Originally posted on owlpoint.com , August 11, 2020, and written by Mark Blanke , CEO of Owlpoint, and Chairman of The CIO Initiative One of the aspects of ITIL 4 that has impressed me the most is the integration and reference to so many other best practices and frameworks. One such reference is to Site Reliability Engineering aka SRE . SRE was originally developed by Google in the mid 2000s as a way of operating and administering productions system with a software development mindset. One of Google’s key drivers in building out SRE was to help bring developers and operations people together. Sounds like DevOps , right? In reality, they come from the same mindset, but there are key differences. Google only recently started sharing the SRE concepts. It was their secret sauce and a way to be far more effective in operating their systems and maintaining a highly reliable environment. However, over time, they realized that it would be better for them to share their methods, so the

ITIL 4 is an evolution of ITIL V3. Before we start talking about specific processes or practices, it is important to stress that the focus has shifted. ITIL 4 gives us a fresh perspective to service management and emphasizes the customer user experience, the approach to the overall service value system, the service value chain and value streams , and much more.  Download the What is ITIL 4 document from the ITSM Academy Resource Center and be sure to read past the first few pages for more information on the new perspective that drives modern service management. The emphasis is on value from the customer user experience and integrated holistic approach. That does not mean that the processes are going away. Today we refer to a process as a "practice". Practices are broader in scope than processes and include all 4 dimensions/resources including the process. Two processes or “practices” that have been decoupled in ITIL 4 are the Deployment Management practice an

All service providers are in the business of customer and user experience . It is not enough to compete on products and services, how services are delivered is as important as what is delivered. The  customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience customers have with one or more service providers and/or their products through the touchpoints and service interactions with those providers. In order to focus on the outcomes and on the customer/user experience, service providers are seeking to master the art of mapping their customer journey. Doing so allows them to maximize stakeholder value through co-creation of value throughout the entire value chain . The customer journey begins by understanding the overall macro-level of steps or groups of activities that generate the need for interaction between the customer and the service provider. These activities begin at “Explore” and end with “Realize” where the value is actually being consumed by the end-users.   Copyright ©

Originally Published on the DevOps Institute Site It has become a truism within the DevOps movement that embracing DevOps is much more about making a cultural change than about adopting new processes and technologies. But changing an organization’s existing internal culture can be profoundly difficult. As Peter Drucker famously noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” All the best-laid DevOps plans in the world might not make a bit of difference if you can’t get your team to shift its mindset. As a DevOps leader, managing this cultural change will likely be one of your most frustrating — but ultimately most rewarding — challenges. Here are five tips from DevOps experts to help manage that change: 1. Cultivate the 5 leadership traits that lead to high performance. Pick up any self-help book, and you’re sure to read some variation on the mantra that you can’t control whether other people change, you can only control yourself. It might be trite, but it’s true. Fort

I looked up “Process Design” and found: “The  activity  of determining the  workflow ,  equipment  needs and implementation  requirements  for a particular  process . Process design typically uses a number of tools including flowcharting, process  simulation   software  and  scale  models.”  Hmm… that is good but “So What”?  Why should a service provider care about process?  I have heard some say that process is secondary to automation.  Okay, sounds good, but then we have to consider, “What are we going to automate?” Every Certified Process Design Engineer knows that when it comes to process we are talking about activity.  The key is that we need just enough process and just enough governance to meet requirements.  Process design contributes to our ability to balance speed and agility with stability.   Having good process design allows for a smooth service belt that delivers value to customers and also gives a service provider the ability to meet business and customer dem

Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog - by @itsm_Donna In IT service management (ITSM) education is critical: it helps organizations get a shared understanding of terms and concepts and a proven body of knowledge such as ITIL® . The IT industry is rife with buzzwords carrying varied interpretations, so education helps get everyone on the same page. But while ITSM professionals may well understand the “what?” and “why? – for example why to minimize risk or restore services ASAP – today it’s the how that needs to evolve and change. And while there is always value in education, achieving certification creates a different level of engagement: people get involved and – critically – seek to understand. Getting certified allows you to represent your competence and understanding of the concepts you’ve learned. After that, you need to get out there and apply them to benefit your organization and add to your credibility and your baseline of experience. Today’s hiring managers are looking for th

