Posts Tagged ‘ITIL’

Is Life Easier If You Are A CIO Who Works For The U.S. Government?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Image Credit Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

You want to become a CIO. You probably want to become a CIO in the private sector – you know, those companies that have owners or stockholders that they always have to work to keep happy. Why haven’t you spent any time thinking about becoming a CIO who works for the biggest employer out there: the U.S. Federal government?

Big Changes Coming

The U.S. Federal government (the one that runs the country, not the states) employs over 300 CIOs that manage all of the different parts of the operation. You would think that federal CIOs would have it easier: I mean they don’t really have to worry about keeping shareholders happy or anything like that, do they?

You need to keep in mind that although a federal CIO doesn’t have to worry about the same things as a private sector CIO, they have a whole bunch of different issues that occupy their time. One big issue is that every four years they may have a completely new boss what with the presidential elections and all that.

As the U.S. experiences the effects of the global recession just like everyone else, federal CIOs are feeling the pressure to show that their IT departments can deliver a solid return on investment (ROI) .

It’s becoming pretty clear that there is a lot of IT funding for the things that you would expect a federal CIO to be working on: things like wireless projects and public safety projects. However, this doesn’t leave a lot left over for all the other things that an IT department is supposed to be working on,

What Are A Federal CIO’s Biggest Priorities?

One of the key ways to tell if being a federal CIO is any different from being a private sector CIO is by taking a look at what’s on their list of projects. Federal CIOs always have to be nimble enough to adjust to a new administration’s priorities which may differ from the last administration’s. This can cause a big change in what the IT department spends their time working on.

Right now the federal CIOs are reporting that the key programs that their departments are working on include:

How Are They Going To Be Successful?

So if you were a federal CIO right now, how would you go about pulling off all of these initiatives while dealing with the tightest budgets in years? As you might be able to guess, there is no one magic answer to this question.

In a survey done by InformationWeek magazine, 21% of federal CIOs said that they were using Lean Six Sigma. 29% reported that they were using ITIL. Even within the military there was no one way to go: the U.S. Army is using Lean Six Sigma while the Navy is planning on using ITIL.

What All Of This Means For You

In your future, there is actually a good chance that you might at some time become a federal CIO – there sure are a lot of them out there. You might have thought that this was an easy route to take – no pressure from owners / shareholders. Think again.

Federal CIOs have to deal with a great deal of upheaval in their upper management structure on a cyclic basis. On top of that even during difficult economic times they need to find ways to push forward on important IT programs that will transform their organizations.

If you do become a federal CIO, I sure hope that you like change. You’ll have your own set of issues to worry about, but at least things won’t be boring!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that it would be easier or harder to be a Federal CIO than being a private sector CIO?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I hope that you wore your good clothes to work today, because there’s a pretty fair chance that you might end up on video sometime during the day. The arrival of low-cost video cameras and high quality video processing software has effectively made it ridiculously easy to create multimedia content. This has got to affect what a CIO does, but how?

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Should A CIO Bother With That ITIL Stuff?

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Image Credit Johnson & Johnson’s CIO Had An Out-Of-Control Growth Problem That ITIL Solved

Johnson & Johnson’s CIO Had An Out-Of-Control Growth Problem That ITIL Solved

Johnson & Johnson Had A Problem

I’m sure that when you picture yourself becoming a CIO in the future you see yourself sitting at the corporate strategy table with the CIO using your deep understanding of IT to help the company move faster and do more. Umm, one problem with that vision – you’re not going to make it to the big table if you don’t solve the problem of run-away IT costs. Johnson & Johnson’s CIO had this very same problem and she tackled it using the ITIL framework. Maybe this would be a good time to look into that ITIL thing…

Just What Is the ITIL?

You’ve probably heard about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL); however, do you really understand what it is? First off, it’s an old (10 years is old by IT standards) set of best practice guidelines for how to do IT service management. It was originally developed by the U.K. government in order to help them do a better job of modeling their outsourced IT projects. It’s quite popular in European IT shops and is only now starting to pick up steam in the U.S.

What makes the ITIL so attractive is that it allows a CIO to run the IT department like a business. This is exactly what Johnson & Johnson’s CIO was looking for back in 2001. J&J was going gang-busters from a business point-of-view; however, their IT costs were going through the roof – they were going up by over 10% every year.

J&J had previously tried the old stand-by CIO trick of pulling together IT operations from all around the sprawling company into a single centralized organization in order to get on top of their costs. However, even though now they knew where the money was going, they still were seeing out-of-control growth on infrastructure tasks. Something had to be done!

