Android, another passion

Shameless hook on VoxIsland 's Android tutorials:

Why have I been so quiet?

Just crazy busy playing with Android... and working on an Android development tutorial (Android Blog for developers here).

Well, let's talk about ITIL and mobility sometime soon, ok?

A "framework" you said?

I often read threads debating whether ITIL is or is not a framework.

Jan van Bon, author and editor of many IT Service Management publications:

There is confusion about ITIL, stemming from misunderstandings about its nature. ITIL is, as the OGC states, a set of best practices. The OGC doesn’t claim that ITIL’s best practices describe pure processes. The OGC also doesn’t claim that ITIL is a framework, designed as one coherent model. That is what most of its users make of it, probably because they have such a great need for such a model...

I agree with this approach, to me ITIL is really a Bible, a set of books (anyway, can a framework really be made of best practices?).

May ITIL bless you.

Warmer datacenters?

No shameless plug here, so le'ts say that datacenter ACME has just announced a 2 MegaWatt expansion to their facility. A major increase in data center capacity, and a source of great joy for the company. And the source of potentially of 714 additional carbon introduced each month into the environment.

At the same time, the risks and rewards of raising the temperature in the data center were debated last week in several new studies based on real-world testing in Silicon Valley facilities. The verdict: companies can indeed save big money on power costs by running warmer.

Cisco Systems expects to save $2 million a year by raising the temperature in its San Jose research labs.

This been, even if they figured out that increased temperature is not correlated to higher failure rates, nudge the thermostat too high, and the energy savings can evaporate in a flurry of server fan activity.

No doubt, fine-tuning datacenters is important, on an ethical, political, ecological and financial standpoint. But first things first: how many bad server room implementations have you seen?

Details here.

better than LinkedIn?

I see LinkedIn as a very powerful tool and I'm using it daily.

While it's a perfect for business relationships and networks management, is it the best tool on the marketplace to manage content, announcements, forums, product evaluations... for a group sharing an expertise?

I'm not sure, and the LinkedIn ITIL certified group (more than 3,000 members) was experiencing some kind of overhead in managing the group while not necessarily getting the information structure that was expected.

The community is invited to move to the newly renovated ITSM portal.

Be social, give it a try :)

Cobit / ITIL mapping

If you read a one paragraph sum-up of ITIL and COBIT (see below), it is clear that those two guys should have a lot in common. But are they really competing?

Well, I'd say they both provide very solid and valid views over the same problems.

When used together, the power of both approach is amplified.

A very interesting approach to dig here.

COBIT: Released as an IT process and control framework linking IT to business requirements, COBIT initially was used mainly by the assurance community in conjunction with business and IT process owners. With the addition of management guidelines in 2000, COBIT was used more frequently as a management framework, providing management tools, such as metrics and maturity models, to complement the control framework. With the release of COBIT 4.0 in 2005, it became a more complete IT governance framework. Incremental updates to COBIT 4.0 were made in 2007; they can be seen as a fine-tuning of the framework, not fundamental changes. The current version is COBIT 4.1.

ITIL v3: Released by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC), ITIL it is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. Version 3 consists of 27 detailed processes organized into five high-level processes described in five core books—Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement—that comprise one function: effective IT service management. In addition, ITIL v3 introduced the concept of the service life cycle and this is described in the book Official Introduction to the IT Service Lifecycle.
The mapping is performed in two layers. A high-level mapping compares the components of ITIL V3 with the components of COBIT and shows the coverage of IT governance focus areas.

a bad call?

Recently I read an interesting comment about calls and incidents: "From time to time, a consultant is in the position of explaining and justifying fundamentals. Recently I was describing how incidents are not the same thing as calls, that every call is not a new incident if the same user has already called about the same incident previously, that it is more effective to record the call history on the same incident. I went to three sources of "best practice" for support - there isn't any."

Well, well, well… this is what happens when mixing concepts and vocabulary.

First ITIL v3, makes it clear: all calls to the Service Desk are not incidents, service requests and RFC (Request For Changes) have their own process and do no longer follow the incident management route.

This being said, a server is down and you receive 20 calls. Which user will you ask to confirm that the service is restored? only one? the first one? all the users? all those who have complained? And what if the service is partially restored, operational for some but not for everybody? how do you know for sure all users are experiencing the same problem?

At this point, we are not talking about technology any more but communication.

There are different approaches and since there is no real common ground for ITIL, COBIT and ISO/CEI 2000, vendors choose to handle this "their way".

You'll see ITIL solutions where all SD calls reporting an incident are creating a ticket that will be related to a master incident.

You'll see solutions where you have no choice but to create one incident per call (if you want/need to log everything and handle resolution notification properly) without this "inheritance" concept.

As I always say, common sense should always supersede ITIL best practices.

Use your first callers to confirm the restoration of the service and the incident closure. Send all callers (or all users in certain cases) a notification about the incident and its resolution. Anyone who disagree can then reopen the incident, or open another one.