Why Social Media is important for ITIL and ITSM practitioners November 9, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in cloud computing, itil, itsm.Tags: change management, customer, economy, IT Service Management, itil, technology, the art of service
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Life will never be the same again! I remember the day in the last century when I purchased my first mobile phone so I could continue the conversations with my clients while I was stuck in one of many traffic jams in The Netherlands. I also remember that most of my consultancy clients didn’t have email addresses, although there was inter-company electronic mail and those big yellow internal mail envelopes for paper memos etc. To connect with clients you used the phone or fax.
fast forward to 2009:
Our current clients have email addresses, a skypeID, google chat, twitter accounts, a facebook or myspace page, a google Wave account and everybody always talks on their mobile computer (isn’t it amazing that the Apple iPhone has this cool apps that you can download so you can even make phone calls with it?)
So what did I do? Over the past few months I have been more and more active with social media for The Art of Service. For one reason: we want to continue to create long-lasting relationship with our clients and course participants.
For me this is natural and logical: Our clients discuss important and urgent issues on twitter and facebook (as well as the not so important but still urgent), so where are there to answer their questions and to engage in the conversation.
So how has the interaction changed?
- I have my own twitter account http://www.twitter.com/ivankamenken . I use this account to share my research findings, ideas, comments and general communication around IT Service Management, ITIL, Cloud Computing, Business Management and personal ’stuff’
- Because not everybody is interested in my thoughts and rants, I also create a corporate twitter account to discuss our events, programs, products and generic information. http://www.twitter.com/taos_events
- I started promoting my mobile phone number on my business card and email signature again to encourage clients to speak with me directly, rather than going through my PA.
- I have a personal SkypeID, and the company has a corporate SkypeID so nobody has to feel they can’t connect with a client at the other end of the world
- The Art of Service has a corporate blog, posts ideas and links on posterous
- We encourage people to send in their questions and requests for help via the forms on our websites
- and of course there are the multiple of RSS feeds, Digg and delicious bookmarks, the hyves and Linkedin profiles
So when I look back at my first years as an ITIL and ITSM practitioner and compare it with the current situation – I would say that social media is a must for every ITIL and ITSM consultant or practitioner who wants to stay connected with the industry, their clients, peers and colleagues.
The way we did business 20 or 30 years ago doesn’t work (as well) anymore, we can’t stop growing… if you don’t use social media yet… change, and embrace it!
It is official: Availability Management is more important than Capacity Management. September 28, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: availability, capacity, Internet, itil, technology, Telstra
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Today I decided to work from home as I needed to get a couple of things done urgently. And for most of these tasks I needed to be online.
A few weeks ago we switched our internet providers because our old provider – although very stable – only offered ADSL in our area. And the new provider offers ADSL2 – with promises of faster speeds due to larger capacity capabilities.
So here I was today… all ready to start my important jobs – and then: I couldn’t log onto the internet, it just dropped out.
And it has been online/offline for the remainder of the day… Very annoying!
Luckily I have my plan B – as I know availability of internet services is important to me: I have my mobile internet solution. And this is what I used pretty much all day. Thank goodness for Availability Management and the proactive insight to have mobile internet where-ever I go.
It’s nice to have high speed internet – it’s nice to have maximum capacity – but it’s of no use to me when it is not available!
Is this the end of an era? Will Cloud Computing separate the “boys from the men”? September 19, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, cloud computing, itsm.Tags: business, cloud computing, service management, technology, the art of service, value
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Had an interesting discussion today at lunch with the owner of an IT support company in Brisbane and the owner of a niche specialist IT provider for the retail industry about the effect Cloud Computing has and will have on this part of the IT industry.
The discussion really started when somebody asked about our experience with migrating from Exchange based email services to Google apps based services. And Scott made a valid point: the small IT support shop around the corner that services the Small Business segment will really feel the change in the market.