J&J’s CIO decided to implement a program based on the ITIL. Now mind you, this is not some silver-bullet magic cure-all. Instead, the ITIL can help with specific parts of running an IT shop. Specifically if you go about implementing ITIL correctly, your IT department can boost the quality of service that it is providing to the rest of the company.

J&J’s IT department was able to use ITIL to decrease how long it took to resolve problems. This in turn resulted in J&J’s systems having more uptime and therefore allowing more work to be done quicker. Needless to say, end users were very happy about this.

Sure happy customers are nice, but what about the money? J&J says that if you count both cost savings and costs that they were able to avoid, then starting in 2005 they believe that they’ve been able to save at least $30M a year.

Why Did This Solution Work

ITIL is not the only way to standardize the way that a CIO runs his / her IT department. Other methods include the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), Six Sigma, and Lean Manufacturing. However, ITIL has been around the longest and its been shown to work.

Taking the ITIL path was the right choice for J&J for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was it provided J&J’s CIO with a way to both quantify and measure the quality of the service that J&J’s IT department was delivering. Who was the wise man who said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”?

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO you’ll be facing the same twin set of conditions that can keep you from doing all of that strategic stuff that you want to be doing: rising IT costs and ever increasing user demands for more service. You are going to have to deal with this issue and do it quickly.

ITIL is not a new “flavor of the day” approach to solving the challenges that an IT department faces. In fact, it’s a rather old approach. However, if you’re willing to make the investment in time and energy that it can take, ITIL just might be the solution that you are looking for.

Knowing that there is a solution framework out there that works is what allows most CIOs to be able to sleep at night. Actually implementing a solution and saving the company, well that’s a job that will be waiting for you when you become the CIO.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Would ITIL work at your company or do you think that a different approach would be better?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just when you think that you’ve got this Internet thing figured out, it goes and changes on you.  There are some fantastic tools out there for you, but will you know what to do with them when you are the CIO?

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Hey IT – Forget ITIL, Say Hello To BDIM!

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

The world of IT is changing once again, are you ready? We have evolved a great deal in the last thirty years and it looks like we’re getting ready to make another great leap forward. This time around we have a name for what’s going to happen and it’s called business-driven IT management (BDIM)!

Antão Moura and Claudio Bartolini have been looking at how IT is managed and they’ve discovered that we’re getting ready for another change. Back at the end of the 1980′s IT management was all about tracking boxes and routers. This was the era of IT infrastructure management.

Stability and control were the key drivers behind this effort. IT acted as a technology provider – IT folks were technical experts and their goal was to minimize down time.

In the past few years this style of IT management has changed. Now IT looks less at the infrastructure and more at the end user. IT now practices what is called IT Service Management (ITSM). The thinking is that IT services use groups of IT infrastructure components to help corporate users (and customers) to do business with the firm.

Viewed this way, IT has become a service provider. The downfall of this is that IT is still viewed as being separate from the rest of the business. The rest of the business believes that IT is mainly concerned with expense control. This has caused one of the firm’s greatest concerns to become the issue of business-IT alignment.

We’ve come up with a whole bunch of technical ways to keep track of how the IT infrastructure is performing in order to ensure that our services are meeting their performance levels. These tools include quality of service (QoS), service level agreements (SLAs), and when you combine both of these you get service level objectives (SLOs).

The arrival of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of best practice standards has provided a way to deliver IT governance which seeks to ensure that IT risks are mitigated, IT is aligned with the rest of the firm, and that the expected results are achieved.

The problem with all of this is that the best practices, such as ITIL, are very useful, but they just don’t go far enough toward providing concrete solutions.

This has led to the creation of the business-driven IT management (BDIM) approach to IT management. The goal of BDIM is to move IT one step further and start to use a full business perspective to mange IT. This means that we would need to stop using technical metrics measured at the IT level.

This can get a bit difficult to grasp, so here are a few IT management questions posed in BDIM format:

  • Of all the IT incidents that are occurring RIGHT NOW, which is impacting the business the most and thus should be worked on now?
  • Which services should we invest in to improve business results?
  • How many standby servers should we have for our e-commerce site?

Since I know some you may still be struggling, here is a formal definition of BDIM:

“BDIM is the application of a set of models, practices, techniques, and tools to map and to quantitatively evaluate interdependencies between business performance and IT solutions – and using the quantified evaluation – to improve the IT  solutions’ quality of service and related business results”

BDIM is still in the development stages. Models have to be created, how it related to the ITIL processes will have to be worked out, and creating BDIM decision support related tools will have to be done. However, yet another IT management change is almost upon us – and it’s name is BDIM.

Does your IT shop still use the IT infrastructure management approach or have you moved on to the IT Service Management approach? Is your IT shop seen as separate from the rest of the business or do you think that you’ve achieved business alignment? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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