Jim Bolton
1/8/2007 2:11:41 PM
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ITIL V3
When ITIL was originally developed it was the result of numerous organizations getting together to share best practices. They learned from each others successes and failures then wrote it all down to share with the IT community. I love it. IT practitioners learning from each other and sharing their findings. This foundation of ITIL is why I love ITIM - a community forum for practitioners to share and learn.
Fast Forward to ITIL Version 3........the ITIL books are being rewritten by vendors (many of whom offer software solutions, "to fix your process problems." My concern is that, when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Will V3 be vendor neutral? Will V3 bring new clarity to implementing best practice process improvements, or will it lay the groundwork for tool sales? A wise person once said, "A fool with a tool is still a fool."
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Ron Muns
11/16/2006 11:56:43 AM
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Infrastructure Is About More than Hard Assets
Article provided by ITIM Association founder, Ron Muns.
Infrastructure Is About More than Hard Assets
The infrastructure needed to support the businesses we serve includes more than just the hard assets; and management is about more than just looking after the physical assets. Infrastructure elements include:
- Hardware—multiple technology solutions and strategies
- Software
- Processes
- People and Culture
- Documentation
So, when organizing IT for success, set up a reporting structure that takes a structured view of the needs of the business, both for today and tomorrow. I believe that the proper organizational structure revolves around effective:
- IT Infrastructure Management
- Acquiring/Developing New Capabilities
- Planning Technology Solutions for the Future
- Administration and Compliance
1. IT Infrastructure Management
This is the day-to-day center of the IT organization. IT Infrastructure Management is responsible for the effectiveness of services delivered to the customer. We are seeing a number of functions falling under one executive within IT. This person is responsible for the acquisition, deployment, management, monitoring, support, security, and retirement of IT assets. We have complex layers of technology, with multiple platforms and strategies. Gone forever are the days when we asked, "Do you have a centralized computing structure, decentralized, or distributed?" We all have all of these and more.
We are more closely aligned with our business partners and need a central point-of-command-and-control to connect the technology dots with a focus on supporting business services. As such, we need an Infrastructure Manager position to bring it all together.
2. Acquiring/Developing New Capabilities
Developing new capabilities requires software developers. This group has their own ways of thinking and it is best if they are not involved in day-to-day IT operations. Developers and analysts tend to be project-focused and do not like or perform well in day-to-day operations. As such, this group should, and normally are, in a reporting structure outside of IT Infrastructure Management. Most often this group reports to the CIO, however, it is not uncommon to have groups of developers that report directly to customer executives.
3. Technology Planning
It is important to look beyond today to tomorrow, and to envision computing platforms and capabilities for the very long-term. This can, and often is, done as a collaboration effort of various IT and customer participants. But, where size and budgets allow, we see this as an individual with think tank-type capabilities that reports to the CIO and works closely with the customers and with all IT functions. It is important to think "outside the box," which is hard to do if you live in the box that is focused on day-to-day effectiveness or operations.
4. Administration and Compliance
This group is the one that does budgeting, finance, handles organizational administration, and are likely the point people/person for computer audits and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. The CIO must have this group to survive.
Conclusion
While there are a thousand ways to organize IT, the above seems to be an effective one. We have preached for years that the IT support organization should most often report to the CIO. Depending on the headcounts in support, this may be a good idea, but we are starting to see the operational alignment benefits of having one person responsible for the performance of today's IT operations. In the past, IT operations were most often led by someone that did not have a customer focus, but an IT operations focus. I believe that the personality and skills within IT are changing. They must change. Organizations will survive only if their IT executives focus on their customers and the business services they deliver.
Best of luck in your journey to support excellence!
Regards,
Ron Muns, CEO and Founder
HDI, Leading IT Service and Support
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11/9/2006 11:18:42 AM
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ITIM Association Launches
Las Vegas, Nev. – November 6, 2006 – A new membership association for senior level IT professionals was announced today in conjunction with the 4th Annual IT Infrastructure Management Conference & Expo (http://www.ITIM2006.com) being held this week in Las Vegas, Nev. The IT Infrastructure Management Association (http://www.itimassociation.com/) is dedicated to being the IT industry’s leading membership association for IT professionals responsible for the deployment, management and effectiveness of IT infrastructure.
