ITIL 4 – Optimize and Automate

Finally. One year later I’ve finished the 7 ITIL principles.

Ten things changed in ITIL 4 (for those who know ITIL v3/ITIL 2011 edition)

This list is arbitrary. There are more changes (like the introduction of practices like project management or workforce and talent management).

The list then:

1. BRM is now RM – to manage all relations with stakeholders, not just with the customers
2. IT Asset Management is now separated from Configuration Management (likewise, Release Management is also separated from Deployment Management)
3. Change Management is now Change Control (beneath it stays the same)
4. Organizational Change Management (OCM) is now a practice (more vivid since ITIL practitioner)
5. CSI Register is now Continual Improvement Register (CIR)
6. Service lifecycle is gone. Look at Service Value System and Service Value chain activities instead. The service value chain activities are always present in the practices (it’s clear how practices contribute value unlike before with processes for the service lifecycle)
7. Four dimensions (not unlike COBIT previous enablers, draw from the People, Process, and Products, and from Service Design’s 5 aspects) are always considered for complete service management
8. Guiding principles (reviewed from ITIL practitioner) give explicit guidance (you can check short cartoons on these on previous posts)
9. Processes and functions are now practices. Grouped in general, service management, and technical management. 34 practices. Getting closer to COBIT here too (each practice has activities too)
10. Incident and Known Error definitions are simpler, non-ambiguous (yes!)

An interview with Stuart Rance

Starting 2014 interviews with Stuart Rance, author of the ITIL 2011 edition Service Transition book and a true dynamo on pushing practices and having people discuss what really matters.

1. Do share your very best practices on chocolate degustation. Dark? With almonds? Swiss? Belgium?

I’m glad you asked that! I’m very fond of dark chocolate coated brazil nuts, but dark chocolate with hazelnuts or almonds is nearly as good.

2. Lately I’ve observed lots of discussion on incident versus problem. Could it mean ITSM still has lots of concepts not well understood by the community?

I think most people understand the concepts, but very few people seem to be doing a good job of problem management. Part of the reason for this may be because of the way activities are assigned to incident or problem management, which I think could be improved. I’ve written about this in a blog article at http://www.sysaid.com/blog/entry/why-you-should-stop-doing-problem-management – I intentionally made this blog a bit controversial to try and get people to discuss the underlying issues.

There is one area where I think that ITSM concepts are poorly understood, and that is in the area of service strategy. I’ve heard people complain that we shouldn’t include service strategy concepts in ITIL foundation training because they aren’t relevant to most people in ITSM and I find that really scary. Key concepts in service strategy include value creation and how customers perceive value. Sadly many people in IT still think in terms of technology solving problems, rather than in terms of creating value for people. I would love to see improvements to ITIL training so that everyone with a foundation certificate really understood that services are about creating value for customers, not about ITSM processes.

3. Social media is here to stay – as once you remarked, for instance we’ve never met in real life but we share and discuss. How do you think it as influenced Service Management progress?

I think discussions in social media have opened out the creation of best practice to a much wider community. Not very long ago there were only a few people contributing to the creation of best practice for ITSM but I have been involved in debates with lots of really creative people, and some of these have led to us having face-to-face meetings where we continue the discussions. There are some very frustrating forums where people seem to endlessly debate the same sterile ITSM questions, such as “is a password reset an incident or a service request”, but I just ignore those and focus on the places where I see useful things happening.

There is a danger that those of us who participate in social media can forget that we are only a very tiny subset of the people with ideas and opinions. It would be great if we could get more people involved, and to do that we have to create truly welcoming communities where people feel that they can join in and get benefits.

4. Regarding Taking Service Forward initiative with the service meta model Adaptive Service Model… what’s your expectation on how these efforts will benefit the ITSM world?

I know what I would like to see, which is the creation of an open, shared, common architecture and ontology for services that is in the public domain and available for many people to use. Even better would be if the owners of all the different best practices and standards adopted (and adapted) this architecture, so that we could all do a better job of adapting and integrating multiple different frameworks. I can’t really say that this is an expectation, but it is an aspiration. I would like to encourage your readers to get involved, join in the discussions and help us to create this architecture.

