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I offer a collection of ITIL links

For your Friday reading and perusal or for bookmarking and saving for later:

• Office of Government Commerce, originators of ITIL, homepage: http://www.itil.co.uk/
• Real World ITIL blog: http://blog.evergreensys.com/
• IT Skeptic blog: http://www.itskeptic.org/
• ITIL Community forum: http://itilcommunity.com
• Dr. ITIL blog: http://www.dritil.blogspot.com/
• An ITIL project in the real world blog: http://itil4real.blogspot.com/

As an additional bonus, there are 17 ITIL-related podcasts on talk.bmc.com. I just listened to the most recent one with Ken Turbitt and Peter Hill about ITIL vs. CoBIT. A very interesting conversation!

In working on a glossary of terms for Business Service Management, I’ve discovered the ITIL glossary, version 3.0, and I’m reading it with interest. It’s a writing task taken very seriously with wonderful cross referencing and consistency of terms and usage. I haven’t yet found a contradiction or hole in logic so hats off to the writers who put it together. The only additional feature I’d like is clickable cross-references to the other terms used within a definition.

With the terms of use, you can reference the definitions as long as you’re not using the glossary specifically to sell your own products or services, and you must use the term accurately. So it’s a wonderful resource and source of content.

One item I found very interesting while studying the glossary: IT Service seems interchangeable with any Service. However, that interchangeability is not specifically spelled out in the IT Service definition. In the Service definition they call Service synonymous with IT Service. But, there’s also the Business Service definition which has an example such as financial services. So the generic term “Service” is never related to say, banking services or financial services, but “Service” is always related to IT Services.

Confused yet? I confess I am a little confused as well, especially if I want to use Business Service Management principles to interrelate banking services and IT services such as ATM software (firmware?) that runs on Linux. At that point, I guess it’s all about Service, no matter what type you’re talking about. I’ll have to ask Peter Armstrong where he draws the line for his definitions of service management.

What criteria do you use for your definitions of IT Service in contrast to Business Service?

Alterpoint is located in Austin (where I’m located) and makes network management software that is integrated with our BMC Remedy Action Request System and BMC now resells their product, DeviceAuthority. With just a couple of “follow this idea” clicks, as often happens when I read blogs, I found this blog entry, ” Break it Down: Making Strides with ITIL and Best Practices.” In it they give props to BMC for creating the BSM Routes to Value that make the sometimes daunting task of implementing best practices for IT manageable — by breaking it down into parts that make sense. My favorite lines from this post are these, because it mirrors my own observations lately.

One of the basic points is that these transformational projects have too much at stake to be threatened by internal pride or lack of good internal assessment. To realign around ITIL or other best practices, you often need to adjust, enhance or expel some process and cultural factors that are baked into your operation before you even start talking about technology.

I’ve got a white paper in progress where I offer observations of methods for implementing ITIL best practices, starting with the infrastructure tools you already have in place, and in it I discuss getting started with small projects that can later add up to more. You hear corporate culture stories when you start to talk about ITIL projects, and Gary Holmes has some great observations in his comment on Throw out ITIL, but keep the CMDB?. I look forward to hearing more corporate culture and organizational communication stories as I continue to learn about this IT Infrastructure Library myself.

Just read an interesting article in Network World’s Systems Management newsletter, “The jury’s in on the CMDB, or is it?” From it, I’d like to pull out two ideas that caught my eye, one is “In fact, awareness of the term ‘CMDB’ outranked awareness of the term ‘ITIL’ by a significant percentage within the U.S. IT population. (Awareness of ITIL has been traditionally higher in Europe in particular.)” I think that the concept of a CMDB is much easier to wrap your head around than the multiple concepts pertaining to ITIL and Service Management and Service Delivery and… and… the list is a long one. But a common database that houses all your assets and connects the dots for you, well, that is somehow tangible and visible and just makes sense.

The other quote from Dennis is, “In almost all the ’successful’ CMDB implementations that I’ve personally assessed, there has been a strong commitment to process and to change management processes in particular. In most but not all instances, this attention has been ITIL-driven, while in some it’s more a mix of ITIL and other best practice initiatives (and in one instance ITIL was thrown out and the CMDB was kept).” Threw out ITIL and kept the CMDB, now that is interesting. I guess one was more useful in that environment than the other. He does make the point that you need good processes in place in order to have a successful ITIL implementation. I suppose a corporate culture that isn’t driven by process and change management would struggle with ITIL and eventually give it up.

Which is more popular in your group, ITIL or the CMDB? Or are they so interrelated you can’t imagine one without the other?

I stumbled across The ITIL Skeptic’s blog today, reading on digg.com. An entry about the seeming impossibility of creating and maintaining a useful CMDB (Configuration Management Database) as defined by ITIL was an interesting read. But I suppose one answer is, don’t make it a behemoth, keep it manageable with federation? Or perhaps the heart of the argument lies in the definition from ITIL? At any rate, I found the post to be informative and thought-provoking.

The ITIL Skeptic chooses to keep his or her identity a “secret” but is apparently not a former BMC employee. I do appreciate a skeptic’s viewpoint as I continue to learn about ITIL and the CMDB since I still feel like a newbie on the topic. Plus, as a vendor we ought to be sure we pay attention to the skeptics.

Especially valuable to me as I continue to learn is the list of links included on the site. Here are the blog titles and links. I was going to offer up an OPML file with subscriptions but it seems that some of them aren’t syndicated, so I’ll work more on that later.

