Stuart Rance wrote in a blog  “Knowledge only has value when it is available to someone, either because they remember it or because they are guided towards it at the time they need it”.   One of the key elements in support of CSI is Knowledge Management. An organization must continually gather knowledge about its services and support processes in order to look for trends, find improvement opportunities and develop strategies that will move them into the future.  The philosopher and essayist George Santayana wrote,  “Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. In today’s reality of increased rates of change, increased employee turnover, increased access to information and greater market completion it is ever more critical to build meaningful knowledge bases that allow an organization can create and capture value by insuring that data, information, knowledge and wisdom are being brought forward to benefit how and what the ITSM organization does to support bus

As the current IT organization has grown from a provider of technology to the Service Provider of choice we have had to incorporate the principles of service management to ensure that we deliver the outcomes required by our customers.  Given that, we have to ask ourselves a couple of strategic questions: What outcomes are we trying to provide? How do we as a service provider facilitate that? Delivering an outcome based definition of services will allow the IT organization to move beyond just business / IT alignment to towards business / IT integration, which really should have been the goal from the beginning.  Supporting customer / business outcomes should be the ultimate focus of the IT organization thus creating value through the delivery of services. A focus on business outcomes is both a critical and in most cases a cultural shift for IT service providers.  As customer’s preferences and perceptions change over time so does the value statement that a service provider

What is hurting the capability of service providers to design and deliver service at the rate of speed and at a cost that is viable to the business?  I asked a group of IT managers and practitioners in a recent training class and all agreed on these common causes: Lack of upper management strategy and direction. Lack of   adequate or accurate information Resistance to change Cultural issues / Agenda’s Inadequate funding I am sure you can add to this list.   Many service providers are suffering from the same pain.   What is causing this?   One area that most will agree upon is the fact that a lot of challenges for a service provider to deliver come from silos.   A classic silo and division that some organizations are addressing are those that exist between development and operational teams. That will help, but it’s not only siloed teams that are hurting this industry.   It is the fact that ITSM processes are also siloed.   If your processes and data are siloed even the best

From an operational perspective, we are primarily interested in the overall management of applications as part of IT services.  These can be developed in-house or purchased off the self from third party developers. Because of our operational point of view, and the focus on ensuring these services/applications are delivered with both utility and warranty, we look at their support from a more holistic approach and use what is referred to as the “Application Management Lifecycle”. It sequences through six stages or steps which are: Requirements, Design, Build, Deploy, Operate and Optimize.  Requirements: Requirements for new applications are garnered, based on business/customer needs and takes place primarily during services design.  There are six types of requirements for any application Functional requirements Manageability requirements Usability requirements Architectural requirements Interface requirements Service Level requirements Design:   At this point the requ