MOF's Question Based Guidance

During a discussion in a recent Intro to MOF class, we talked about some of the best practice guidance from MOF that we would use in our ITSM improvement initiatives. We had an enthusiastic “YES” that the MOF question based guidance will be a most welcome addition in our toolkit. Let’s talk a little bit about MOF and what this guidance entails.

MOF is a Microsoft Solution Accelerator that helps integrate IT best practices, governance and risk, compliance, and team accountabilities for managing key functions across the IT service life cycle. In the documents, MOF provides scripted questions to help organizations drive service improvements by process or stage or activity. For example, the MOF Reliability Accelerator offers direction on understanding, setting targets and measuring IT service reliability. It addresses creating plans for the following areas:

Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Continuity
Capacity

Here is an example of the question based guidance from MOF 4.0 which addresses some of the key issues in creating a Service Availability plan.

What are the key components that make up this service?
Are there any single points of failure in the application delivery architecture? Can we mitigate these?
How has this service performed in the past, either in production or in a pilot or lab environment? What have we learned from this, and how will it affect our availability planning?
What are the specific recoverability targets for this service? Are they achievable, or do we need to evaluate new or alternate technologies such as virtualization or clustering?
Do we need vendors or suppliers to deliver components of this service? Are they able to commit to OLAs?
Does trend data highlight inherent resilience problems with this service or its components?

Using these questions will ensure that we have covered specific issues in our service management initiative. Above is just one section, one example, of the hundreds of key questions included in the MOF Solution Accelerators. MOF 4.0 is available to download for free. Take a look at it, use these questions, and take the best from the frameworks to improve your services.

Look for more about MOF in upcoming blogs from the ITSM Professor. Do you know what a MOF Management Review is? We will discuss this soon. Also, if you are interested in learning more about best practice frameworks, join us in our upcoming webinar on Jan 20, 2011. It is titled ‘Integrating ITSM Frameworks, Standards and Processes’ presented by Jayne Groll.

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