5. From your experience can ideas and practices like Tipu, Standard+Case, process mining applied to service management and others from “alien” fields outside ITSM really flourish and gain momentum without Axelos support?

Both Tipu and Standard+Case come from the fertile mind of Rob England, and maybe you should be asking him this question. I really do like many of his contributions to ITSM best practice, but it is hard for ideas like this to compete when hundreds of thousands of people every year are taking ITIL training. It would be really good if we could find ways to communicate developing best practice to a wider audience, and maybe that is something we should put more effort into over the next year.

6. [Mistery question from Aprill Allen!]  If you were putting together a new service management program team, which celebrities—living or past—would you choose?

In general I think that celebrities would be a terrible idea for a service management team. We don’t need heroes and people whose main talent is marketing themselves, but in the spirit of the question I will offer some names.

Overall charge of the program and Continual Improvement:

Eli Goldratt (if you haven’t heard of him then do some research)

Demand management and BRM:

Steve Jobs (tell me what customers will want next year)

Service operation processes:

Rob England (who else)

Dear Santa

@rumagoso Do a blog with your wish list in it. Title it: “Dear Santa” #justsayin

— Kenneth Gonzalez (@ken_gonzalez) December 18, 2013

A robust ITSM body of knowledge, like

• A Service Catalog ontology with a well-defined way to describe services and requests. Useful for comparing service offers and better define what IT needs to put in place to support and deliver.
• A common way to describe what people do (be it within processes, be it in project context). So people know and can be measured in a fair way.
• An ITSM learning path with shorter and cheaper costs. The current model for ITIL is a cash cow and the foundation level does not work. I am betting on Axelos to help you Santa on this!

Broader awareness and adoption for great approaches out there that are not UK-based/backed by big orgs

• Standard + Case
• ISM
• Process Mining applied to ITSM

As for me, I’d love to

• Meet (devirtualize!) more great ITSM people (I’ll sure will be submit speaking proposals in 2014)
• Work with people that make me grow on sharing great stuff
• Tell stories that help people change

An interview with Jan van Bon

Jan was one of the first ITSM persons I met in real life. I like the pragmatic way he addresses every topic. I learnt a lot and somehow I find it inspiring Jan is never a follower.

Here, the full interview:

1 . What you do when you’re not sharing, arguing, discussing and confronting in ITSM arena? What other interests do you pursue during your “spare” time?

Belgian beer and Scotch whiskey is a great hobby. But to be serious, I do have other interests 😉  I am a graduated biomathematician, and when I quit my position as an academic researcher and stepped into IT in the late eighties, I dedicated my training to game management. It keeps me off the street and in the field, close to Mother Earth.

2. You’ve edited more than 80 books, Gutenberg would be proud. Is there a future for printed books?

There is a future, but only in combination with electronic versions. The books I’m involved in are always knowledge carriers, and the demand for knowledge will persist, though the format may change. I’m sure I’ll produce more electronic knowledge carriers than printed work, but the latter will be in demand as long as the current leading generation isn’t extinguished. Electronic carriers offer much more training options than printed material, and the appreciation of these formats is growing. The acquisition of a game provider by Capita is just a symptom of that trend.

3. Can Amsterdam model help understand why it is apparently so hard having top management and IT aligned?

Yes, although I prefer not to refer to the “Amsterdam Model” but to SAME, the Strategic Alignment Model Enhanced: it’s more pure, easier to understand, and it serves the same goal more effectively. You can download it here. By the way – it’s not really hard to align business and IT, once you accept the 3×3 model of SAME and its consequences. The SAME model tells you exactly how responsibilities can be distributed according to the main control paradigm: separation of duties. The Dutch have developed and used this since the mid nineties, but you can’t find it anywhere else in the world in the same position. I’ve published a historical analysis of the development of ‘plane thinking’, as we call it, in 2010 (in Dutch), showing how these ideas have developed over time since the late eighties.