Ask yourself the question… seriously… if you had to start all over again, and set up IT systems for your business, would you purchase proprietary software or would you start off with Google Apps for your email, word processing, basic spreadsheets, intranet pages, etc?
I know what I would do.. we did it a few months ago: we no longer use Microsoft Exchange Server. We no longer need the IT support that goes with managing email ID’s etc. That could amount up to a massive cost saving for the small business owner, but what will it mean for the small IT shop?!?!
The only way to succeed in this industry (imho) is to be amazing with your services. Your clients will want to stay with you – not for the money, but for the unparalleled service which they can NOT get anywhere else!
Technology is replaceable for something with the exact same features and benefits – service is not.
The question most ITIL Experts dread at parties… September 18, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: business, elearning, IT Service Management, management, technology, the art of service
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Have you ever been at a birthday party or a neighborhood barbeque and have people asking you: “So, what is it that you do for a living?”
I used to HATE that question! I have been working in the field of IT Service Management for the last 13 years … and every time I answered this question, I would be attacked by technical stuff about their PC or laptop at home. Heck, I don’t know! I am not a PC specialist.. I am an IT Service Management specialist.
So – what do you say to people at parties?
I struggled with this for years. Even stopped mentioning the ‘IT’ in ITSM… but then it turns into.. well, yes – not quite dinner party conversation.
But the IT industry has matured now – no longer do I have to feel embarrassed about the fact that I work in the IT industry in a role that does not require detailed technical skills.
I can now proudly announce: I run a company that helps the career driven IT Professional with Educational programs and tools for personal and professional development. For example:
•Certification Courses
•Exam Preparation
•Study Guides
•Toolkits
•Templates, cheat sheets
Want to know what this looks like? Check out our websites:
http://theartofservice.com for product info
http://theartofservice.org for eLearning programs
http://theartofservice.net for general company information
Classroom ITIL Service Management training does not add value at all!… January 8, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: business, education, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, itsm, technology, the art of service, training, value
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Well – if I had received a dollar for every person who told me this in the past 12 years, I think I would have a nice little bank account by now! (hmmm – idea for new business model!!)
This morning the discussion came up again when we were talking about ITIL Service Management implementation and what is involved with it all… the reason was a potential client who was under the impression that you ‘install’ ITIL Service Management, just like you install a new piece of software. It’s pretty intuitive and you don’t need any training either. Just read the manual and you’ll be fine… There is no real value in classroom courses anyway, right?
Well – wrong actually, and I will tell you why:
- Attending a classroom course is like having your personal consultant for the duration of the class. And better still – you will have a multiple of consultants because every program has a large amount of experience sitting around the table!
I mean – when was the last time you hired a team of consultants for 3 days for the total amount of $ 1495? Exactly… NEVER! Any decent consultant with a proven track record and experience will charge that amount per hour.. and then some… - The discussions during a classroom course are invaluable. As I wrote in a previous blog, in one of my ITIL V3 Intermediate Classes we had a discussion about the difference between ‘continual’ and ‘continuous’. Both terms are used in the ITIL books, and if you don’t have a discussion about it, you will probably never think about the reason WHY both these words are used… Exactly! You can hear the coin drop in the classroom when I discuss the reason why it is called Continual Improvement and not Continuous improvement. All of a sudden it all makes so much more sense!
- When you attend a private (in-house or in-office) classroom course, you will notice that all students start talking the same language. You and your colleagues have gone through the same experience and have learned the same words and have a shared understanding around certain issues. This will be very important when you get back to your operational working life. You don’t get this from reading the books, because only reading the books leaves room for interpretation and assumptions… discussing it in class doesn’t (as much)
- Classroom courses are never just about the ITIL theory. There is always that little bit of extra that you don’t get from reading the books, or signing up for an eLearning course. Implementation considerations are always discussed, people management is always a hot item and most of the assignments in the ITIL V3 Intermediate programs are about workflow management, report writing skills and give you the opportunity to improve on your leadership ability.