Organizations adopting DevOps culture and practices are able to deliver high-quality products faster and therefore the business can deliver value to customers faster. You sometimes hear that DevOps and ITSM aren’t compatible . An IT professional attending the ITSM for DevOps course said “Everything would be OK if we could get change and compliance people out of the way!” Sound familiar? The reality is that high-performing organizations aren’t achieving success without ITSM processes. In today’s digital world organizations are performing ITSM processes Understanding Agile Service Management is key to ensure agility across the entire lifecycle. These high performers streamline, integrate and automate the process into the DevOps pipeline so that people don’t even realize that they are executing ITSM processes. We can not optimize DevOps without them and we can not accelerate our ITSM processes without DevOps. In an enterprise, DevOps doesn’t eliminate the need for controls and data. Re

One of the most frequently stated key takeaways from DevOps Foundation Certification Candidates is the big AAH-HAA moment when they realize the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Terms matter and the context in which we use them can make or break the success of any DevOps pipeline for digital transformation . Which one of these you select for your organization will have a significant impact on the way you orchestrate ­­­­your DevOps Pipeline and your Continuous Delivery Architecture. It will most definitely help to define the appropriate tool pipeline, determine how you will utilize and program those tools for automation and will have an impact on the context of your communication plans to your stakeholders. How will you approach integrated testing? There is not one element of development and delivery that Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment will NOT impact. Therefore; It is critical to understand what they are, how they are the same, how they

ITIL 4 is coming! ITSM Academy is working hand and hand with the experts to ensure you achieve your mission. ITIL 4 Updates will be kept current for you so that you can stay the course . As a Global Strategic Partner of AXELOS (the owners of ITIL) we have been working with their teams, and the global community, to help ensure that ITIL 4 is "worth the wait". ITSM professionals have the opportunity to expand on the work, effort and skillsets that they gained from ITIL v3 and allow newcomers the opportunity to accelerate their ITSM and transformation initiatives. ITIL 4 will help us all to accelerate our productivity and to integrate Best Practices across the entire organization for real transformation and business value. ITIL 4 retains the best of ITIL v3/2011, with most of the operational and tactical practices and processes you know. The release also includes focus on integrating many best practice "frameworks". Think DevOps, Agile, Lean, etc. All good new

Agile Software Development is very well known and practiced in most organizations today in order to respond quickly to the ever increase in demand for IT Services.  Many of these organizations, while making some improvement, are not seeing the outcomes they had expected.  Why is this?   We are applying Lean methods, cycle time is increasing and yet, unplanned work, delays in deployment and unstable production environments remain. Consider the time from idea to delivery as the “ Value Stream ”.  Through this Value Stream, we want to increase the “Flow of Work”.   We will never see the type of optimization that is required unless we look at this Value Stream as a whole.  Applying Agile, Lean, and even tools in development without integrating Change, Security and Operations will break down and decrease the Flow of Work. DevOps helps with this idea.  Many companies, both large and small, are attempting to integrate the development and operations teams.  We have cloud services an

Although Agile, DevOps and automation for Continuous Delivery (CD) techniques are on the rise, service providers are still at risk for not having the necessary velocity to meet demand.  In the same way that we recognize that we can NOT silo our IT teams, we must also recognize that as providers of services we must not silo our processes. ITSM processes, including Event Monitoring, Problem Management, Release and Deployment Management, Test and more, are not going away. The integration of ITSM process must be considered throughout the entire value stream and CD pipeline.  None more so than “Change Management”.  Certainly the need for Change Management is increasing not decreasing. What must go away are over engineered, bureaucratic and outdated process activities.  We must begin to radically rethink the way we incorporate change into the CD pipeline.  Our mission overall is to deliver a “Quality” product or service. Ok then, what is “Quality”?  Quality not only infers that the

Service Management Best Practice is as relevant today as it was a decade ago.  Some would argue that it is even more relevant.   Increase in demand, dynamic requirements and varied silo’s and cultures within an organization demand some semblance of management control.  Failure to do so results in just that …..“Failure”.   Following ITIL Best Practice allows service providers to align IT with the changing business requirements.  Sounds Great!  What does that mean exactly? Business requirements are consistently evolving and changing.  This creates a DEMAND that generates a workload for capacity.   The service provider must anticipate this demand and gear their service assets accordingly or consumers will not receive the value that they have paid for and expect.   We can anticipate demand by monitoring and measuring specified patterns of business activity and then adjust accordingly.  Think of a NEST thermostat.  A NEST thermostat learns what temperature you like by learning

