Search

In the first post in this series, Service Monitoring as a Strategic Opportunity , one of the topics that we discussed was the need for a "Service Monitoring Service " that would act as the monitoring platform for all of the various application and service teams within the s...

The first aspect of Service Design is to define the functional requirements, capabilities, and so on. No matter what we are doing and no matter the industry, we should always start with the customer in mind. In the case of our Service Monitoring Service, our customers are th...

Service Management must not shy away from application development Most Service Management organizations are full of process people. And then, there are tools teams that are full of tools people. What I mean is that the tools teams are made up of individuals who are experts...

Earlier in the series, we discussed the importance of enabling features in our Service Monitoring Service that make the application teams want to use the service rather than building their own “page myself” scripts.There are many features that we may add, but there are thre...

Managing IT assets has been a natural part of business for decades: where is the asset? What are you paying for it and from whose budget? From the service management perspective of “ providing value through technology services ” we rely on the assets to deliver the technolog...

Business service management (BSM) is about bringing value to a business through matching overall business objectives with IT. Arguably, the concept has been with us for some time; but like the latest version of ITIL ® addresses the issue of business and services, it ha...

As we begin these next few blog posts on “Implementation”, it is important to look at the ground we have already covered. To begin this series, we discussed Service Monitoring as a Strategic Opportunity . We followed that discussion with four posts on Building Service Monit...

Simplifying things for our application team consumers: Inputs Application teams know their applications. We know our Service Monitoring Service. We need to quantify very simple inputs that will enable our application/service teams to easily consume our service. The great new...

In my previous post in this series, I posed a question: “Can perfect monitoring still end in failure?” I hope that you have come to the same two conclusions that I’ve come to: nothing made by humans is perfect, and even if monitoring were perfect, we can most certainly fail...

One of the most important aspects of delivering a world-class service, regardless of whether the word "cloud" is associated with the service or not, is Service Monitoring. Monitoring should not be considered a commodity, but rather a strategic opportunity for Service Deliver...

1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL provide? ITIL ® provides a deep foundation when it comes to IT Service Management. One of the reasons is because ITIL is a framework. It is a set of best practices that focuses on aligning IT s...

Products, Services, and Service Relationships Over the next few weeks we will publish a blog series to give you the big picture of ITIL ® 4. A bit of context before I start: When I was in India last November, I was challenged by a group of trainers to create a single dia...

Throughout the "Building Service Monitoring as a Service with an Eye on the Cloud" blog series, we have focused on the need for a Service Monitoring Service - a “monitoring hub” of sorts. This approach is different from the legacy centralized monitoring approach whereby t...

Roman Zhuravlev talks service management and why ITIL ® is not the work of a “crazy professor”! Service management is everywhere – and that means the economy becoming more customer-focused, intelligent and alive. With the exciting concept of digital transformation, o...

It’s a pivotal and exciting moment for the service desk. For those still struggling with their traditional IT service desks that might sound like an odd statement, but significant change is coming. Historically, the service desk’s primary role has been a help desk for when ...

Delivering services that equally meet consumer demand while remaining stable and reliable has become even more critical with the speed of IT change today . Every service organization needs to create, deliver and support services and understand the skills and competencies th...

Looking behind, the Building Service Monitoring as a Service with an Eye on the Cloud   series of blogs has covered a lot of ground - from why, to what, to how. Now it is time to look ahead to how we pump water through the pipes we have built. It is time to discuss how we be...

ITIL ® has always been dynamic. It has evolved over time to reflect changes to the way organizations work, different service management concepts and priorities and our understanding of the different capabilities required to deliver value. Now it’s time to update ITIL ...

Following the release of ISO/IEC TR 20000-11:2015: Part 11 - Guidance on the relationship between ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 and service management frameworks: ITIL® at the end of 2015 , we spoke to Shirley Lacy, managing director of ConnectSphere, who was involved in i...

Although an integral part of the ITIL ® Service Lifecycle, Service Strategy is probably the element most IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals are least comfortable using. In fact, even the word ‘strategy’ can strike fear into some IT professionals as, quite sim...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

Delivering value to a customer doesn’t begin and end with a product and its features – it also requires service . In the IT development world, recognizing the need for service means cultivating skills in service management. This is where turning to ITIL ® is important...

Everyone’s favourite IT service management (ITSM) puppet blogger, Joe The IT Guy, published an article a couple of months ago on the alignment of ITIL ® and DevOps. It had some great insights, and Joe suggested that I pen a follow-up … so, here it is. Before I start, I’d...

The Service Value Chain, and Service Value Streams Welcome back! This post is the fourth (and last) in a series in which I connect the key concepts of ITIL 4 . In the last blog we briefly covered the service value system (SVS) and its five components. One of those compon...

AXELOS’ Future ITSM Professional report predicts a growing need for people working in ITSM to adopt a more strategic role as service management principles spread beyond IT and throughout organizations. Service management consultant, Lisa Hodges, reflects on the findings: ...