These extra-curricular activities and discussions bring a lot of value to the workplace as it makes the actual implementation project smoother and more focused. - And last but not least: a safe environment.
During a classroom program there are a number of skill based assignments that are addressed. As students in the class you are given the opportunities to make mistakes and to have the option for trial and error. You are not demoted or made redundant from your job when you make a mistake! You are not ridiculed or are missing out on a bonus because you didn’t quite get it the first time. It is the perfect opportunity to learn from your mistakes to make sure you will NOT make them in your work environment!
To me it is easy: there is always a business case for classroom training! The catch is, that you will need to find an education partner (like The Art of Service 
) that uses this approach to their classroom programs. Teaching is more than a regurgitation of theory… it is an opportunity to grow and make connections with knowledge you already have!
So when implementing ITIL Service Management, and when you want it to be successful…, don’t forget the education component! It is part of your Continual Improvement Program!
Starting from scratch in 2009 – new chances for ITIL, ITSM and Cloud Computing… January 1, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, cloud computing, itil, itsm.Tags: business, cloud computing, economy, management, recession, service management, technology
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It is 7am on the 1st of January 2009 – always a special moment the start of a new year. We have a tradition that on the 31st of December we grab a little notebook that we hide during the year and look back at our goals and ambitions that we wrote down on the 31st of December of last year. It is great fun to look back at all the goals and targets we achieved (tick) and missed (crosses). Even our 7 year old joins in with his goals and targets for the next year…
And now 2009 is here… we look at an empty calendar and consider all the things we want to do and achieve this year.
What will it bring for our ITIL Service Management certification programs? With the current economic situation, recession even in some countries, organisations need this more than ever…
Service Management gives visibility of IT Services, gives better management controls on the IT group, it helps with making strategic decisions due to the improved quality (and quantity) of information available to support these decisions. BUT… will their leaders have the insight and the guts to continue to hire educational services? To educate and grow the knowledge kept within their IT groups about IT Service Management, IT governance and standards compliancy… Honestly, I don’t know…
And what about Cloud computing? Again… this is such a great opportunity for many organizations to continue to deliver the IT services to its clients with more storage and more processing power… for a fraction of the price! That must be good news to most CIO’s . But it is also a fairly new concept and I am questioning if CIO’s will dare to choose Cloud Computing as a viable option for their IT Service Delivery.
No matter how you look at it, 2009 is a clean slate; we start from scratch and there are many new chances and opportunities to help IT organizations (and therefore companies at large) in achieving their goals by utilizing ITIL, IT Service Management and Cloud Computing.
I am very excited about this idea and can’t wait to get back to the office again to start talking to our clients again…
only 4 more sleeps!
ITIL V3 Intermediate course – OSA November 30, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in itil.Tags: certification, cmdb, Intermediate, itil, ITIL V3, itsm, OSA, Practitioner, technology, the art of service
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WOW – what a week it has been! I have been a busy little bee… teaching a new course in a country where I don’t speak the language is one of those experiences that you don’t get every day! As a person and as an IT Service Management Professional you can’t help but learn and grow through experiences like this.
It was amazing – a whole group of ITSM consultants, Tool implementers, Pre-sales support specialists and 2nd line support people. It was an amazing mix of database experts, infrastructure specialists, application managers and of course… ME!
What I really enjoy about this ITIL V3 Intermediate OSA program over the ITIL V2 Practitioner course IPSR is the fact that you get to talk about process interfaces between Service Operation lifecycle and the other lifecycles… we had some GREAT discussions about the link between Access Management, Information Security Management and Availability Management. I also very much enjoyed debating the benefits of recording CI information in the CMDB to support the Service Desk when most of your (hardware) infrastructure is outsourced… received some fantastic insights from the database expert in the group about how you could manage this without bogging down the IT group in storing too much detail, so that the IT organisation receives the correct amount and type of information to be able to make EDUCATED decisions on service outages, incidents etc. … all with the objective of supporting the business processes to the best of our abilities!
