John Borwick’s blog
Neat stuff John likes.
Lauren was on the news
Lauren was on the (local, WXII 12) news: she was around #7 or 8 in line for an iPhone! She went to the AT&T store across from Thruway. For a little while, you can use WXII’s really poor web video interface to see her: select “news,” and then look for “iPhone a big hit in Triad.”
The iPhone does not work with OS 10.3. 
Update 7/1: Lauren was also quoted in the Winston-Salem Journal:
Lauren Pressley, a librarian at Wake Forest University, said she was looking forward to trying out the iPhone, especially its ability to access the Internet.
“There’s potential for a real shift in how people find their information,” she said. “Plus, it also looks fun.”
ITIL v3 Service Strategy
Yesterday I finished reading the first ITIL v3 book: Service Strategy. Well, really I read the first half and skimmed the last half.
In the ITIL v3 “life cycle,” Service Strategy is the hub of the “life cycle” wheel. It’s the core around which Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation rotate. (Continual Service Improvement then floats around fixing all the processes 
) Service Strategy focuses on the “value proposition” of IT: how does your IT department create value? In what market space do you operate? What’s your core competency?
The book is more theoretical than any of the ITIL v2 books I read. I really liked how Financial Management–the process of figuring out how much services cost, and in general how financial resources are used by IT–was presented as a lens by which you can view your IT strategy. I also liked the book positing “the five” ways that IT organizations can be organized (in terms of the organizational chart), partly because many ITIL implementors first ask how their department should be reorganized.
My hesitation about the ITIL v3 books is that if I was just discovering ITIL for the first time, and I read Service Strategy, I would think “this is interesting but irrelevant.” The ITIL v2 books were very modular and, if you can believe it, relatively hands-on compared to Service Strategy. ITIL v2 encouraged you to choose the modules you were most interested in, such as Configuration Management and Change Management, and start by implementing the modules most relevant to your organization. Admittedly, ITIL v2 then gave you very little idea of how to implement a given sub-set of modules, but at least the books came across as “read one chapter, and you know most of process X.”
I think ITIL v3, on the other hand, isn’t going to “click” for me until I’ve read/scanned all five books. I appreciate the concept of a “value net,” and of strategy vs. operations vs. tactics; I’ll take it on faith that one day we might need to know about “discount rates” to determine whether a service is economically justifiable; but if I didn’t already understand what ITIL was trying to do in v2 I probably would have a hard time plowing through all the v3 books.