In the world before ITIL v3 and Continual Service Improvement (CSI) it was part of a service level manager’s job to identify areas for improvement. However, this was ad hoc and happened mostly if a customer was complaining. We used what were called service improvement pl...

Change, release and deployment in ITIL ® help to ensure that what a requester – such as a service owner – wants can be delivered from a technical and feasibility perspective. I’ve seen this work effectively in the French national railway company, SNCF; but before we get...

Hitesh Patel demystifies the role and qualities of the Service Delivery Manager and where ITIL® Practitioner’s best practice guidance can support their work: Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is a role many people struggle with within IT Service Management (ITSM) and, for...

What is IT4IT and who is it relevant for? AXELOS’ ITSM Portfolio Development Manager, Roman Zhuravlev and Anton Lykov, Solution Architect for Micro Focus, discussed the IT4IT architecture model in a recent AXELOS webinar and this blog post offers a brief summary of their dis...

Over the past five years, I believe that – for some IT organizations – the ITIL ® concept of Service Strategy (SS) got left behind. Why is this? IT organizations have been buried in the “trenches” of an endless loop which includes immediate uptake of design, transition an...

Every service management implementation is a cultural transformation. And culture change is an even bigger issue for senior management than it is for IT and ITSM, as they need to recognize that for such a transformation to be successful, they need to lead and be role mode...

The ITIL ® update recently announced by AXELOS will be guided by the Lead Architect Team, comprising highly-respected experts from around the world. In this first blog post from the team, Troy DuMoulin talks IT past and present along with what an updated ITIL will mean f...

ITIL Intermediate’s Service Design (SD) module provides one of the most important approaches to deliver a service that works and enables value creation. Without employing SD and, for example, moving to transition without much design and attention to processes there is a ...

The IT Service Management (ITSM) mindset in 2017 needs to shift, both culturally and in ways of working that are about breaking down barriers and silos. This means embracing agile service management and moving away from long-term projects of process and improvement. Yes, th...

Organizational transformation is built on ITIL ® best practices. And, from what I’ve seen from the frontline, the need for this still exists. In fact, there is so much work still to be accomplished among organizations that I could be busy for years and years! As a consul...

Value for Stakeholders, PESTLE and the Four Dimensions Welcome back! This post is the second in a series in which I connect key concepts of ITIL 4. In the last article, we briefly discussed the concept of value co-creation, and I’d like to expand on that here. While value ...

In early December 2016, Kaimar Karu and I found ourselves in Portland, Oregon running a workshop with Jon Terry, Shane Carlson, and Kevin Behr. Over dinner one night, we started talking about Enterprise Service Management (ESM). Differences in opinion started to surface, and ...

Have you noticed how the world of IT is changing in recent years? Have you also noticed how your role, responsibilities and current work practices might be coming under increased pressure to change and work differently? Organizations used to buy and build IT infrastructure a...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

Yale University’s IT Service Management (ITSM) journey began in 2011, just before my arrival in 2012. At the time, the University had about 450 central IT staff and a newly appointed CIO who had arrived with a mission to create a world-class ITSM organization. ITIL ® ...

While my first exposure to ITIL ® came almost 30 years ago – working in tech support for the American part of Glaxo – helping organizations adopt and adapt ITIL has been a cornerstone of my consultancy practice for 15 years. In that time, I’ve seen ITIL help organizati...

Janek Rozov, Head of the Information Society Services Development Department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications in Estonia, explains how it has introduced a multiple-view service catalogue to improve understanding of services amongst its citizens and allo...

Understanding the needs of others is fundamentally at the core of good service. A working definition of a good service is the ability to address the needs and wants of an individual in the fastest and most effective way possible – whether it’s in a restaurant, at a hotel, ...

As part of our Professional Development Programme , AXELOS has outlined the skills and competencies needed in a wide range of roles across IT service management and project and programme management. In this blog post, Pauline Brown – Service Operations Manager at the Un...

ITIL ® and ISO/IEC 20000, the international standard for service management, have enjoyed a long and mutually supportive relationship. ISO/IEC 20000 is currently being revised for the third time, with an increased focus on Service Integration (SIAM), governance and manag...

How can DevOps bring service improvements to IT service management (ITSM) in organizations and avoid throwing operations the “hot potato” of badly planned change projects? And what is the role for ITIL ® Practitioner’s 9 Guiding Principles – in particular start where y...

While working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with responsibility for global service level agreements, certifying in ITIL ® ’s Intermediate Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA) module was essential. I really recognized the power of ITIL and service mana...

People wanting to progress their careers and make a difference in IT and IT service management (ITSM) roles need to concentrate on three major issues: their customer, the services they need, and the value they should be providing. Avoiding the sport of “framework hunting” i...

Project management and IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving and, as a result, are becoming more interlinked. The reason for their entwinement is simple: it’s part of a move from ‘traditional’ project management approaches that focus on producing a deliverable to a more...

What’s the difference between being certified and not certified in IT service management (ITSM) best practice? At a base level in ITSM you might be someone providing “boots on the ground”, doing the actual troubleshooting on the service desk and implementing changes. Howev...