best practices....(and Dilbert)

Dilbert series presents another amazing strip about best practices. 

Check here. 

This makes me think if all those companies who want to copy best practices from other companies have competitive advantage? I say this because some so-called ITIL pundits indicate that the ITIL publications creates level-playing grounds for companies not knowing best practices. 

However, I question this statement. Best practices will keep evolving and are tailored to a specific environment. ITIL is  a best practices compendium as of May 2007. More best practices have evolved since then. Hence, the companies can gain competitive advantage in their IT Management only if they have people with right skillsets.  Human capital is as important as practices in place. 

PE firms must deploy ITIL v3 in their portfolio companies

Recently, an article of mine was published on thinkingstreet.com here.


ITIL v3’s business service management approach makes it the best fit for adoption by private equity (PE) firm for deploying in their portfolio companies in order to enhance the value of their portfolio.

The prime objective of a PE firm is to obtain controlling interest in a target company and restructure the target company over a period of 3-7 years such that its value enhances and sell it once the market value is more. It can be reasonably concluded that the value of the PE firms is a function of value of their portfolio companies.

This objective is achieved by deploying best management practices and cutting on flab in the operations of the target company. Usually, in a PE firm, a partnership’s investment activities can be divided into four stages: selecting investments, structuring investments, monitoring investments, and exiting investments .

ITIL v3 fits well at the stages of structuring investments and monitoring investments. The PE firms can leverage the best practices in the only written IT Operations’ guide. The beginning of a v3 project is resource intensive. However, it starts yielding benefits within 6-12 quarters depending on how it was deployed.

The prime reason that v3 is a good fit for PE is due to its business service management approach for the IT services. Besides, v3 introduces the much needed dimension of Financial Management and portfolio approach, a dimension that was missing from the earlier versions but was of high significance. The address to value creation, value capture, and value networks makes it well-aligned with the objectives of the PE firm.

The concept of market spaces discussed in V3 helps the IT department think beyond the immediate internal customer. If the IT arm of a particular portfolio company can start providing services to external customers, the value of the portfolio company will be enhanced.

Also, V3 adopts a lifecycle approach, which is pragmatic as compared to the earlier modular approach, which discounted the fact that the business place is constantly evolving and that IT needs to adapt. When a portfolio company is being restructured by a PE firm, there are significant changes, which can be addressed on the IT side only by a lifecycle approach.

On one hand, most of the IT shops find V3 abstruse and hence, either delay the adoption and/or are too busy putting out fires in order to adopt it. V3 will act as a shaman between those who worlds. The resistance is easier to overcome in case of a PE portfolio company than in case of a regular company. The structuring of the organization is in such a way that the partners can exert significant pressure to get initiatives off the ground quickly. Besides, the managers of the portfolio companies must not oppose the adoption of v3 in these environments as they gain an experience, which sells for a higher rate in the market, if they can prove a successful deployment.

If I were a stakeholder in the third version (popularly known as v3), I would pitch it to the PE firms, in order to have increased adoption for my Operations’ guide.

sample papers for itil v2 to v3 bridge exam

Exin is offering ITIL V3 bridge book for free. All you have to do is go to this link, add it to the cart, and check out. Select the procedure as invoice and the cost is Eur 0.

Take advantage of it while you can.

architecture patterns and IT service management

While researching for patterns mentioned in v3, I stumbled upon this book titled "Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children " over here.

v3's Service strategy discusses about patterns in services' resources' requirements. This puts architecture patterns in the driving seat.

Surprisingly enough, Prof Krishnan (CMU fame) and myself were planning to work on something in this direction with Mellon Bank for Sourcing services. Having such patterns back from the service providers can help clients to retain the knowledge and to a certain degree, control on their architecture.

Personally, I think that based on industry, definition of IT service management may blur or become accentuated. For instance, in the financial services space, it is less efficient if one differentiates between a business service and IT service. I feel that the whole part is a business service and IT service is so embedded in it that the IT folks cannot live in isolation in most of the cases. Of course, there are certain functions in which they can be siloed out and made to function. For instance, infrastructure. However, in case of other IT services - they are all integrated to the business services tightly. This puts another most debated question in front of us - shouldn't ITIL name be expanded to have IT Service Management rather than having the term Infrastructure in it? Shanon Taylor, architect of v3, is working in that direction.

