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.

ITIL Design Guidelines

I recently discovered "ITIL Design Guidelines" and, you know me, started my reading on the Service Operations chapter.

I've read a lot of ITIL books in the past and I must admit I wish this one would have been my first.

I don't know for you, but for me, when I'm in a new playground, I'm looking for pragmatism; and that is all this paper is about, briefly describing the concept of using guidelines when designing ITIL services. It then presents a starter set of design

guidelines an 46 concrete examples that can be used by IT Service Management Implementation teams.

And the cherry on the cake, download it for free: http://www.itilversion3.com/

ITIL and SAP

Pink Elephant and BMC software have conducted a survey on what are perceived as the greatest advantages and challenges when adopting ITIL in a SAP model.

In a nutshell,

Benefits:
- Efficiency: 88%
- Increased availability: 44%
- Reduced headcount: 18%
- Financial ROI: 14%
- Other: 17%

What goals led to adopt ITIL:
- Standardize processes: 82%
- Become more efficient: 68%
- Better align IT to the business: 45%
- Lower the cost of management: 45%
- Improve accuracy: 4%

It's also interesting to see that, in most cases, Incident Management, Service Desk and Change Management are the most common ITIL process implemented first (in that order) and are usually implemented within a 6 month time frame.

The complete survey is here.

ITIL and Operations

ITIL (in all its versions) provides insufficient guidance on operations management. It doesn’t provide clarity on process versus function issues in the core operations discipline. E.g., the Operations Management process was never clearly addressed in ITIL, although it is at the heart of each information processing system.
And only limited information was made available on the function with the same title.

ITSM, the international platform for ITIL and IT Service Management, is currently trying to address this problem and provide more guidance in a book that is currently under the review stage.

Stay tuned, I'll tell you more soon.

More (on) capacity

I've been working in the telecommunication industry for now more than 10 years.
Different companies, different positions, different countries but also different Worlds (TDM / VoIP).
Over the years, I've seen the technologies improving, and the best practices at the same time.
If one thing has remain pretty much the same, it would be Capacity Management.

The new economy crisis has seen a return to old values. Who can afford today not delivering
agreed Service Level Targets in a cost effective manner?

In the the airline industry, which crisis is older, the survivors are those who have successfully implemented a dynamic Capacity Management framework.

Do you have such a framework? Do you have the tools you need?

ITIL's coverage on Capacity is decent, but not extensive.

I got confirmation that The ITSM Library will soon provide more practical guidance "with lots of checklists and draft templates".

So, stay tuned!