What is a Service? ITIL defines a Service as "a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks."   In other words, when we do something for another party that gives them something they need or creates value for them, we are providing a service. Customers/users want to enjoy the benefits of the services we provide but don’t want to take on the challenge of managing those items themselves, therefore we provide those items to them in the form of services. It is also important to differentiate between client-facing services that allow end users to do their work and internal technical services that enable those services to be delivered efficiently and effectively. At a strategic level it is important to understand the concepts of services, customers, value, service providers and how organizations relate to them to help us define which services will be delivered and to whom they will be

While you might not be able to get your head around how to measure DevOps when it is defined as a cultural and professional movement, there are some key factors to consider that will help us to measure the success of shifting to a collaborative and integrated team throughout the value stream that includes Dev and Ops. It is clear that DevOps goes beyond the integration of the development and operation staff but includes breaking down those silos between all parties and stakeholders including the Business, external partners, and 3rd party suppliers and IT.  If you think it is difficult to get your own internal teams to play in the same sandbox consider the challenges when 3 rd party vendors and suppliers are then thrown into the mix. Being able to demonstrate proof that DevOps practices benefit the organization requires examining factors that influence overall performance.  Practices that enable your organization to improve the flow of work between the Business and Operations en

The service catalogue is a data base or structured document with information about all live IT services, including those available for deployment.   The service catalogue is the only part of the service portfolio published to customers and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT services.   The service catalogue includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, ordering and request processes. Service catalogs act as knowledge management tools for the employees of an organization, allowing them to route their requests for and about services and services to the subject matter experts who own, are accountable for, and operate them. It is a means of centralizing all services that are important to the employees, users and management of the organizations which use it. The service catalog acts as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed businesses to see, find, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in

With the onset of the cultural and professional movement into today’s industry I recognize that culture and people are at the forefront and also acknowledge that automation will be critical to our success as we move to improve productivity and quality throughout the lifecycle between Development and Operations. (DevOps). Some believe that DevOps is all about pushing development paradigms into operations others believe that it is taking the accountability for risk mitigation and production that has been traditionally owned by operations into development.   It is in fact both and understanding terms such and Infrastructure as code, unit testing, integration testing, and more importantly how the integrated roles between Dev, Ops and third party vendors fit into that will help to ensure the scalability, speed and productivity that we all need to deliver quality service.  Infrastructure as code The essence of Infrastructure as Code is to treat the configuration of systems th

Today technology has been integrated into almost every aspect of business and continues to grow in importance with every new innovation. It is impacting organizational structures, business processes, how and what products and services we offer to our customers.  This tidal wave of change is increasing in complexity and velocity.  These dynamics are shaping the strategies we must employ to manage our IT environments. Given the changes that are happening in the digital world today, support organizations have had to look at how to enhance and speed up the traditional waterfall approach to management of our IT infrastructures.  ITIL and Agile are not contradictory of each other.   Agile development provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout its development lifecycle.  It is a methodology on how to deliver projects , that is iterative, adaptive and an incremental approach to project management which can be used for almost any type of project. ITIL   is

Bob Dylan once wrote “The times they are a changing” DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that improves IT's time to market through better communication, collaboration, integration and automation.  It is the intersection of development (software engineering), technology operations and quality assurance (QA). DevOps is as much about a different way of thinking as it is a different way of behaving. Dev-Ops is a solution to a business problem - one that requires faster deployments, more innovation and tighter integration with all stakeholders. It is as much of a visionary shift as it is an opportunity to leverage build-deploy-operate technologies. Visionary shifts require that an organization Create a sense of urgency, to stay stagnant is to fall behind the competition. Form a guiding coalition, get buy in from senior leadership and collaboration with middle management. Create a vision.  Apply agile tenets to the entire service lifecycle, breakdown complex

The relationship of IT Performance on Business Performance is becoming more evident today as service providers strive to meet the dynamic rate of change that is required to meet business requirements.  It is unfortunate that all too often the evidence for the lack of IT performance is brought to the forefront because processes break down, cost overruns occur, and business outcomes suffer.  When the flow of work is broken the service provider is not enabled to provision service at the rate of demand that is required and the cost of provisioning tends to soar. When we look at the lifecycle for the deployment of a new or changed service we recognize that there are many roles, functions and activities that a service provider must manage and control.  When the development activities are silo’d from deployment and operational activities the value stream tends to break down and IT staff suffer.   This breakdown often results in frustrated staff that feel that they are not enable for