When I talk with companies about IT processes and IT service management (ITSM), ITIL seems to be the de facto standard for ITSM. Implementing an ITSM without using ITIL, seems to be impossible. I have many customers that have implemented ITIL-based ITSM processes and most of them had enormous trouble during the implementation and/ or operation.
Companies mainly have three problems during the implementation and/ or operation of ITIL processes:
Today a tweet from Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) has caught my attention:
Don't waste money on automation without first looking at your processes. https://t.co/PWeFDbyQkb pic.twitter.com/7RvhmvS6GQ
— Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) May 8, 2016
https://twitter.com/CTOAdvisor/status/729141035692068865
Keith wrote a nice blog post and I really recommend to read it. His point is, that automation enables business agility.
The point of automation is to enable business agility. Business agility isn’t achieved by automating inefficient processes. The start of an IT automation project begins by examining existing processes and eliminating inefficiency.
What is a problem? A problem is an obstacle, that has to be surmounted. Solving a problem is connected with obstacles. Or more general: Problem solving is a process to get from an unsatisfactory to a satisfactory situation.
Most of us get paid for solving problems. It’s irrelevant if you are paid for solving technical problem (e.g. My computer doesn’t work), or if you are paid to create solutions for customers (e.g. design infrastructure for a Citrix XenApp farm). At the end you solve a problem.
I really like the idea behind Kanban. I wrote about it in 2014 (Organize your work with Kanban), and I even wrote my bachelor thesis about it (Industrialisierung der ITIL Service Operation Phase unter Verwendung von Lean Management // Industrialization of the ITIL Service Operation phase with Lean Management).
The word “kanban” comes from the japanese and can be translated with “signboard”, “card” or “billboard”. Kanban is a scheduling system and helps to implement the pull principle in a lean manufacturing system. The methods and instruments of lean management are widely used, not only in the industrial manufacturing. Especially in the the agile software development, Kanban has reached a noteworthy distribution.
Complexity, in general usage, tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement.
Following this disambiguation, and assuming that “many” means N > 2, all systems with at least two or more components are complex. But that would be an exaggeration, right?
Most systems in information technology (IT) are complex. Almost everything we are working with, consists of two or more components, regardless if it is hardware or software. But it’s a question of the perspective. If you look at a system from a higher level, you will only be able to identify some of the greater components. If you look closer at it, you will be able to identify more, smaller components. Every system consists of hardware and software. Hardware is nothing without software. Think of a storage system, with all those disks, controllers, disk enclosures, firmware etc. Or think bigger: A complete infrastructure based on a VMware vSphere cluster with multiple servers, network switches, SAN switches, storage systems, synchronous mirroring between data centers etc. The system can be split into its components and sub-components. And each component and sub-component is more or less important of the operational function of the whole system. Adding more features makes a system even more complex. With each added feature or modified feature, the probability rises, that something breaks or doesn’t work as expected.
Yesterday, at 02:13am (CET), I got an awesome e-mail:
Dear Patrick,
I am pleased to welcome you to the PernixPro program!
I’m very happy to be part of this program!
This program is similar to the VMware vExpert or Microsoft MVP program. It’s designed to spread the magic of PernixData FVP. I am totally convinced of PernixData FVP. Because of this, I’m very pleased to be part of the program. Thank you for the recognition!
Everyone has their own technique to organize work. As you maybe know, I’m a big fan of Lean. And you know maybe also, that Lean is a philosophy based on the aspect to create value for customers and eliminate waste of resources in production processes. Taiichi Ōno, the father of the Toyota productionsystem, defined seven forms of waste. Womack and Jones developed Lean Production, which is based on TPS, and highlighted five principles to achieve a lean production.
When you deal with problems in IT, you often deal with problems where is root cause is unknown. To solve such problems, you have to use a systematic method. Only a systematic method leads to a fast, effective and efficient solution. One of the most commonly observed methods in my career bases on approximation. We all know it as “trial and error”. Someone tries as long until the problem is solved. Often this method makes it worse than it was before, and it often leads to wrong conclusions, and furthermore wrong results. If someone draws a wrong connections at the beginning of the analysis, this leads to a totally wrong path. I would like to illustrate this with an example:
If you want to see highly automated and efficient production processes, you have to leave the information technology (IT). Look at the the automotive industry, or generally a industry with a high amount on industrial production. What is the output of IT? It is an IT service. What is a service? A for the customer convenient usable combination of knowledge, technology and processes. The following is the definition for a IT service used in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3:
In addition to the benefits that VMware grants to vExperts, a couple of vendors grant also benefits to vExperts. This includes free licenses, subscriptions or other offers. This is only a loose compilation of vExperts benefits.
| Vendor | Offer | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Solarwinds | Virtualization Manager NFR | http://bit.ly/1gYJtBB |
| Veeam | Backup & Replication NFR | http://bit.ly/1esRaFn |
| Pluralsight | Annual Plus Subscription | http://bit.ly/1esTa0o |
| Tintri | Polo Shirt | http://bit.ly/1eJqgE2 |
| Devolutions | Remote Desktop Manager 1y NFR | http://bit.ly/1iRVXfm |
| Login VSI | VIP program | http://bit.ly/1esPY4M |
| Hewlett-Packard | StoreVirtual VSA NFR | http://bit.ly/1m4J6gt |
| Darren Woollard | Sticker & URL Shortener | http://bit.ly/1noB4gb |
| DataCore | SANsymphony-V NFR | http://bit.ly/1iUXd2N |
| Proximal Data | AutoCache NFR | http://bit.ly/1eLKoWa |
| VSS Labs | vCert Manager NFR | http://bit.ly/1eTncKP |
| Unitrends | Enterprise Backup for VMware or Hyper-V NFR | http://bit.ly/1eWqn4Q |
| Symantec | Backup Exec V-Ray Edition NFR | http://bit.ly/1eTFcEO |
| Royal TS | Royal TS/X NFR | http://bit.ly/1jtpNbB |
I also recommend to check the following blog post:
