John Borwick’s blog

I just found this EDUCAUSE presentation, about California State University, Northridge, who struggled with prioritizing 100s of projects.  They had no way to prioritize these projects.  Much of what they’re saying is generally applicable–they needed IT governance!

“IT governance” is a hot topic, but not many people describe actionable steps to implement IT oversight.  This presentation helps describe their approach to getting Customers involved in prioritizing new work.

It’s been a little while.  I have a new job: I’m now in charge of “process management & continuous service improvement” for my department, as part of our new “planning & strategy” team.  The job’s really exciting and really it’s my career goal, so now I’m trying to learn as much as I can to be effective.  I’ve been reading “Business Process Change” and I have a set of the ITIL v3 books, so I want to read these carefully and create a bibliography of process improvement information.  I’m trying to figure out how my blog/a blog will work into all this, as I’d really like to document what we do with process improvement and what I learn–partly because it’s so hard to find useful introductory information about actionable IT process improvement.

Well anyways–happy holidays and a festive new year to all!

I’ve been working on a temporary blog for work: http://itsmfusion2007.wordpress.com.  Another guy from work, Mike, is also using the blog.  We’re at the three-day itSMF (Information Technology Service Management Forum) USA conference, in Charlotte NC.

Today I set up drupal for work, for our internal “reporting” web site.  I’ve never used drupal before, except when blogging for LOPSA.   Overall, I like it a lot!  I set up some “books,” a “forum,” a (site-wide) blog, and some static “stories.”

Some of its guts are a little awkward, though; I had a hard time guessing whether the “anonymous users can post HTML” option was in the content area, the admin settings area, or under the user “roles.”

Sometimes I wonder whether to move the UUFWS site from Plone to something else, like Drupal.  I think that the “value net” for UUFWS-specific IT is not in web site administration, which is why I recommended that instead of developing a car pool forum we consider “outsourcing” that problem to a car pool provider like GoLoco.

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.

I just posted my first LinkedIn question:

Familiar or know someone familiar with ITIL or ITSM in a University environment?

I’d like advice about how one might implement ITIL or ITSM best practices in a University environment. I’ve read the ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery books, and I’ve found Gartner Group articles and web sites describing how to implement ITIL and ITSM in a corporate environment. Do you have any experience or know anyone with experience implementing ITIL or ITSM best practices within an educational environment?

Now to see what the LinkedIn response is like…

At work, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about effective processes.

For example, my first “wiki” that I tried to introduce was based on Twiki. Twiki is OK and everything, but the wiki never took off. I was the only person adding content. Everyone else kept using the old Word document with all our documentation in it–at least they could rely on that to solve their problems in an emergency.

Well, the next time I implemented a wiki, I spent a full work day moving all the old Word document content. I then hid the Word document so that no one could get to it, and I trained the principal person who wrote in the Word document on how the new wiki works. Surprise, surprise–that wiki took off.

Implementing “Getting Things Done” in my life has been my biggest process implementation. Besides organizing my life, I learned quite a bit about cost:benefit analysis for whether to make my process more complex.

In short, I think I’ve spent a lot of time subconsciously training myself about how to implement effective processes that I can rely on. I’m hoping that this skill might help if we ever implement ITIL!

I’m reading Service Delivery, one of the two core ITIL core books. It describes Service Level Management, IT Financial Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity Management, and Availability Management. Work bought the book.

So far in this book the capacity management section appeals the most to me. We do very little historical monitoring, so capacity management might be one of the first areas to mention to others. We don’t have good capacity growth plans, and an annual or quarterly Capacity Plan would help us with our capital planning.

I’ve ordered The Visible Ops Handbook, which I think I saw at LISA 2005.

I’ve also asked LOPSA about whether ITIL is all it’s cracked up to be. Two people wrote in about their horrible experiences, where either management forced a “strict” implementation of ITIL where they created 17 “managers” for each management area, or where the operational folks were forced to use counterproductive tools. The one or two people who spoke in favor of ITIL underscored that you must adapt ITIL’s processes to make them fit your needs.

I have been reading a fair bit about ITIL over the last six months. I just started reading about Microsoft Operations Framework. Microsoft’s description of MOF “explains how MOF builds on and extends” ITIL. This is as close as saying “embrace and extend” as you can get. “Embrace and extend” is Microsoft’s proven way of breaking standards.

I’ve started reading Slow Leadership, a blog about how to reduce the pace of business without sacrificing productivity. I like some of the quotes from their recent survey:

I am not in any way empowered to fix the devastatingly inefficient systems that are currently in place. All I can do is look on in horror.