In the Netherlands we now have fully standardized methods for both information domains: the FSM Method for ‘business information management’, covering the guidance of the BiSL framework, and the ISM Method for ‘IT service management’, covering the guidance of ITIL and ASL. Both are fully integrated and prepared to deliver an integrated end-to-end management system for the entire information support domain, using all guidance of the referred frameworks (and much more).

4. ISM is not mainstream yet. What’s missing?

I’d say: ‘awareness’. The ISM Method is only available in the Netherlands. It takes various players in a market to deliver a nationwide support structure for the method: we need providers of standardized BPM tools, providers of standardized ITSM tools, trained consultants, trained trainers, and exam organizations, to create a market, and they need to be able and willing to work together in delivering an effective and efficient, but very simplified system for ITSM. The hype nature of ITIL is a much easier alternative in terms of making money: nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM, so it’s a safe proposition to align your services and products to ITIL. The customer won’t know the difference, because the alternative isn’t familiar enough for them – yet. But these times are changing now, at least in the Netherlands: more and more companies have heard of the astonishing success of companies adopting the ISM method, they want the same, and they adopt the ISM method.

There’s another reason: most consultants are controlled by just two drivers: their hourly rate and the number of hours they sell. This simple calculation shows that most consultants are not interested in a method that will cut their income to the bare essential hours, leaving the customer in the winning position: highest value at lowest cost. Luckily, there are more and more consultants who really want to make a difference by delivering more value at less cost. And they are rewarded for their changed proposition, because the now highly satisfied customer will of course hire them again for the next challenge they can’t face without the help of a real ITSM expert. But as you will understand, such a change of attitude in the consultancy market takes considerable time, and the biggest providers will be the last ones to follow. That’s the face of evolution.

And a third reason is really mean: the ISM Method exposes the manager and his management system as the biggest fail factor, and not the tool, the consultant, the technology, or the customer. The method focuses at improving the quality of management, by following standardized structures for standardized goals of standardized ITSM organizations. This is a real bottleneck: managers tend to ignore or deny that they often are the problem. Of course you can understand that it’s hard for a manager to go to his board and tell them that it wasn’t the consultant, it wasn’t the tool, it wasn’t the technology, but it was due to his own lack of management skills, it was due to the fact that he always had to migrate to new technology and never took the time to get his organization straightened, it was due to all these projects he had to run, it was due to the fact that he actually was a techy and not a manager, and that he would love to get the opportunity to learn how to solve this problem. What do you think he would expect from that kind of exposure? A bonus, a promotion, or the sack? Note: a good board would appreciate it if he stepped forward and confessed this, but that’s exactly what the manager wouldn’t understand….

5. Do you see a fit between Standard+Case and ISM? Could we have a way simpler service management approach than ITIL?

Both S&C and ISM simplify ITSM, compared to the way ITIL describes it, and other approaches do so too (think of FITS). But ISM is a method and has a process architecture, and all others actually miss that. And it’s in the process where all management starts. ITIL has been and still is a great guide to ITSM, but it describes ‘best practices’, and that immediately is its Achilles heel. Best practices are results of a management approach, and you can’t implement the results of someone else – although you can use it for inspiration. It’s like this: ITIL describes the symptoms, and we need a method to cure the patient. ISM is that an example of such a method. It has reformatted the ITIL guidance with a 180 degrees U-turn, and works inside-out, with a true architecture for the ITSM management system. As a consequence, ISM can generate all ‘symptoms’ described in ITIL, and more (if you prefer COBIT, ASL, or any other flavor).

6. TFT brings a new model to conferences. Do you think live conferences need to evolve?

I think we need to keep exchanging knowledge, ideas, inspiration, experiences, instruments, in any way we can. TFT is one of these ways, based on modern community technology. If this works for you, it’s great. Others may want to meet face-to-face, use text-based forums, or any other type of environment. I guess these will all persist and find their place with those who can profit from them.

7. [quite current question from Lynda Cooper] Given the new ownership of ITIL by Axelos, what do you think is the future for ITIL?

