Friday 16 November 2012

Implementing IT Service Management: A case study focussing on critical success factors

Implementing IT Service Management: A case study focussing on critical success factors.

Wow big read for the last review paper. Initially from reading the introduction I thought this would be an interesting paper to read. Just past the introduction there is large amount about the IT Service management frame work ITIL and other frame works. I gave these sections a miss.

The paper was a little to detailed for my liking next it goes on about the Research question, method how the data was analyzed then finally gets into the actual project its self or so I thought as this point I find myself at the conclusion.


Conclusion
Even with full support from senior management when implementing ITIL there is a lot more you need for success. You need good organization, a change in culture through your organization and focus through out the organization.

Read the start and finish of this article and you will get the main gist of it as it is a little to long and detailed if you already have some knowledge of ITIL, saving your valuable time for something else.

On a side note google should really implement a word count into blogger this would help sucnificantly when trying to fill out 200 words on a review paper post.

end.

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Towards TQM in IT Services

Towards TQM in IT Services

WOW what a wordy article on quality.

Until reading this article I had not really thought of the different ways of measuring quality. I usually think about quality as gap quality or value quality as defined in the article.

I'm not sure where this article is meant to go or or its real purpose. It does give a good overview of the different quality definitions and there relationships to IT service, then recommends Gap and Value quality are best for measuring quality in IT TQM (total quality management).

The diagram used to model the solar system is defiantly not to scale but does give a interesting perspective on how to evaluate products and services and how the different factors affect each other.

Next is a discussion about a survey questionnaire they are going to use to test the survey questions for ambiguity, misunderstanding and vagueness of the terms used to them improve the questionnaire, there is no evidence or hows this went as this step is currently in progress at the time of publishing the article.Weird?

Maybe this article is way above me or I have no concertration\comprehension left in me after a busy day but the article doesn't seem to fit together and come to and definitive conclusion.


Saturday 27 October 2012

An Overview of IT Service Management

An Overview of IT Service Management

OK 2nd last post lets go.

This article really does give an overview of IT service management and the various frameworks available as described in the title. After reading it and viewing the information regarding which which frameworks are being adopted, "If we use ISO 9000 as a surrogate for the future adoption of the ISO/IEC 20000 standard, the forecast is for exponential growth in the adoption of ISO/IEC 20000." Where can I buy shares in a company the does ITIL testing or ISO certification the article almost looks like and investment advertisement. Or should I be developing my own frame work to sell\print money?

The article does outline some graet stats that should how the effectiveness of adopting a ITSM strategy can help a business for example "In 2000, target response time for resolving Web incidents at Caterpillar IT was 30 minutes -- but it hit that goal only30 percent of the time. After Caterpillar implemented ITIL, its IT providers hit the benchmark more than 90 percent of the time. In addition, Caterpillar has been able to grow its business exponentially in the past five years with only 1 percent increase in its IT budget."

I think some form ITSM frame work should be adopted if you in the business of IT, the benefits are well worth the effort.

Monday 24 September 2012

Taming the Help Desk

Taming the Help Desk

I  think possibly this is the best article yet. First of I'm astounded such a small team can manage and support so many staff and students! This article first addresses a lot of issues that affect geeks in a tech role to a management role. The language used is informal and very friendly and gets the point across,  From addressing your Geek appearance to transitioning to managing staff some great ideas are expressed.

A key point discussed I can relate to was knowing when to speak and when to shut up as typically there is the overly quite geek or obnoxious geek who doesn't know when to shut up. I have meet a few of these(obnoxious geeks) in my time and they drive me nuts yet still I am a little jealous at there abilities to express themselves even if most of what they are say is crap! as I tend to be the overly quiet geek and miss my opportunity, there's room for improvement.

A lot of decision in the article goes on to describes setting up a help desk, hiring a staff then managing and keeping up moral in the team. Lots of useful ideas advice to come in handy and that hopefully I can apply in the future, some where, some time, at some service desk.

You Want us to Support WHAT?!? Negotiation, Delivery, and Cultivation: The Gateway to Excellent Service Deployment

You Want us to Support WHAT?!? Negotiation, Delivery, and Cultivation: The Gateway to Excellent ServiceDeployment


Right-o first off, Kerberos password, does that actually exist? Doesn't Active directory dish that out a kerberous token when you successfully authenticate when logging into a domain connected pc?

Doesn't matter.

Yes the help desk is important and does really need to be involved in  changes, development and when something goes wrong and they need to be let in on this early. I don't know how many times I have seen a change implemented,  the service desk hasn't been updated or notified and calls are flooding in, your trying work figure out a work around and ya cant come up with anything, so you wander off an have a yarn with a level 3 administrator only to find they have made a change or something has broken but they haven't let you know or you get a blank look as if to say I didn't think it would affect that.

 A lot of time and effort can be saved by communicating with the service desk but that only works if the higher levels in the team also communicate with the service desk as well. The service desk I think also has a really good idea of how users work with the services supplied and can give some really good feed back on discussions involving future services or changes. Being able to ask with a users frustrations in mind how something may be affected.

Developing a Service Catalog for Higher Education Information Technology Services

Developing a Service Catalog for Higher Education Information Technology Services



This case study gives a great incite to how a service catalogue can be implemented for a business catering for a large amount of people. It is almost like a system by step guide. 

I found it interesting where it is discussed around making the content searchable.  As my work places service catalogue typeish website suffers from one the  issues they out line. It categorises services by showing questions a customer might ask, which is very frustrating because you can never find the question you want to ask. The questions are also to long and difficult to skim though the text just becomes too much.  It is really cleaver how they avoided this in the article by refining the categories to board basic request EG Do something? Need Something? Fix a problem? Get information? Buy Something? Etc…..

It would be nice to implement something along these lines and see the improvements or changes in the dynamics of how service requests and incidents come through to a service desk. 

The article outline nicely how the implementation of a service catalogue can change the service provided to a business and the way it can add value to both the customer\user and service provider.

Monday 17 September 2012

Conger, S., Winniford, M., & Erickson-Harris, L. (2008). Service management in operations. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems

Service management in operations.

This was a long read. The article discusses a survey on the implementation of various forms of ITSM in a rang of US firms with IT departments. Generally firms with larger amounts of employes were more likely to use some form of ITSM.  Which is not so surprising trying to organize and coordinate large amounts of people and technology there needs to be something to keep the anarchy contained. the smaller business were less likely to use ITSM, as staff were more likely to to be performing multiple roles.

A statistic I found interesting was that more firms had implemented Change management than Incident management, it wasn't by much. Incident Management was one of the higher adopted process even higher than the service desk, whose logging these incidents?

The conclusion identifies that there is some conceptual confusion on exactly what a IT service is which I agree with, most people with out any IT knowledge thinks there's computers with programs on and they can send email, explain whats IT service is and there eyes glaze over.

I guess the implications for the of IT operations are less efficiency and more downtime  with no implementation of ITSM, changes happen, changes cause effects and incidents are born and help desk people stay in their jobs fighting fires.