Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog , February 2020 and written by Christian Nissen , IT management consultant and lead author for the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value module. Back in the industrial society, goods were a dominant factor in our lives. But in the “service era” we prefer to replace ownership of goods with access to services and resources without necessarily owning them. This is happening with and without digital transformation , although the latter accelerates this phenomenon: think Uber and Airbnb. In this context, the ITIL® 4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value module – within ITIL 4 Managing Professional – is about the engagement and interaction between service providers and stakeholders and the conversion of demand to value via IT-enabled services. But what does this mean in practice? Previously, services were treated in the same way as manufactured goods: it was the customer’s responsibility to derive value. Conversely, the core concept of ITIL 4 is that value is co-c

Our friends over at CitrusCollab shared this really interesting case study: Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs™ & SLAs together Business Situation A regional utility company with 10,000 employees was ending a first time, multi-year IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with a well-known, sizeable India-based outsourcer. At the termination of the contract, the client was extremely unhappy with: the lack of service quality, the lack of promised innovation and cost reductions, the poor employee experience with the technical services delivery quality, the unacceptable governance experience with the management of disputes and issues, the ineffectiveness of financial penalties as a lever to obtain service performance improvements.  CitrusCollab consultants assisted in the outsourcing contract rebid process. We created several Employee Experience Level Agreements (XLA*) to augment the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the new IT Infrastructur

Originally posted on owlpoint.com , June 15, 2020, and written by Mark Blanke , CEO of Owlpoint, and Chairman of The CIO Initiative The Four Dimensions of ITIL 4 and the Changing World of Work Recently Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced his employees could continue working from home “forever.” Knowing some people like an office environment, Dorsey is keeping the door open for those who want to return to the workplace. But ultimately, he is leaving it up to each employee to decide what they want to do. Dorsey’s statement follows reports that Fortune 100 corporations, including JPMorgan, Facebook, Capital One, Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, and others, are extending work-from-home policies. Post-COVID-19, having employees in an office environment can be a sticky proposition. What if someone falls ill and infects others? What if a valued employee simply doesn’t want to come in – ever? What if half of your office space is continually empty? This leads to another question – why rent expen

Originally posted on tsoshop.co.uk, AXELOS Global Best Practice Blog , July 2020 and written by Rae Ann Bruno , President of Business Solutions Training, Inc (BST) As it became evident that sheltering was going to be a requirement during COVID, things changed drastically and quickly for organizations. The workforce became remote virtually overnight. Information technology (IT) was suddenly 'at the table' with the business decision makers - some for the first time - to help organizations set-up a remote workforce and service their external customers. What IT accomplished for their organizations, demonstrates the value of the ITIL 4 guiding principles and a focus on the employee and customer experiences. According to PRINCE2 , a project is 'a temporary organization that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to an agreed business case.' Project managers are empowered to chair the project team and direct them toward successf

A Digital Transformation requires radical and profound change that orients an organization toward an entirely new direction and takes a service provider to an entirely different level! High Velocity IT (HVIT) is the application of digital technology that will likely play a major role in significant business enablement where speed is crucial! This is an Atmospheric View of High Velocity IT - Meditate on this for a few - POWERFUL! High Velocity IT is just a normal way of doing business for some organizations. For others it is an aspiration and many service providers are on a quest to get there fast. Best practice shows that there are three core elements required for HVIT and after taking a deeper dive into these aspects I became excited to see how these characteristics can change the world! Want to LEARN more? Get Certified in HVIT. The HVIT Certification Course takes a deeper dive into this model. This is more than a skillset it is an ability to shift the entire organization t

ALL CALL SREs REQUIRED!  Let’s take a walk down to the ocean and while you consider the opportunity, benefits, and $$$, think about dipping your toe in. Let’s explore Reliability, Site Reliability, and the Site Reliability Engineer .  No doubt the world is evolving. People are evolving and tech is evolving. Business and customer requirements are evolving. The evolution of systems requires the evolution of engineers. Nature and pandemics put undue stress on our resources! In comes the Certified Site Reliability Engineer .  "Urgent, Urgent, Urgent… All hands on deck!",  is a call that practitioners, managers, and organizations do not want to hear and recognize must stop! Reliability – At a minimum, we recognize that the delivery of service is not dependent solely on the quality of the product itself and the goal is not that the products or service merely be deployed. A service must be operated and sustained over a period. How long? For the life of the service.

There are three core frameworks that can help us to shift the way we think, do work, and ultimately shape the behaviors and values that are the heartbeat of our organizations - CULTURE! Each of these models can be used to identify, analyze, and move an organization to new heights, new ways of collaborating and increasing speed and value for service consumers. Models for learning how to "Shift the Culture!” Erickson Model – Identifies the stages of psychosocial development  The Erickson Model helps as a starting point for “Where are we now?”. Westrum Model – Focus here is on the organizational types :  - Pathological  - Bureaucratic  - Generative  The Westrum Model helps providers get detail on the behaviors within their organization and teams.  Laloux’s Culture Model – Frederic Laloux’s model provides a clear picture of how culture may evolve in an organization. Laloux expands the concepts of the two previous models. The model comes f