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| Annual Conference and Exhibition 2006 | ||||
| Frequently Asked Questions (answers from guest speakers) | ||||
| Special appreciation to Mr Peter Robert Edwards, Mr Ken Turbitt, Mr Damien Wong and Mr Sushil Chatterjji for contributions to the answers. | ||||
| [1] How to get the buy-in from Board of Directors that ITSM assessment / implementation is needed? | ||||
| (Peter Edwards) First and foremost, the implementation of ITIL is about achieving business benefit, and therefore the first step is to identify the major pain-points that business is experiencing in its relationship with IT. For example, business may be concerned about:
Once the IT pain-points are clearly identified, it is often fairly straight-forward to identify that the implementation of an appropriate process framework, with appropriate measures, will address the root cause of the issues, provide an improved quality of service to the business, and therefore provide benefits to the business. |
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| [2] People are worried that ITSM will cut their jobs. How to neutralize this? | ||||
(Peter Edwards) This is certainly not an issue in most organizations, and if it is an issue in an organization, then I suspect that there are some larger cultural issues that are the root cause of these concerns. Therefore I suspect that those larger issues should be addressed, in addition to dealing with the direct question of whether ITSM will result in job cuts. I am assuming that the question is asking whether or not the implementation of ITSM will result in efficiencies that will mean that fewer IT staff are required, and therefore there will be job cuts. The implementation of ITIL is primarily concerned with improving the quality of IT services to the business by providing defined, consistent processes. While there maybe improvements in the efficiency of the IT services, it would be uncommon for that to result in staff reductions. However, if that was an organization’s reason for implementing ITIL, then there are probably some larger issues to be dealt with, as discussed above. One way to neutralize this concern is to show staff that ITIL is fast becoming a de-facto standard for IT management processes, and that their career as an IT professional will be enhanced through their involvement in an ITSM implementation. I would support this by ensuring that there is a program for wide-spread ITIL education. Secondly, by improving the quality of IT services to the business, IT jobs tend to become more secure, because the business tends to be happier paying for IT services if they are satisfied with the quality of those services. |
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| [3] We have implemented Incident Management and Service Desk without a CMDB. Our next step is Problem Management. Should we focus on populating the CMDB first before Problem Management? Why? | ||||
( Ken Turbitt ) Congratulations on your project so far, with the implementation of the Service Desk and Incident Management, hopefully your initial Project goals have been reviewed and reached. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, as it depends again on your overall project goals and the current pain points that you are trying to alleviate. Incident and Problem management are often implemented together, as it makes sense to have a formal “hand-off” of incidents that are duplication, or cannot be resolved quickly and need more investigation. However, all incidents should be recorded against the CI that is affected, allowing for later analysis to highlight CI’s being affected more than others, enabling root cause analysis for permanent resolution of the initial incident, or the symptom highlighting the real root cause and problem, or related CI. Even enabling a quick resolution of the incident as all the CI information is to hand at the time of logging, highlighting any recent change, configuration differences from the approved standards etc. Carrying out Problem Management without a CMDB holding at least basic details of the CI’s and their relationships within the Infrastructure, and hopefully the Business Processes (for Business impact and criticality), will be very ineffective and become simply a 2nd line support call handing/filtering mechanism and not Problem Management. My suggestion would be to work on the CMDB and Change Management together (as ITIL recommends) ensuring it is kept accurate, start off with both at a basic level to get you started, and then bring in your problem management discipline, and mature all as you Plan, Do, Check and Act. Again, remember I do not know your specific circumstances, pains, or goals, but given your current situation, my recommendation is as stated. All the best with your ITSM journey. |
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| [4] I have issues engaging 2nd level support in the ITIL transformation, we are seeing lapses in service delivery and unpredictable resolution/response times. We do not have strong mandate from higher management on ITIL transformation. How can I start to engage/involve 2nd level more in this change? | ||||
( Ken Turbitt ) Again, not knowing your specific circumstances, I’ll answer as best I can. Sounds like you have 2 issues here, one around “Management Sponsorship” of your project and one around “operational acceptance” of your project. Both need to be addressed or you will keep experiencing issues of acceptance. You recall Josh’s presentation which shows how people react to change. You need to review the people involved and determine where in this cycle they are, then you’ll know better how to address the problem. Taking just the 2nd level issue only, if would sound like the teams have not realised the potential benefits to them, let alone the impact they have on the overall service operations. Education is key. On the Project, it’s goals and deliverables. Try to involve them at this level first. Always highlighting to them the benefits they will experience. (everyone want’s an easier work experience, show them how your are planning to do this for them, whilst ensure they know they are safe and secure). Perhaps even get them to switch roles with the Service desk for a few hours, just to highlight why you need them to accept the new programme. During the Panel session on day 2 we mentioned that a powerful education and training tool is the Simulation method. We in BMC Software have an Airport Simulation day, often delivered free to clients and prospective clients. This would help your whole team have a fun day, and learn why they need ITIL and to work together for the benefit of the company they work for. It’s not easy to address, but hopefully this idea may help a little. Failing these, fire them and recruit new people who will follow the new process, as they will know no different. I have known this to actually happen, it can work, but only for part of the ITSM areas, not it all!! |