The ITIM Association’s founding strategic advisory board comprises an impressive group of industry experts, analysts, business leaders and journalists, including HDI founder and CEO Ron Muns; advisory board chairman Pete McGarahan, president, McGarahan & Associates; Steven Birgfeld, CIO, CompuCom; Patrick Bultema, venture partner, vSpring Capital; Mike Carper, divisional VP, technology operations, Coldwater Creek; David Coyle, research director, IT operations management, Gartner, Inc.; Jonathan Feldman, journalist and director of IT services, City of Asheville, NC; Ron Hurle, general manager of enterprise production services, Intel; Brian Johnson, ITIL worldwide practice manager, CA, Inc.; Kurt Milne, managing director, Information Technology Process Institute; Jim Sage, VP IT and CIO, University of Akron; John C. (Jack) Scott, founding partner, Evaluator Group and Peter O’Neill, principal analyst, Forrester Research.
In addition, the ITIM Association has assembled a group of leading industry advisers to identify a number of key focus areas in order to address critical issues affecting IT management. These leaders will provide expertise and lead member forums, discussions, blogs and other educational and membership community offerings. Focus areas include:
- Infrastructure Management Strategies, led by Pete McGarahan, McGarahan & Associates
- IT Governance, led by Jan Heuthorst, Quint Wellington Redwood USA
- IT Compliance, led by Michael Bargerhuff, Apollo Group, Inc.
- Service Desk, led by Jim Bolton, Propoint Solutions
- Network Operations, led by Rhonda Vetere, JP Morgan Chase
- Service Level Management led by Patti Magers, Fox IT
- Business Continuity, led by Dennis Wenk, Hitachi Data Systems
- Business Alignment, led by Terry Okus, IBM Global Services
- Change and Configuration Management, led by Kevin Johnson, Seamless Technologies
- IT Security, led by Stan Waddell, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
- Financial Management, led by Suzon Crowell
- Lou Hunnebeck of CCN, Inc. will serve as an " adviser at large "
Members of the ITIM Association will receive access to an online community that features a web-based interactive library, webinars, subscriptions to the Infrastructure Insite Magazine, the ITIM eZine newsletter, white papers, blogs and discounts on the ITIM Conference & Expo, books and online educational and training materials.
"This is an exciting and important development for the IT industry," commented Ron Muns, founder and CEO, ITIM Association. "The ITIM Association is the first forum that brings together all the varied areas of expertise involved in the successful sourcing, deployment, management and retirement of IT infrastructure technology. It is our hope that the ITIM Association will offer an invaluable new resource to IT managers and executives looking to stay on top of the latest industry trends and issues in IT infrastructure management."
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9/29/2006 10:56:23 AM
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IT Trends and the Infrastructure Management Pendulum
Peter O’Neill, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research will talk about “IT Trends and the Infrastructure Management Pendulum” during the closing general session of the 2006 ITIM Association Conference & Expo. He sees the number one challenge for managers of IT infrastructure as “The continuing plethora of vendors in this market. Although there is consolidation as the large ones absorb various technology providers to round out their offering, there are still new vendors who are able to provide added value and innovative solutions.”
With regard to the future of IT management, Peter was asked the following questions:
1) How do you see (choose one of the following: IT governance and compliance, IT service management, IT lifecycle management) evolving over the next few years?
One of the greatest challenges for IT service management in enterprises in the future is the fact that there will be a mixed environment of service providers – both internal and external – as more and more commodity work is outsourced to a managed service provider. The enterprise IT organization will therefore become a service aggregator and will want to adopt standard methodologies to document service delivery and measure their success. The ITSM challenge is to consolidate these data and also manage work breakdowns between SLAs and OLAs.
2) How do you see the best practices and policies that are the focus of ITIM becoming more fully integrated into the IT department in the coming years?
The increasing adoption of ITIL is now very evident, with an acceleration in now that ITIL maturity can be audited and certified according to the ISO 20000. IT organizations are recognizing that they way they do incident management or other processes is not different than other organizations and leveraging the experience of thousands of companies as documented in ITIL is a pragmatic approach to help cope with a more mixed set of providers (see above) and staff churn.
3) In your view, what does the future of IT management hold for the next five years?
Simply put, an IT organization will increasingly be seen as a business and should be run accordingly. IT itself is so intricately involved in all business processes that Forrester’s view is that the term IT itself should disappear in the future. Having IT implies that this is something separate and different.
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7/12/2006 12:21:56 PM
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Required IT Skills Continue to Change
In the May 22nd, 2006 issue of InfoWorld, author Dan Tynan researches MBA programs targeting IT professionals while Bob Lewis reports on developing your IT staff’s skills by being innovative, creative and making it real. For the last few years, CIOs have been talking about the importance of building better business skills and knowledge amongst their IT staff. I have included the links to the referenced articles above and want to know your thoughts regarding the right mix of technical versus business training, development and knowledge for your Infrastructure Management professionals? I look forward to your thoughts, opinions and experiences.
Pete McGarahan
Chairman, ITIM Association
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