Axelos had a bad start by shouting out loud how much money will be made. They then started meeting about the future of ITIL with same parties that created the ITIL market. I don’t know what you think about that, but it seems a guarantee for not aligning to a dissatisfied market. More meetings are planned, as I hear, but in the mean time the market is shifting fast: I hear more and more providers who are completely fed up with the way ITIL is exploited and the money they must pay to join the bandwagon. These parties are eagerly looking for alternatives that deliver more value at less cost. Despite of this trend, I think the ITIL hype cycle will roll on for quite some time. But in the spirit of my original education and profession: I believe in evolution and I plan to give this evolution a helping hand. We shouldn’t forget that ITIL has been and still is of great value to the ITSM market, but I expect to see a forward leap in that market – and as usual with evolution: it will generate a new species.

An interview with Antonio Valle Salas

This is the English translated version of Antonio Valle Salas interview. for the original in Spanish please go here.

Antonio Valle Salas

1. Tell us about your experience with TFT13

Being part of TFT conferences is an incredible experience. When I participated at the first edition, in 2012, it was exciting because it was the first time something like that was organized. In this second edition everything was more mature and the competition to get selected among the 24 speakers was harder. It is not only about the conference’s media repercussion (it has generated more than 10 million social impact by twitter reach), also the organization, the sharing channels and the topics are profoundly innovative. Someone said TFT is the TED of ITSM and I think they are right.

2. This process mining stuff looks like a potent way for understanding Santard + Case patterns. But, when we still dont have records how can we prepare for latter process mining?

Ten or twelve years ago, that was the main problem faced by those starting with early process mining investigation. Nowadays, practically all information systems track process execution.

Anyway, the minimum attributes a log must contain in order to use it with process mining tools are:

• Case ID
• Activity
  
• Timestamp
• Operator

I believe there is no ITSM tool lacking this kind of information, since it is needed to ensure traceability for the executed actions.
The real problem comes when our process traverses multiple information systems hence log consolidation in one format must be achieved from different platforms with distinct formats must happen (the most popular case is trying to track a process “Order to cash”, where there may participate multiple information systems).

3. The CAPEX and OPEX dynamic duo. Is it always better to invest in processes allowing operational cost reduction?

🙂 I see you’ve searched well and have uncovered a document that has been written quite a long time ago! That paper has been written from a class I gave at university and my aim was to explain what today is known as a “technical doubt”.

The truth is the appropriate thing to do is to look for a balance between the different expenditure types, because one reflects a short-term thinking while the other (operational cost reduction) reflects a long term thinking.

Still, I think this topic has changed a bit as time goes by and now it is not so much about CAPEX versus OPEX, which is a relevant financial classification, more it has become “what is the money spent in IT for“, regardless of having or not cost recovery; for instance, all the new *aaS wave means that money is OPEX, even if in reality it is extending business.

4. Is Lean useful for Service Management? Is it not bet ter suites for industry?

This is another hot topic, even more when taking in account the value added by Rob England with his S+C approach.

Tradicionally, Lean was seen as a tool set meant mostly to cost reduction by standardizing and error elimination (waste). But this is a simplistic view of Lean.

Actually Lean is a management strategy that strives for maximising value delivered to the customer, and for that uses different paths. One path is cost reduction but problem identification, root cause search, introducing a continual improvement culture and putting in place best practices are some of many available tools.

This way, the relation between S+C and Lean is meaningful because within Lean we can find ideas, methods and tools that help us with the Standard part (where we can attack problems like standardization, variability reduction, flow leveraging and stock reduction) but also we can find great help for the Case part, where we have tools like Kaizen or the A3 thinking to apply the scientific method to case solving.

 It has been born within industry and can not be directly applied to service delivery practices, it has to be understood and adapted, but I firmly believe it is a good path to pursuit.

5. How do you see the future of ITIL® Training now with the Joint Venture?

Independently of the JV, I think ITIL® has right now it’s future somehow at stake. Slowly (at least in Spain), what before was a distinctive factor now has turned into an utility: using Nicholas Carr words, ITIL® does not matter, it is something everyone has…. if you dont have it, you loose reputation or contracts. but having it does not make you win more contracts.

So, I think JV has hard work ahead. On one hand it must incite the existing communities in ITIL market so they get back that feeling back from ITIL® V2, on the other hand it has to win back those communities and finally it has to come up with an innovative and attractive product (possibly combining the multiple reference frameworks it has, like ISACA has done with COBIT5).