• ITIL Community Forum
• Wandering through Best Practice
• Fear & Loathing on the Road to ITSM Excellence
• Doug McClure’s blog
• ERP 4 IT
• An Expert’s Guide to Network & Systems Management
• Real World ITIL

Shortly after posting my ITIL and monitoring scenario about BMC Performance Manager notifying CONTROL-M that an SAP job was failing, I got a great response about how CONTROL-M even takes it a step further towards ITIL ideals with the Batch Impact Manager module.

Just read your blog. I wanted to update you on a couple of items which help to fill out the drive to ITIL standards achievement in the operations and monitoring environments.

BMC CONTROL-M has an additional module called BMC Batch Impact Manager. This module allows a user to reduce a large flow of jobs to a single service instance and monitor those services critical to the business. Is there any other kind? When a service is predicted by Batch Impact Manager to fail its due out time, Batch Impact Manager issues alerts to operations and provides an interface to Service Impact Manager to focus attention on bringing the service back to normal. Therefore if an SAP process was included in that critical service, as soon as the non-availability of the SAP process impacted the service, CONTROL-M and or Batch Impact Manager would start to squeal.

Great stuff! I’ve just added some links and spelled out the acronyms, otherwise unretouched. The embarrassing thing is, I knew about this module but hadn’t made the connection. Thanks Ronnie for bringing it to my attention!

There’s a new research tool for those of us learning about and researching ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). You can find it at www.ITServiceToday.com. I’ve used it and I like the categories it gives you to search within — like Google’s Images, News, or Groups categories, you can choose news, articles, white papers, blogs, or training, once you do your search, and find the keywords within that type of document category. It defaults to searching within articles. He says journalists like using it and I would agree, the hits I’m seeing are good quality docs.

Thanks again, Dr. ITiL, for a good research tidbit.

Despite my inability to read Dutch, I got a nice note telling me who created the Apollo 13 ITIL game simulation

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, and I apologize for my tardiness! A few weeks ago I received a nice email from Jan Schilt, Managing Director at Gaming Works BV, letting me know that they developed The Apollo 13 - an ITSM case experience™. It’s available in Dutch, German, English, Polish, Spanish and Danish. Click on over to their website for ways to find certified trainers.

Found that the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education offers ITIL certificate courses

Over at the epr4it blog, there’s a post about the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education’s ITIL professional certifications offering. It’s great to see a university team up with industry experts to offer practical education and certification. It’s accredited by Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB), which is the primary ITIL accreditation body. The University of Minnesota also has an ITIL Resources page with four podcasts and a few papers that look informative and helpful.

The most recent entry on erp4it, ITIL: process or function, describes a concern with a disconnect between business process/service management and ITIL. He references a thread on the dm-discuss Yahoo Group that talks about functions and processes and I was especially intrigued by the idea that you should reuse processes across several functions. Yes, that makes sense. One good example is the process of adding customers to your IT systems. While it might cross functional groups, such as sales management and customer care, which may not even be in the same organization, it’s important to reuse the same process for consistency and also to save time and effort. I think that the examples given help show the connection between business services (customer tracking) and IT processes (warehousing the customer information). While some of the discussion is really about semantics, there’s a need to make connections between ITIL and business needs, whether they’re called processes, functions, or services. Those connections can’t always be made by vendors, due to the unique way each business runs their business, and due to the fact that a function can reside across organizations in a company. As you probably know well, there’s no easy answer when you start to document processes. When the question is as complex as the ones you’d run into while defining functions and processes, the answer is nearly always “It depends.” In grad school we called that our classic graduate student answer.

Whew! And I thought the tech writers had deep semantic discussions about the meaning of different words! We can’t compare to these ITIL and data management discussions. What do you think? Is there a disconnect between ITIL and the goals of running a business, or do you see the connections that we’re making with the Routes To Value message, even if we can’t describe for you how your company’s organizational structure and functional areas work? My hope is that we’re letting those who know the business best implement what makes sense for your business.

Talking about the top three reasons people say they’re working on implementing a CMDB

According to Network World, in this CMDB adoption: What some numbers tell us and why article, they have found three top drivers or motivations for CMDB implementations:
1. Change and Configuration Management (also named Release, Change and Configuration Management)
2. Service Assurance
3. Problem and Incident Management

Interestingly, “Asset and Inventory” was fourth on one survey, but when asked if CMDB was going to be used for “Asset Management” instead, that category fell even further out of the list of reasons to implement a CMDB. Read the article for the full story and details.

In the IT Discovery Suite talk I went to at the BMC Forum, these are some of the items that we see are driving discovery tool needs. While not necessarily directly related to CMDB implementations, I see a coupling, and definitely our discovery tools can populate a CMDB. However, I wonder if asset management isn’t as much of a focus, and there are plenty of other pain points to choose from. In case you need a pain point. I’m guessing most of us don’t need more pain points, but here you go.

Common pain drivers

• Don’t know what assets are deployed or their inter-dependencies
• Over- and under-buying of assets
• Cost, risk of software license and regulatory compliance
• Change Control vs. Change Management
• No insight into the impact of IT health on business activities
• Long resolution times
• Missed SLAs

Common project drivers

• Inventory
• Software license management
• Regulatory compliance
• ITIL® best practices (e.g. configuration management)
• CMDB initiative
• Application & Patch Management
• Server consolidation
• OS Migration
• Root cause analysis
• Intelligent Trouble ticket generation

You can take the survey for Network World yourself. What projects or pain points are driving your CMDB projects?