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Showing posts from July, 2009

ISO 20K Can Be a Starting Point, Not a Destination

Since it's adoption, there has been a slow, but steady growth in the number of organizations that are seeking, or have achieved, ISO/IEC 20000 (ISO 20K) certification. For the most part, interest in the standard is being driven by RFP requirements or perceived competitive advantage. The certificate is seen as an "award" that an organization receives for achieving best practice ITSM. While ITIL is being actively adopted, many organizations are overlooking ISO 20K because they do not perceive any value in the certification. I recently realized that we are looking at ISO/IEC 20000 in the wrong way. The standard has so much more to offer than just a certificate. It actually provides a starting place for an ITSM journey, not only the destination. ISO/IEC 20000 defines the "minimum critical activities" required to deliver high quality, aligned services. Once these activities are understood, an organization can assess which activities they already execute well and w

Defining Categories

I often hear from organizations that they are not reaping the expected benefits from their Incident Management Systems or integrated Service Management suites. One of the biggest reasons is that they are struggling to determine how to categorize incidents, problems, service requests, changes, and so forth. Coming up with the right categories for your organization is easier said than done. If you’ve had to do it multiple times, you’re not alone. Having said that, it is important to persist. Categories drive many process activities such as: Incident matching Second- and third-level escalations Workflow management Self-service decision tree logic Priority definition Knowledge base searches Trend and root cause analysis Metrics production SLA reporting Miscategorized records cause inefficiencies, ineffective reporting and can even damage the relationships between lines of support. For example, are your second-line support teams regularly asking “why was this record assigned to me?” If so,