Ryan Ogilvie presented on improving IT service management. He argued that IT departments often plateau because they maintain a process-centric mentality and focus too much on incidents. To advance, IT must think like the business and address other processes like knowledge management, event monitoring, and reporting. Effective knowledge management can reduce incidents and improve business understanding, but requires overcoming challenges like buy-in and information management. Comprehensive monitoring of systems, dependencies, integrations, and business activities is also important. Finally, reporting must be simplified and tied to objectives in order to effectively manage performance.
2. What the Hell is IT Doing?
Presented by
Ryan Ogilvie
Twitter:@ryanrogilvie
Blog: Service Management Journey
Linkedin: ca.linkedin.com/pub/ryanogilvie/2b/183/873
16. Monitoring types
• System monitoring :
• Watches CPU load, free
memory (RAM), disk
space etc. SNMP based
hardware monitoring,
etc.
• Dependency
monitoring :
#TFT14
• Checks web server
• Integration :
• Tracks third party or
other integration
points
• Business activity
monitoring:
• Records KPI or key
performance
22. Reporting
• Here are our objectives
• Here are our reports on them
• This is our strategy for improvement
However beautiful the strategy
you should occasionally look at
the results - Winston Churchill
#TFT14
23. Wrapping it all up
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't
take."
Wayne Gretzky
#TFT14
25. With thanks to our slides
sponsor, CA Technologies
Try Nimsoft for free at
ca.com/NSD-trial
Notes de l'éditeur
In this presentation I want to spark some thought together on how you can leverage the activities you are likely doing already in your organization. The difference between learning and understanding is that ah-ha moment you get
I want you to visualize this…..It is Monday morning and you are heading into work with all the optimism in the world. You get into the elevator and a few senior managers from your business units are there. You nod, hit 27 on the elevator. The woman says to the man already inside, “wow we really had application issues over the weekend” “ the man says “ yeah, what else is new….Your optimism is fadingThe man says “I just don’t get it…. What the hell is IT doing?”
Not really…..Much like in this scenario we are left to struggle with ways in which we can improve our serviceMore often you are finding that organizations are improving in the adoption of ITIL and other best practices. The challenge is that we (IT) tend to limit our scope which in some ways limit us from taking service delivery to the next levelSo often you hear we “do” Incident and Change yet we always seem to hit the same ceiling with regards to performance – unfortunately this is where frameworks nay-sayers will chime in saying “see I told you this wouldn’t work!”But wait…. All is not lost….
Before we can know where we are going we must know where we areWithout some direction any road will do and that is why we end up in the INC CHG SR circle…and this is ok – you need to walk before you can run – you have started on the journey to improvement
Why do we plateau?Mentality – IT needs to enable the customers which it supports – some times we (IT) get in our own ways to do thatNeed to think in terms from business experience – this is where shadow IT comes from in large partGet out of the rut of thinking like IT – Us vs Them – (it doesn’t really exist) your customer already works with you so why not develop the existing relationship
IT can be very process centric – and while your customers may understand process they probably do not understand why it causes delays or issues for the customer experienceAlways looking at the same things - shuffling the deck chairs on the titanicVery easy to look INC etc. – very visibleIncident doesn’t bring value – it only is an indicator of issues we experience with service – the value comes from being able to diagnose and correct from a root cause
This is now the time to look at some other processes to assist us in taking this to the next step – every superhero needs a sidekickI recently read a really good article on the ITSM review by Vawns Guest about ITSM superheros, That resonated with me a bit to think about the Service Management SidekicksI have picked 3, EventKnowledgeReportingthere are others… I am know what you are thinking – this all sounds easy enough but how do we make this happenHow can we get to a point where we are allowing these to positively impact the way we provide service
