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.
Friday, 16 November 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
Mastering IT Change Management Step Two: Moving from Ignorant Anarchy to Informed Anarchy
Mastering IT Change Management Step Two:Moving from Ignorant Anarchy to Informed Anarchy
Its been a while, right interesting article - a description how a IT support Organisations beginning steps into implementing a change management process.
I like the way the author likens the first steps of setting something like this up to Ignorant Anarchy,
I can see the Authors descriptions very clearly and liken them to a few things I have seen first hand.
With systems having changes implemented and no one being informed and going through a troubleshooting process only to find some one form down the back has changed a setting and not told any one and is the cause of the incident.
Then this morphs into everyone being informed some people caring when it doesn't even affect them tying up the help desk with unneeded queries, but on the other hand in the past they have been affected by changes that weren't meant to affect them but did, it puts you in a interesting position when you have to reassure them it wont affect them.
I cant imagine working in a large business with 60-75 changes going on in a month it must be anarchy as the authors describes when there is none or trying to implement change management process.
Then bliss once reaching step four "Mastering IT Change management".
Its been a while, right interesting article - a description how a IT support Organisations beginning steps into implementing a change management process.
I like the way the author likens the first steps of setting something like this up to Ignorant Anarchy,
I can see the Authors descriptions very clearly and liken them to a few things I have seen first hand.
With systems having changes implemented and no one being informed and going through a troubleshooting process only to find some one form down the back has changed a setting and not told any one and is the cause of the incident.
Then this morphs into everyone being informed some people caring when it doesn't even affect them tying up the help desk with unneeded queries, but on the other hand in the past they have been affected by changes that weren't meant to affect them but did, it puts you in a interesting position when you have to reassure them it wont affect them.
I cant imagine working in a large business with 60-75 changes going on in a month it must be anarchy as the authors describes when there is none or trying to implement change management process.
Then bliss once reaching step four "Mastering IT Change management".
Saturday, 11 August 2012
What determines IT spending Priorities?
What determines IT spending Priorities?
Just as difficult to read on the ground as at an altitude of
10363m, This article proved I have very little upstanding of economics, but
what did get out of it in my mind proved
logical and nothing to ground breaking,
The article breaks down a survey of 1495 business leaders on
where they are looking to spend their IT dollars on the different functions of
their business.
Not surprisingly for me most businesses expected
administration (people) to be the biggest IT expense. The article broke down
the data more with small business more like to rank security as a low expense
and big business a high, as small business think they are not susceptible to
hacking and would prefer to spend on R&D.
One trend I found interesting was that in general business
small and large were not prioritizing spending in general on security, because
of the poor economic climate at the time of writing, I assume to save money and
run bearing the risk. I look at this two ways take the risk and come out on top
maybe or continue with high security and protect what is of value to your
business until the tough times are over but I guess it depends on business type
which path you would take.
In conclusion a tricky read with what I think was not really
astounding info, you could work out where spending might be by looking at the
business and think logically. This may be the IT department brain in me think
not the management brain though.
Just over Australia
now, 7 hours to go, Who’s doing the R&D for Singapore air in flight
entertainment? the plane on this map is
far from scale, business opportunity or a business spending elsewhere in tough
economic times.
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
Paper 2 Six Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make
"Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make" By Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill.
Initially I didn't find this article very thought provoking until I started writing about it, as for nearly all the the six decisions I have seen affects of these being made by the wrong people (IT team or misinformed\not interested people management team or a combination of the two).
If the team I work with was put in charge of spending there would be many services duplicated and under utilised, in the past we had our own exchange server which enabled us to be very flexible with distribution lists and department identity with regards to email address, creation of role based accounts . Since this service has been centralised, sure we can't instantly set up a new account, if something goes wrong with a new Staff members HR processing or someone cant be added to a distribution list with 3 clicks, now it takes an email to the central IT department to sort. This now all takes a bit longer but there is less licensing, hardware and maintenance cost and its one less service a already under pressure IT team has to maintain.
Currently there is decisions being made about upgrades to systems that have a huge amount of features that cam be implemented and can do some very cool things, the problem I see with this is even with a small business there is a lot of setup involved for a small IT team like the one I work with. I can see that possibly the management team has been misinformed with high expectations and when the new system is implemented very little of the features discussed with them will be implemented properly and will possibly be under utilised in the wrong areas and not really add any business value. Saying that though, the fault may fall back a little on the managements teams lack interest in IT and role it plays in there business and there dismissive decisions.