Finally, IT Service Management will evolve to become a subset of Business Service Management - which has been around since a while now. I am not trying to nominalize the value that ITIL v3 brings - I am just expressing that it is an old wine in a new bottle :P

certifications in the new world

Gartner predicts that the current and emerging new hot skills are as follows:

1. Project Management
2. Service Management
3. IT Governance
4. Sourcing Management

These and several others.
I felt that a valuable way to indicate one's proficiency in atleast the knowledge about the same can be with the help of certifications. However, this is not to say that anything can replace practical experience. Theoretical knowledge and certifications (by passing tests) cannot substitute an experience.

I've listed the relevant certifications:

PMP - for Project Management
ITIL - for Service Management
CGEIT - for IT Governance
eSCM - for Sourcing Management

I hope this is helpful for budding IT operations management professionals.

which version of google are you on?

Fred Luddy, the CEO of Service-now.com, mentioned this phrase at the NYC Executive briefing as he was trying to emphasize the importance of flexibility in SaaS implementation for Service Management tools. I was invited for the event by VP, Strategy at the company, who is a good acquaintance of mine.

Truly enough, Google's version is not known to anyone. It is irrelevant for the front user as long as all his data in various dimensions is stored for future retrieval and analysis by back-end data storage.

My close encounter and the dialogues with Fred revealed me his persona of an architect, a researcher, a scientist - being dominant over his persona as a CEO. He was former chief software architect at Peregrine, which got bought over by HP.

Surprisingly enough, service-now.com has been able to come up with an on-premise deployment for clients who may be wary of data residing on service providers servers in a SaaS model. For instance, the event had a leading global investment bank indicating how they plan to rip off their older software of Peregrine for IT Asset Management and install service-now.com's suite.

Imagine the impact of this new paradigm - This nature of an on-premise deployment can help allay government's fears and make them a potential client for such services.

ITIL v3 talks about cost distribution of small proportion of fixed costs and large proportion of variable costs in order to make internal IT services' offerings competitive and flexible (to scale up and down based on business needs). Service-now's SaaS implementation ensures just that.

I see this company as a rising star. The product is awesome - way beyond what some of their competitors have to offer. The team is great. Finally, the timing is right - as US market starts ITIL adoption and we are reaching a point of inflexion for the same.

does ITIL v3 marginalize value of CMU's MISM program?

As I read ITIL v3 since summer this year, I realised that most of the techniques mentioned in the books (primarily Service Strategy and in general, all the five books) are taught in MISM and more. Also, based on one's interests, one can shape program to become an operations expert for IT operations or services' operations. I had a doubt whether this was all the information/knowledge I paid for at MISM? Does the release of ITIL v3 appreciate value for one of the alums at the cost of rest of the current students?

Well, ITIL v3 does not marginalize MISM program. In fact, it enhances the value of the program - by highlighting that one of the alumni (Majid Iqbal) from the program was one of the authors for the ITIL v3 set of best practices. This highlights that CMU MISM program's students are thought leaders.

The pure inter-disciplinary approach that the school promotes and adopts creates a rich culture which leads to innovations. As Bill Gates mentioned on the Charlie Rose show, the world is far more inter-dependent today and we have multi-lateral alliances everywhere. In such a world, it is essential to create these linkages between various disciplines.

In future, plenty of new problems will emerge with newer dimensions. Whoever solves them will have certain set of best practices - those can get recorded into ITIL v4, v5, v6, etc. What CMU teaches you is how to approach a problem from different dimensions and solving problems with effective and enduring solutions.

I don't intend to spark a huge debate here by assuming superiority. There are a lot of aspects that can be changed in the program dynamics. However, it is clearly a program that's unmatched. If you want people who bring business solution by leveraging technology then currently, MISM is the place to hunt such people from.