As the New Year begins, most IT service providers already have their IT strategy in place.   A few decades ago we heard loud and clear… “You must align IT with the business”.  Then we heard in the next decade…  IT...”You must align with the business”.  Notice the focus was on what “IT” must do.  I believe that most IT organizations get that.  The real question when considering a strategy is how this can be achieved.  Or is it?   I hope that moving forward the new mantra will be “Hello business”… “You must engage IT in order to ensure success.”  If the strategy does not include how the business is going to consistently engage, plan and strategize with the IT organization it is possible that the business strategy will not ensure the type of success that is hoped for and could continue to miss the mark. A recent BizReport article by Kristina Knight states; "During 2016, the perception that developers are basement-dwelling, socially-awkward techies with no grasp on business

Part of the role of the Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM) is to ensure that ITSM processes engage and reflect agile values and that they are appropriately designed with “just enough” control and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer outcomes when and how they are needed. The goals and objectives of Agile Service Management include: Ensuring that agile values and principles are embedded into every service management process from design through implementation and continual improvement. Improving IT’s ability to meet customer requirements faster.  This includes process and process integration, capabilities, knowledge transfer and the use of appropriate technologies for automation. Being effective and efficient (lean).  It also means ensuring that we don’t bias too far in one direction.  I can be very effective but not efficient. On the other hand I can become too efficient but impact my effectiveness.  Either of these s

In his recent blog ‘ Devops Areas - Codifying devops practices ’ Patrick Debois explains that DevOps activities typically fall into four patterns or areas.   DevOps activities typically fall into four patterns or areas. In each of these areas best practice dictates that there will be a bi-directional interaction between Dev and Ops, which will result in a fluid knowledge exchange and feedback from each of the major stakeholders, including Development, Test, Product Management and IT Operations.   In the 1st area we extend delivery to production. This is where Dev and Ops will collaborate to improve anything on delivering a project to production by creating or extending the continuous integration, deployment and release processes from Dev into Ops. Activities here include making sure environments are available to Dev as early as possible. That Dev & Ops build the code and environments at the same time. Create a common Dev and production environment process while ensuri