Decision 3.
I found this interesting in the fact I have seen first hand a few very intelligent people requesting a Mac (Influenced by Apple crack, the amazing apple marketing machine), when we are primarily a Windows environment. Advising that the applications they use for there business\corporate\research workspace are not available on OSX, or they have being using Windows for the last 15 years how can a change now possibly make them more efficient on a unfamiliar operating system?
The result after a few months once the decision had been over ridden my a management team trying to make a problem go away, that had not taken much insight just trying to keep there staff happy, a request to install Windows in boot camp and a department manager asking for their staff members Mac to be taken off them because they had become so unproductive.
Decision 2.
I'm not sure where the blame lie's here but I have seen an IT team getting to-many projects thrown at it, starting one getting put on to another coming back to the one before and finishing one of these, this defiantly "leads to a backlog of delayed initiatives and an overwhelmed and demoralised IT department and costly as many tasks before a performed again as a past project is continued after a long break. This would be avoided with a Management team setting clear objectives after being informed correctly in the first place
Decision 5
This amused me as although I have not worked in an environment where levels of security\privacy and been decided, I imagined my work places security implementation could be likened to Fort Knox if we were left in-charge with out involvement from our management team. Which would not fit the business environment as many staff travel and collaborate when various other business and institutions.
This has gone a little off topic and turned more into a rant than a structured blog post, but all in all I think there needs to be a balance between IT and Management with IT advising management and management taking interest in aligning the business with IT and having the final say. The Article sums this up nicely with good examples that I can relate to.
Initially I didn't find this article very thought provoking until I started writing about it, as for nearly all the the six decisions I have seen affects of these being made by the wrong people (IT team or misinformed\not interested people management team or a combination of the two).
- How much should we spend on IT?
- Which Business Process should receive our IT Dollars?
- Which IT capabilities need to be company wide?
- How good Do our IT services really need to be?
- What Security and privacy risk well we accept?
- Whom do we blame if and IT initiative fails?
If the team I work with was put in charge of spending there would be many services duplicated and under utilised, in the past we had our own exchange server which enabled us to be very flexible with distribution lists and department identity with regards to email address, creation of role based accounts . Since this service has been centralised, sure we can't instantly set up a new account, if something goes wrong with a new Staff members HR processing or someone cant be added to a distribution list with 3 clicks, now it takes an email to the central IT department to sort. This now all takes a bit longer but there is less licensing, hardware and maintenance cost and its one less service a already under pressure IT team has to maintain.
Currently there is decisions being made about upgrades to systems that have a huge amount of features that cam be implemented and can do some very cool things, the problem I see with this is even with a small business there is a lot of setup involved for a small IT team like the one I work with. I can see that possibly the management team has been misinformed with high expectations and when the new system is implemented very little of the features discussed with them will be implemented properly and will possibly be under utilised in the wrong areas and not really add any business value. Saying that though, the fault may fall back a little on the managements teams lack interest in IT and role it plays in there business and there dismissive decisions.
Decision 3.
I found this interesting in the fact I have seen first hand a few very intelligent people requesting a Mac (Influenced by Apple crack, the amazing apple marketing machine), when we are primarily a Windows environment. Advising that the applications they use for there business\corporate\research workspace are not available on OSX, or they have being using Windows for the last 15 years how can a change now possibly make them more efficient on a unfamiliar operating system?
The result after a few months once the decision had been over ridden my a management team trying to make a problem go away, that had not taken much insight just trying to keep there staff happy, a request to install Windows in boot camp and a department manager asking for their staff members Mac to be taken off them because they had become so unproductive.
Decision 2.
I'm not sure where the blame lie's here but I have seen an IT team getting to-many projects thrown at it, starting one getting put on to another coming back to the one before and finishing one of these, this defiantly "leads to a backlog of delayed initiatives and an overwhelmed and demoralised IT department and costly as many tasks before a performed again as a past project is continued after a long break. This would be avoided with a Management team setting clear objectives after being informed correctly in the first place
Decision 5
This amused me as although I have not worked in an environment where levels of security\privacy and been decided, I imagined my work places security implementation could be likened to Fort Knox if we were left in-charge with out involvement from our management team. Which would not fit the business environment as many staff travel and collaborate when various other business and institutions.
This has gone a little off topic and turned more into a rant than a structured blog post, but all in all I think there needs to be a balance between IT and Management with IT advising management and management taking interest in aligning the business with IT and having the final say. The Article sums this up nicely with good examples that I can relate to.
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