And the training? If they keep dealing with it like a consumer market without ensuring certifications are credible, then ITIL® training is dead.

6. What new trends in Service Management are most promising for you?

Right now I think some trends are just being born and we will see they will become important in the next three to five years:

• Process Mining

• IT Governance and Corporate Governance of IT

• Risk based Service Management

• DevOps (but that wont be its name… it will be called Agile Service Management or something similar)

7. We finally realise ITSM is about people. So does regional culture affect the way we do ITSM? Eg is there Mediterranean ITSM? [a question from Rob England to Antonio]

Oh! Great question!

Yes, of course… there is a Mediterranean way of life, and living includes executing processes. During my professional life, that’s the most important problem I’ve found while helping companies to promote a service management initiative; every time I’m told that “we are not in Germany, we are not used to follow strict procedures”, and may be this is why it is so difficult to make the wheel move.

It’s fun that this question comes from Mr. Rob England. When I was reading Plus! Standard+Case, it surprised me that sometimes it proposes the idea that “we must accept that there exist another part of the reality that corresponds to the Case side of the coin”. In these Mediterranean countries, what we must accept is that there exists another part of the reality that corresponds to Standard (!). Moving this to the Cynefin framework, that locates us somewhere between Chaotic and Complex.

Una charla con Antonio Valle Salas

Aqui tienen muy interesante charla con Antonio Valle Salas. For English version please go here.

Antonio Valle Salas

1. ¿Cómo fue tu experiencia en el TFT13?

Participar en las conferencias TFT es una experiencia increíble. Cuando participé en la primera edición, en 2012, fue emocionante porque era la primera vez que se organizaba algo así. En esta segunda edición todo ha sido más maduro y la competición por conseguir un puesto entre los 24 ponentes ha sido más difícil. No es sólo por la repercusión mediática del congreso (que ha generado más de 10 millones de impresiones en web) sino porque la organización, los canales de difusión y las temáticas son profundamente innovadoras. Hay quien ha comparado el TFT con el TED del ITSM, y creo que tiene razón.

2. Esto de la minería de procesos parece una herramienta poderosa para entender patrones Standard + Case. ¿Pero cuando todavía no hay registros con la información cómo puede uno preparar la prospección minera?

Hace diez o doce años, este era el problema principal con el que se encontraban aquellos que estaban comenzando con las primeras investigaciones en minería de procesos. Hoy en día prácticamente la totalidad de sistemas de información dejan rastro de la ejecución de los procesos.

En todo caso, los atributos mínimos que debe tener un log para poderlo incorporar en las herramientas de minería de procesos son:

• ID de Caso

• Actividad

• Timestamp

• Operador
  

En ITSM no creo que haya ninguna herramienta que no guarde este tipo de información, ya que es precisa para dar trazabilidad a las acciones realizadas. El problema serio viene cuando nuestro proceso atraviesa varios sistemas de información y entonces es necesario consolidar logs que vienen de diferentes plataformas con diferentes formatos en uno sólo (el caso más popular es intentar hacer la trazabilidad de un proceso tipo “Order to Cash”, donde pueden intervenir varios sistemas de información).

3. El dúo dinámico CAPEX y OPEX. ¿Es siempre mejor invertir en procesos que reducen los costes operacionales?

🙂 Veo que has buscado bien y rescatas un documento escrito hace mucho tiempo! Ese paper lo escribí a raíz de una clase que di en la universidad y estaba tratando de explicar lo que hoy se conoce con el nombre de “deuda técnica”.

En realidad lo adecuado es conseguir un balanceo adecuado entre los dos diferentes tipos de gasto, ya que uno refleja un pensamiento a corto plazo mientras que el otro (la reducción de costes operacionales) refleja pensamiento a largo plazo.

Aún así, creo que la temática ha ido variando un poco con el tiempo y ahora ya no es tanto CAPEX versus OPEX, que no deja de ser una clasificación financiera, sino se que ha convertido en “para qué sirve el dinero que gasto en TI”, independientemente de si hay amortización o no; por ejemplo, toda la nueva oleada de *aaS hace que el dinero sea OPEX, aunque en realidad esté ampliando las capacidades del negocio.

