The Year of Shattering Silos

This is the year to shatter the silos. Consider any best practice, method or standard that you have or are thinking of implementing. In any DevOps, ITSM, ISO or Lean initiative the biggest challenge that any CIO or organization as a whole will have to address is how to meet the rate of demand and the dynamic business requirements. Dynamic business requirements are a norm not an exception and the service provider will need to ensure fluidity throughout the value stream. Shattering Silo’s will be a prerequisite to achieving end-to-end workflow and agility.

Functional Silos

When talking about silos most practitioners immediately think of integrating departments or functional teams. One of the more obvious silos to address here is the division between development and operational teams (DevOps). While there is a lot of buzz in the industry on how to bridge that great divide, the real chasm that hinders efficiency and optimization is that between the business and IT. Business performance is directly related to IT performance and the business side of the house must engage IT in all strategic initiatives. Not only to ensure functional and nonfunctional requirements but I am speaking here of full on consistent support and engagement with IT to ensure an ever evolving service belt.

Technology Silos

Outdated, disparate, and nonintegrated tools and technology are killing the opportunity to achieve real competitive advantage, time to market and business outcomes. A holistic approach to tool selection to support DevOps, ITSM and Lean will have to be looked at from and integrated tool chain perspective. Enough already with replicated tools effort and resources.

Process Silos

Ok… now we are really getting to the crux of things. When attempting to bust out of and to shatter silos. Those organizations that have attempted it will be the first to tell us that we should never have a “Configuration Management Process” project or “” project. Instead you might have a project to “Record and Track Changes” in order to restore service quickly and reduce business and customer impact. This initiative would like to look at how to integrate some small increment of integration between Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management. This is very different than having an over worked bureaucratic configuration or change control process that hinders more than it helps. Every process design or improvement initiative that is driven by customer and business needs and requirements would work best to deliver value. When projects are not driven by the voice of the business or the voice of the customer we tend to end up with process for process sake. Taking an iterative agile approach to process design and looking at what might be required for a holistic integrated process approach across the software development and service lifecycle is likely to avoid a lot of bureaucracy, bottlenecks and impediments in the velocity and cadence required to meet dynamic business requirements. Agile Service Management will truly help to shatter the “Process Silos”.

Information Silos

Functional Silos, Technology Silos and Process Silos create data and information silos. Simply put, if your data and information are siloed, you will always be siloed and perhaps never have the capability to achieve true optimized business performance.

To learn more or to become a Certified Agile Process Owner or Certified Agile Service Manager: http://itsmacademy.com/Agile

The Four Ps of Service Design - It’s not all about Technology

People ask me why I think that many designs and projects often fail. The most common answer is from a lack of preparation and management. Many IT organizations just think about the technology (product) implementation and fail to understand the risks of not planning for the effective and efficient use of the four Ps: People, Process, Products (services, technology and tools) and Partners (suppliers, manufacturers and vendors). A holistic approach should be adopted for all Service Design aspects and areas to ensure consistency and integration within all activities and processes across the entire IT environment, providing end to end business-related functionality and quality. (SD 2.4.2) People: Have to have proper skills and possess the necessary competencies in order to get involved in the provision of IT services. The right skills, the right knowledge, the right level of experience must be kept current and aligned to the business needs. Products: These are the technology managem

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group . As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. Note: Goods may not always be provided for every Service Offe

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you. Roles and Responsibilities: Process Owner – this individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented. They will ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance. Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and deliverables. An example of a policy in could be… “All Incidents must be logged”. Policies are rules that govern the process. Process Owner ensures that all Process activities, (what to do), Procedures (details on how to perform the activity) and the

Search