It will always come back to marketing… reallyrebrandYou may have tried this before and it didn’t workThis is why marketing is important - don’t let the baggage of the past prevent you from moving forward – rebrand itThink about when you rolled out INC… there probably wasn’t much marketing on the incident process, because it was reactionary not proactive – so focus on that – you are working to improve service – you are taking proactive measure to improve serviceHow this improves business outcomesYou need to address it in the terms of those who you are selling it to. Its about the customer not IT…. Its about their needsPain vs PleasurePut another way people are more pain adverse than anything else. If I told you to place your hand on a stove burner that was off you would think about why??? However if I told you that the burner was on you would be more than comfortable to say noTo put that in this context we want to promote what gains we wont see as a result of not doing activity “x” in a formalized way we will see if we don’t do something rather than the opposite
We all know what knowledge is, but we really need to address “organizationally” what knowledge is and also what it is not.CMS – internal system knowledgeKnowledge articles – self serviceBusiness knowledge – info about our customers
Top benefits – having available knowledge has benefits –imagine thatIncident Reduction – both in duration and in volumeThink of it in Incident outage time – if I was able to take 10 minutes to look through knowledge records – whether it is INC, PR CHG documents whatever we are leveraging I would be able to make informed decisions on how to escalate and correct the issue. why reinvent the wheel on a conference call when we can say “ here are the first 5 things we need to check before anything else. You already spent time diagnosing – use this informationBusiness understanding – being able to solve issues for your customers at first call is key. Think of a customer experience where you can have a dialog with your customer on a “one to one” scenario. Think about your own customer experiences – good and bad, being in a position to be able to know that your customers have a place that they can look at information to help themselves and when they cant they are a call, or text or tweet away from assistance.Overall a better customer experience and a place where you can have dialog with your customers. Remember we are all peoplePretty powerful stuff
So why aren't we doing this in a formalized way some top “challenges”Remember the marketing for the buy in…. The concern may be that we would spend the time up front – you need to rework that in terms that show the return – the time saved by having this information allows you teams to not do the same old fixesDoing off the side of the desk is OK but not sustainable in the long runMoI - – what we need vs what we can collect. This can be a daunting thing, which is why it presents as such a challengeStaying current – having a way to ensure that the data you have is current and validated through a review process of some “was this useful” survey, or a knowledge expiration dateWORN – you need to consider a way to not only create the knowledge but there also must be a way to present this to people otherwise it will sit on the shelf – it cant be locked up for no one to see
Keep it simpleDo what makes senseGo back to the business outcomesWe may need to start out with identifying what a critical service is and what it is made of as a base for future iterations
Now lets move onto event managementWe are monitoring things in silos but we need to bring them together to be able to strategizeNetworks monitors networks and servers monitor servers
We could talk all about monitoring for the next hour but it will not do us any good if we don’t put ourselves in a position to improve the customer experience
How do we do that – look at it from a service perspectiveThe reason we speak to monitoring in silos is that if we monitor everything for a service and the network connection is down the service is not working
Without some functionality there may be no service at all And in other cases something being down may be covered about redundancy. This information may play into your service availability but the key is to understand your service
Moving onto reportingYou have probably heard…If you cant measure it you cant manage it….May not mean measure everything – tell the story about the guy who was counting the dots on the ceiling tiles
Small moves, while this data provides value – is it positioning you to improve service delivery today or the near future?If It isn't coordinating with your business outcomes / goals what value is it really producing
Small movesStarting small with outages (amount and frequency) will allow you to get a strategy togetherWhile CPU is important to some in your ops team it may not always translate to your customersThis is the current customer pain point
ObjectivesReports on themWhat are our CSF – which KPI support themDetermine strategy – now what is our strategy to be able to accomplish
Rarely anything worth doing is easy…But keeping it simplified to revolve around the business needs will allow you to market your improvements and discuss on a level with the businsess that is no ITIL speak
Stay connected – keep the conversation goingThis conference is about “WE”, and being able to engage each other is pretty amazingIt is the communities we are a part of that largely allow us to learn