4. ¿Qué utilidad tiene Lean para Service Management? ¿No es mas bien aplicable para industria?

Este es otro de los temas candentes, más aún teniendo en cuenta la aportación de Rob England con su aproximación S+C. 

Tradicionalmente se ha visto a Lean como un conjunto de herramientas orientada especialmente a la reducción de costes por medio de la estandarización y eliminación de derroches (waste). Pero esa es la visión simplista de Lean.

En realidad Lean es una estrategia de gestión que busca maximizar el valor entregado al cliente, y para ello utiliza diferentes caminos. Uno es la reducción de costes, pero la identificación de problemas, la búsqueda de causa raíz, la introducción de una cultura de mejora continua y el despliegue de buenas prácticas son otras de las muchas herramientas de las que disponemos.

De esta manera, la relación entre S+C y Lean es importante debido a que en Lean podemos encontrar ideas, métodos y herramientas que nos ayudan en la parte Standard (donde podemos atacar  problemas como la estandarización, la reducción de la variabilidad, la homogeneización del flujo y la reducción de inventarios) pero también encontraremos grandes ayudas en la parte Case, donde tenemos herramientas como Kaizen o el pensamiento A3 para aplicar el método científico en la resolución de casos.

Es algo que ha nacido en la industria y que no se puede aplicar directamente sobre las prácticas de entrega de servicios, sino que se debe comprender y adaptar, pero creo firmemente que es un  buen camino a seguir.

5. ¿Como ves el futuro de la formación en ITIL® ahora con la Joint Venture?

Independientemente de la JV, creo que ITIL® tiene en estos momentos el futuro ligeramente comprometido. Lentamente ha ido ocurriendo (al menos en España) que lo que antes era un factor diferencial, ahora se ha convertido en una utility: parafraseando a Nicholas Carr, ITIL® does not matter, es algo que tienen todos… si no lo tienes, entonces te desprestigias o pierdes contratos, pero tenerlo no te hace ganar más contratos.

Así, creo que la JV tiene por delante un trabajo muy duro. Por una parte debe conseguir animar a las diferentes comunidades de su mercado para que vuelvan a sentir esa ilusión que se destilaba en los tiempos de ITIL® V2, por la otra tiene que volver a ganarse la simpatía de la comunidad y finalmente deberá utilizar las diferentes bazas que tiene para conseguir un producto innovador y atractivo (posiblemente combinando los diferentes marcos de referencia que tiene, de la misma manera que ISACA ha hecho con COBIT5)

¿…y la formación? Si la siguen tratando como un mercado de masas sin darle prestigio a las certificaciones, la formación en ITIL® está muerta.

6. ¿Qué nuevas tendencias en la gestión de los servicios te parecen prometedoras?

En estos momentos yo creo que hay algunas tendencias que están comenzando a nacer y que veremos que adquieren importancia en los próximos tres a cinco años:

• Minería de Procesos

• IT Governance y Corporate Governance of IT

• Gestión de Servicios basada en Riesgos

• DevOps (pero no se llamará así… se llamará Agile Service Management o algo parecido)

7. We finally realise ITSM is about people. So does regional culture affect the way we do ITSM? Eg is there Mediterranean ITSM? [a question from Rob England to Antonio]

Oh! Great question!

Yes, of course… there is a Mediterranean way of life, and living includes executing processes. During my professional life, that’s the most important problem I’ve found while helping companies to promote a service management initiative; every time I’m told that “we are not in Germany, we are not used to follow strict procedures”, and may be this is why it is so difficult to make the wheel move.

It’s fun that this question comes from Mr. Rob England. When I was reading Plus! Standard+Case, it surprised me that sometimes it proposes the idea that “we must accept that there exist another part of the reality that corresponds to the Case side of the coin”. In these Mediterranean countries, what we must accept is that there exists another part of the reality that corresponds to Standard (!). Moving this to the Cynefin framework, that locates us somewhere between Chaotic and Complex.