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| [5] What are the Do’s and Don’ts of setting up a CMDB? Can you give some “must do’s” when we set it up? | ||||
| ( Ken Turbitt) Fantastic question, and one where the answer could go on for a very long time. Because we have been asked this question many times before we have written a book, “Step by Step guide to the CMDB”, which will be published and available in September 2006. It covers 5 Stages, and 27 steps. The five stages are, “Assemble the project team and define the project”, “Define the requirements, Finalise plan and select technology”, “Construct and maintain your CMDB” and finally “Communicating ongoing value and driving continuous improvement.”. As you can see just from these 5 steps, quite a lots needs to be reviewed and considered, researched and presented, before you even think about data collection! But in from your management is essential, as many IT and Business Functions will need to become involved and supply data or access to data. | ||||
| Rather than create an extremely long answer, may I strongly suggest obtaining this book, authored by Industry leaders, Consultants and Experts, and large implementation users. In the meatime, I can highly recommend 2 magazines we have published, on the CMDB, called Viewpoint 1 and 2, with articles from again, industry experts, and users implementations with advise and guidance. | ||||
| [6] What is the industry’s benchmark on SLA performance? Is 100% possible or is it realistically lower, and is that acceptable by industry? | ||||
( Damien Wong ) In reality there is no one single benchmark for SLA performance across industry, and practitioners should not attempt to over-generalise. This is really specific to individual organizations, and should be based on business need, i.e. cost vs. performance. Some organizations may practice inclusion of planned downtime into the calculation of SLA performance which rules 100% SLA performance out immediately. In addition, even if 100% SLA performance is technically possible, it is not practical. The cost of increasing service availability from say 3 9’s to 4 9’s is in itself usually prohibitive in terms of cost. As such, we need to ensure that we are matching the service availability and corresponding SLA’s to what is actually required by the business. In some business-critical services, 99.9% availability may truly not be good enough and business may be prepared to pay for increased SLA performance, but in most other cases, even 98% service availability could be more than enough. To manage user expectations accordingly, we then need to ensure that Financial Management for IT Services (especially accounting and charging) is incorporated accordingly with Service Catalogs that define different SLA grades (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, etc.), and Customers will then adopt the right SLA’s for different services as required. |
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| [7] How can we offer a reasonable SLA to the customer if the service is made up of many organizational units and each offer an OLA (e.g. 99% availability)? NOTE: No additional IT budget! | ||||
( Damien
Wong ) There are 2 ways in which appropriate SLA’s can be achieved:
Top-Down or Bottom-Up |
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| [8] Our company had engaged external expert to implement ITIL’s Incident Management. But our management is thinking of implementing the Change and Problem Management ourselves. Do you have any step-by-step approach for the above-mentioned 2 processes and any whitepaper you know of? Is ITIL applicable for programming process? | ||||
| (Damien
Wong) There are various white papers that are available on implementing
ITIL Change and Problem Management processes. The important thing to
note is that ITIL specifies “What” to do, but not “How”
to do it. As such, it should be taken as a framework / guideline as
you implement these processes within your organization in the context
you operate in. There are white papers available in the itSMF website and many others that are also freely available on the net. With regards to the applicability of the programming process within ITIL, this falls squarely under the Release Management process. You may wish to refer to the Release Management processes within ITIL for greater details. |
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| [9] Are corporate governance and regulatory intiatives/requirements driving IT investments? OR is high IT investments driving the need for corporate governance/IT governance initiatives? | ||||
| (Sushil Chatterjji) More of the second – ever increasing IT investments, due to the increased dependency/intensity of IT use for business initiatives is driving the need for IT governance. Leading corporations are adopting the paradigm of (IT-enabled) business initiatives, not just IT initiatives. The IT Governance Institute (ITGI) worldwide surveys (downloadable from www.isaca.org) show increased recognition that IT is often pivotal to deliver business strategy. Added to that, in certain geographies, mandatory compliance (eg SOX) is driving IT re-engineering, which may result in increased investments in IT. | ||||
| [10] Any ballpark figure on what is the global IT spend and what percentage is driven by regulatory requirements? | ||||
(Sushil Chatterjji) Industry analyst companies (Gartner, Forrester etc.) put out figures on IT spend – this varies across industry etc.; perhaps what is more important is the amount wasted (see below) extracts:
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| [11] IT Governance is a good concept, how do I implement this w/o appearing to be an obstacle to business needs? For example: Who am I to say this particular user do not need another laptop? | ||||
| (Sushil Chatterjji) It is not merely a concept; it is an imperative for any IT-enabled enterprise (both private and public) to adopt. Failure to adopt IT Governance results in poor performance from IT-enabled investments, period – see above. Good IT Governance consists of a combination of management practices, processes and structure/mechanisms to aid decision-making related to IT matters. One of the goals of Value Delivery (which is one of 5 key focus areas of IT Governance according the ITGI – others being Strategic Alignment, Risk Management, Resource Management, and Performance Measurement), is to ensure that IT-enabled business investments are made to support the business and realise business benefit. A fuller explanation and framework for the governance of Value is given in the Val IT framework from the ITGI (downloadable from www.isaca.org). | ||||
itSMF
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