And the icing on the cake was the fact that all students passed their exam! 100% passrate… WOOHOO. The Art of Service has always maintained a 100% passrate for the ITIL V2 Practitioner courses but it is great to see that we continue this into the ITIL V3 Intermediate programs!
Can’t wait for the next one….. After I spend the entire weekend sleeping, because I only realise today how tired I am after such an achievement.
7 tips to achieve successful ITIL implementation October 18, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil.Tags: business, IT Service Management, itil, itsm, management, project, technology
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According to the members survey performed by the itSMF Asia (and administered by ITsmF International), and the presentations during the ITsmF Asia summit, the following are guaranteed success-factors for your ITIL implementation:
- Everything you do in IT MUST fit in with the company’s goals and objectives, and having the C-level board members involved in the decision saves a lot of time trying to convince managers and team leaders at the shop-floor that this is a good thing to do.
- Everything you do MUST fit in with the IT strategy
- The reason for ITIL implementation has to be YOUR reason – don’t look at other organisations as you might be comparing apples to oranges.
- Cost saving is NOT a result/benefit/outcome of your ITSM implementation.
- Use external help – according to the ITsmF Asia you will have a much better change of being successful at your attempt.
- Benchmark your ITIL/ITSM project against external standards – don’t turn into blind followers of the ‘ITIL-cult’. ISO/IEC 20000 is very good for this purpose!
- Only use tools that are appropriate for your level of maturity. If you use Excel spreadsheets and it works for you… DON’T change it because the vendor said so.
I know they are mother statements but very valid. Something to ponder over at least…
enjoy the weekend!
Will ITIL V5 still have Capacity Management as a process? Or is it replaced by Cloud Management? October 17, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in cloud computing, itil.Tags: business, capacity, cloud computing, itil, itsm, technology
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This was the discussion I had with Rob England (IT Skeptic) and Eric Lauzon (CIO – Asia for Nortel) during the networking cocktail party on Monday.
That morning Eric had explained how Nortel transitioned their IT strategy. This was needed partially due to the way the world is changing and turning towards hyperconnectivity. Examples of hyperconnectivity he gave are the 4-fold increase of Internet commerce transactions, the amount of new facebook registrations each day and the NIKE wifi shoes. Eric also discussed how Nortel implemented a unified communications strategy where the desktop is completely integrated with telephony (voip) and other cool things.
In the afternoon there was a panel to discuss the balance between capacity, resource and cost.
Anyway – those were the triggers for the discussion.
So with our rapidly changing industry and the fact that this change is not just the change in technology, but also the change in customer demands and expectations – are we really going to need Capacity Management in the future?
Clients want access to an IT service and they want it NOW – this is what they are used to in the consumer technology market… and with the options of Cloud Computing, SaaS, virtualization and other web-based services we can pretty much deliver everything our clients want…. within their expectations for timeframew… so why bother with capacity management?
Well – because you still need to have an idea of where the company is going; what are the corporate objectives, what is important to the bottom line of the company, what type of service are they going to need in the future? So you will probably always need to do Business Capacity Management (the future looking part of the process).
The nitty gritty part of the process – the routine activities of monitoring, measuring and analysing utilization and performance of individual components will probably not be as important anymore in the future. All that stuff is dealt with at the supplier side. The ‘cloud’ … you don’t control those components so you don’t need to perfomance manage them.
The internal IT shop will need to manage the performance of the web-based services –> the outcomes of that service, that is! So a much closer link to Service Level Management than we currently have. And probably closely linked to supplier and vendor management as we currently know it in outsourcing situations.
So I don’t think the process will be eliminated or deleted from the framework, but the activities to be performed will change. You can’t stop the control activities but you can eliminate a lot of the operational activities.
