a chronicle of the Savage Journey to ITSM Excellence
This is basically a compilation of 4-5 years of blogging — mostly alone — on what was a wild ride on the road to IT service management excellence. If you find anything here that interests you, great, but it’s mostly a way for me to put on paper various rants and rambles that are sure to bite me in the ass someday. Tragically, the ether that is the internet is forever…
However, with the advent of ‘cloud computing’, the introduction is as relevant today as it ever was:
Introduction – 2007
About my blog…MyServiceMonitor’s weblog is intended to foster discussion about the realities (and frustrations) of implementing Best Practice, whether that be ITIL, CobiT, ISO 20000, Six Sigma, TQM, et al. I wanted a place to rant about best practice frameworks and share some experiences with friends, peers and basically anyone who wants to listen and join the fray. As I tend to blog very late in the evening the postings are, well… pretty much midnight ramblings…
I believe that the real road to a quality culture has more to do with people than with process (which may make some ITIL fanatics scream in horror), since in the absence of process it is values that carry the day. I am in awe of many IT professionals — many much smarter than I — who are literally killing themselves keeping the cars on the road as the business keeps its foot firmly on the accelerator (and in some cases on IT’s neck). They have my admiration (and sympathy).
For those customers who lack both process and values, it was nice knowing you. The business and IT are simply getting too complex, the world is moving too fast, and big brother’s getting much better at watching you for you to last much longer.
For those of you who know the difference between right and wrong, and are struggling to do the right thing (i.e., best practice), then consider this a place to vent, to rant and to share some humor as we continue down what we know is the Right Road.
A savage journey indeed, and what a strange trip it will be.
These posts are not in the order which they were originally published…I’m simply grabbing them a re-posting as it suites me over time…
Let’s Kill Incident Management…
OK, it’s a Friday and I’m tired. We’ve had two bomb scares, the Dow dropped like a stone and I’m just friggin’ cranky. So I’ve decided to kill the Incident Management process.
It’s one process I’ve always hated anyway…. users are pissed, zombie-like IT staff take endless calls — many of them for the same Incident — and we never seem to really know what’s going on anyway. Log it, assign it, and re-assign it sometime later… let’s just put this bastard out of it’s misery.
We’re goin’ to a virtual cloud environment anyway, and since we’ll be provisioning new services faster than shit outta’ a loose goose we’d better get collaboration’ in real time. Generating tickets after users calls is a sure road to hell in the new word that’s already upon us…
There are still people out there who insist that unless we can ‘create Incidents’ then “you will not be a (XYC) company standard”. Why? I like traceability as much as the next guy, but at what cost? Your arm’s bleeding like crazy! Don’t you want a tourniquet?
Get me some DevOps dudes and get them quick!
I’ll provide them with service monitoring intelligence that will enable them to establish truly collaborative management. We won’t open tickets, we’ll just assign events to the right person; and in many cases before the service is impacted (so screw the damned Incident!).
We’ll report on real time threats, service impacts, capacity trends and bring processes like Capacity, Availability and Event Management front and center (where they belong in the new world order).
I don’t need a room full of people creating, reporting and shuffling tickets (Incident tickets anyway). I need people who can understand utilization trends, early warnings and take immediate action.
If users want to open tickets, we’ll open a laundry.
Let’s kill Incident Management.