevent projects which may seem like good business ideas but whose benefits really won't pay off. The article is also available along with reader feedback commentary at the following site which requires free registration: http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/node/735
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Osman Aykut, CTO - AQM Solutions
November, 2007
|
As if the busy mainframe administrator didn't have enough to do trying to keep the z/OS environment up and running efficiently, today's distributed environments present an entirely new series of challenges. Applications that live "in the cloud" and outside the jurisdiction of the z/OS administrators are quickly becoming the number one consumers of CPU resources within the mainframe, as end-user requests reach deep into the heart of the database, either directly thru DB2-Connect or after firing off a legacy transaction in a CICS or IMS/DC environment.
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