We saw in a recent blog from “The Professor” how cybercriminals could create a network of controlled computers to propagate a “BotNet”.   One of the malicious reasons for these powerful networks of control is so that the hacker can perform “Distributed Network Attacks” (DDA’s). We all have experienced this at some level and the outcome is not good for enterprise, corporations, or businesses of any size.  DDA’s create disruption even to our own home operations.   A DDA is sometimes referred to as a Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS attack.  This virus or network of virus’s attacks behind the scenes to take over system resources.  A DDOS could attack switches, hubs, routers. It sometimes will flood the network backbone with nuisance transactions with the intention of sucking up all the bandwidth that might otherwise be necessary for day to day operations. DDOS can bring to a screeching halt the web sites for processing claims, or even shopping cart interfaces for the purchasing o

The purpose of Portfolio Management, when applied to Provider investments (especially, IT investments), is a central mechanism to an overall Value Management approach by making investment allocation explicit against strategic choices such as how much to invest in potentially high value, but usually risky initiatives versus safe but low-value activities. The Service Portfolio represents the complete set of services that are managed by the service Provider.  It is used to manage the entire lifecycle of all services and is defined by three categories of services.  The service pipeline represents service that is under consideration (purposed) or those that are currently in development but are not yet ready for deployment or consumption by the business partners. The next category is the service catalog which represents all live services or services that are available for deployment to the business partners. The final category is retired services.  This represents the services that are

Every organization that delivers products or services will need to shift their ideas for how they plan, build, test and deploy a service that is resilient and for one that truly delivers value for both customers and the internal business.  Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous deployment are all supported by Continuous testing.    Continuous anything will not be assured of success without Continuous Testing.   Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. Shifting left ensures that the test takes place early, up front in the pipeline of delivery, NOT after the development.  Testing after development is too late because then we do not have the time, money or resources available to re-engineer, re-design or to re-develop appropriately.   When we test after the development of an application the best we can do wit

The purpose of the (IT) Service Provider is to serve the needs of the business.  This is carried out by providing services to the business which are then engaged to provide some form of value to both the business and the Service Provider. Often the value delivered is less than optimal because the Service Provider and the business have different perspectives, culture goals, objectives, and incentives. The Business-Provider Alignment Model (BPAM) provides a framework for being able to analyze and understand these differences between the provider and its business partners. By engaging the BPAM we can begin to surface dialog about the relationship between the provider and the business and begin constructive discussions about the partnership that needs to be created. It does this by allowing each party to exam the four key elements of alignment – business environment within which the business operates, strategic context for the business, provider strategy and the provider portfolio of

Today every business is an internet business.  The performance of any business is directly related to the capability and performance of IT.  Therefore, we must all take cyber security seriously.   Let’s start with a botnet by breaking down the word itself.  The first syllable, “bot” is short for robot. The second syllable “net” is from the word network.  A botnet is formed when a hacker writes a computer program that will breach security on a single computer.  It does not stop there.  This computer program called a virus has the capability to take over that computer that it just hacked into. It does not stop there either because this is not good enough for the cybercriminal.  With a botnet, the virus will move from one computer to another, take control of each and then connect all of the disparate computers into a powerful system or network of control.  This is known as a botnet. Cyber criminals are control freaks.  They will sometimes create a virus that controls thousands or

In today’s business climate it is imperative that the IT Service Provider not only understand what the business strategy is, but be able to initiate and deliver services that not only support it, but help to shape it.  This can be successfully accomplished by ensuring that the service portfolio remain aligned to the business needs.  Over time these requirements and demand for services change and mature.  The Business / Provider Relationship is integral in keeping the demand and supply of these services and capabilities appropriately and continuously aligned.  One of the tools engaged for this task is the “Business-Provider Maturity Model”. The Business-Provider Maturity Model is a way to help surface and understand the growth in maturity of business demand for Provider services and capabilities, and a Provider organization’s maturity of supply capabilities needed to both satisfy and shape that demand. Many maturity assessments are very IT centric assessing the ability of the Servi