On Friday I had the privilege to take part in a vendor’s local user group forum (ah heck, I won’t be vendor neutral and just tell you it was with Service-Now.com). Service-Now showed that their next release will include a specific time management module. This is a concept that’s not new to me, especially since at my current organization we’ve been wanting to build a separate field in our current ITSM tool specifically to allow people to enter in time spent on Incidents/Requests/etc. What amazed me is that this is the first vendor I’ve seen that includes it as an OTB feature. Maybe I’m not looking at the right tools, but I’m not really seeing this elsewhere. In fact, another positive feature set of Service-Now is that they include a project management module. How perfect is it to be able to use a tool to connect I.T. project management (translation: Service Design and Transition) to Incident and Problem Management? I have no idea why this isn’t prevalent in more ITSM tools, but if you read my previous post on considering Problem solving as a project, you’d understand my excitement with such a technology. Now here’s my next question. Could Time Management become its own process in ITIL? I honestly think it’s possible, especially to measure cost and efficiency it’s important to be able to track time as a metric. Since one can say time is money then it’s possible that this would simply fall under Financial Management, but I think time tracking as a whole should have its own process since it really follows the entire lifecycle of a service. Of course, I could also just be stuck on time since I saw a great documentary about Einstein’s theories on relativity. And since it’s definitely time for me to get my rest, I’ll leave the question open; should future versions of ITIL deal with Time Management processes?
The IT Skeptic has a great blog post about discrepancies in the Service Transition and Service Design books about the definition of a Service Owner. I love ITIL, but I’ll definitely agree it’s not perfect. If you’d like to read the post (which I suggest you do) here’s the link: http://www.itskeptic.org/about-itil-service-owner. Once again I’ll ask the question, how does this affect me at my job? Since my organization isn’t too far into ITIL getting into specifics between Service Manager and Service Owner really doesn’t matter. So from my point of view, and to keep things simple, I tend to think that the Service Manager is the person responsible for the service, i.e. works with the Service during its entire lifecycle. The Service Owner is the person that faces the business and is accountable for its availability. In other words, if a Service fails the Manager is responsible (remember RACI?) and the Owner is accountable. To me, this means that a Service Owner is going to be high in the I.T. leadership, maybe even possibly the CIO or CTO, while a Service Manager is more of a Technical Function and works to maintain the Service. I could be completely wrong with this simplistic interpretation but it’s probably the best one that will work within my environment (if we ever get there) and will be the easiest for my coworkers to grasp. As far as what ITIL says; maybe the V3 refresh corrected the definitions across all of the books.
I came across this recorded session from the ITSMf Fusion conference of 2009. The guest speaker is the CTO of Cook Children’s Hospital in Texas. An exact environment like the one I’m working in – it’s great! I listened to the recording and found that the challenges that we face are the same that Cook Hospital had to face. Here’s the link to the recording if you want to understand ITIL in my organization. The difference between Cook Hospital and my organization is that they’re overcoming their challenges while we’re still working on ours.
A few days ago I was talking with my director and he described that ITIL V3 was just too complicated and essentially boiled it down to “V2 keeps it simple with two books, one how to deliver the services and the other how to support them. V3 breaks everything up into five books, which this organization isn’t ready for.” With this statement and all the other posts/discussions about the validity and practicality of V3, I’ve finally come up with my own opinion and it’s that V3 should really be V4. Now I understand there’s a lot of inconsistencies and criticisms of the texts and that’s a reason a “refresh” is being published, but I’m simply going on my own opinion as someone that started my training in V3 and hasn’t had any V2 training (I did purchase and read the books since I hate feeling like I could be missing something). V3 really does make sense to me. It’s aim is to, as completely as possible, describe a framework on how to deliver services using a complete life-cycle approach. This means working through when a new service is required by the business, through it’s development and testing, to when it’s deployed and eventually enters standard operations. All this is meant to have improvements continually taking place in order to allow the service to dynamically change with the business so when it’s deployed it can provide maximum value. This sounds wonderful! Except I can’t think of any organizations that are built this way. Most already have services and CI’s in the environment and I’m sure they already have some kind of development process in place. So when I think about how V3 is going to fit into my current workplace, I can’t but help feel overwhelmed and think it’s impossible. This is why I say V3 should really be V4. To me at least, it seems too far out in the future to make sense by most companies. I can definitely see value in certain parts of V3, such as making Request Fulfillment a specific process and including Access Management, but the practicality of trying to completely implement ITIL V3 is not realistic for where I work. I do think that the concepts of V3 are where IT Service Management Best Practices need to go, but it just feels like an in-between standard is missing. This may be why things like ITIL lite and MOF are gaining popularity. They just seem practical. Ultimately, do I like V3? Yes! Do I like it better than V2? Again, yes. In its entirety is it practical for where I work? No. I think someone needs to publish ITIL V2.5 so there’s a stepping stone between V2 and V3.
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