Interesting times coming our way!
itSMF Asia Summit – ITIL, ITSM, trends and lessons learnt October 15, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in itil.Tags: business, change, customer, IT, itil, itsm, itsmf, ROI, SLA, technology
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It’s 6am here and I am sitting in my hotel room trying to summarize 2 days of ITsmF Asia Summit. What do you learn when you attend a summit like this? Even after almost 15 years in the industry? Well – as it turns out, quite a lot! (although not everything has to do with the subject matter on hand!)
First of all I’d like to ask where everybody was! According to Umar Chandran (the president of itSMF Singapore) the chapter has 285 members and as this was the ASIA summit you’d expect chapter members from Malaysia, Thailand, China, Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, India to attend. That’s a LARGE slice of the globe! And you know what? there were 88 delegates (136 when you include all vendors and speakers). 88! Where is the rest?!! You can’t tell me that all the other members in the industry don’t have the need to be educated…. very interesting! (to me at least)
- The presentations:
Must admit that there were some amazing presentations but the delivery style was sometimes less than desirable. Again, it’s not WHAT you have to say but HOW you say it. If you want to get your message across tell stories, be prepared and engage with the audience, don’t read your texty long listed bullet-pointed slides but have visuals and be the value add to the presentations.
Rob Stout (CA) knows how to do this – he is a very engaging speaker and lovely to listen to! Sharon Taylor also knows how to do this and probably practiced practiced and practiced her talk 5 million times by now! But the delivery is still as if it is the first time ever she tells this story and that is very good! - ITIL vs. ITSM
Most of the presentations were very basic from a content point of view. Mr. Puranachoti from the Stock Exchange of Thailand gave an overview of IT Service Continuity Management and how they applied it in their data centres. The keynote speakers on day one were very clear on the need to align the IT operations with the business and that without this link you will have a very hard time getting your business case approved (Laura Knapp’s keynote) and spend too much time trying to explain why certain decisions were made (Eric Lauzon’s keynote). - The itSMF Asia members survey
It was very interesting to see the results of the Asia members survey. 155 people responded so it’s a very elite cross section of the Asian market. My biggest suprise was the fact that 17 people said they fully implemented ISO/IEC 20000. That is almost 11% And on top of that 9 people said they had projects in progress. WOW.
The other suprise was the project benefits: the top 3 of benefits of implementing IT Service Management and ITIL are:
a) improved customer satisfaction
b) Service Delivery as per the agreed Service Levels
c) improved management of change requests.
Reduction in IT cost was pretty much the last one in the list…. - Business users are friends… not food!
Sonia Chorng-Der Shyr had a great example on how they used the most disgruntled end-users, the ones who complain the most about IT services and have turned them into IT Pals. The IT Pals are asked to provide input into functional specifications and are also part of end-user testing. When they are satisfied, chances are that the rest of the user community agree as well!
Brilliant move if you ask me! - Speaking of food…. the lunches were AMAZING!
When you love light lunches with only 1 or 2 choices… you were clearly in te wrong place! The buffet style lunch was amazing… I probably put on 2 kilos in the past 2 days!
So – what did I miss?
- The Party!
itSMF conferences are renowned for their social events. This time there was only a cocktail networking event… maybe it’s a cultural difference? Maybe people in Asia don’t like to party? (although I find that hard to believe…. I watch discovery channel….. ha ha!)
- The ‘meat’ in the presentations
Most presentations touched on the surface of IT Service Management with ITIL… Maybe this happened because the presentations were approx. 30 minutes each? It gives enough time to give people an overview of what you have been doing, but not enough time to get into the lessons learnt and what the delegates can take away from this.
- The exhibitors.
There were only 8 companies in the exhibition hall… maybe this is due to the fact that Terrapin organizes the entire conference and that the overhead makes sponsorship and exhibition at the summit too expensive? (after all for 2 days we’ve been talking on ROI!) I couldn’t see a clear ROI for any of the exhibitors to be honest… shame…
Anyway, that were a few of my initial thoughts on the conference. No doubt more stuff will trickle through in the coming days and weeks.
Now, I’m off to the airport on my way back to the office!
