Infrastructure Management and Strategic Design: Part 4 – Service Management Frameworks

links for 2006-08-19

People Over Process — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 08:21:21 GMT

'Hybrid mutant' found dead in Maine "This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing." Whao this whole article is like an HP Lovecraft story...and it's even in New England. (tags: via:sogrady lovecraft weird dogs hybridmutant)

re: Infrastructure Management and Strategic Design: Part 4 – Service Management Frameworks

einhverfr — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:01:05 GMT

"# Monetize the service management offerings, even if your customers are internal. This will help quantify the service effectiveness and bring measurability across the board "

I am not a fan of this idea. THe problem is that it creates additional overhead both in terms of general accounting and budgetting by various departments. It also tends to lead to resentment by people whose jobs (managing budgets) are made markedly more difficult. If some other departments (such as the ergonomics department) follow suit, the result can be discouraging people from getting access to services they need.

So it can have some positive effects, but at the cost of a great deal of complexity and additional problems. Complexity is generally the enemy.

One of the serious problems with many of these best practices is that many businesses attempt to implement them to make themselves look better and are unable to look beyond the chosen (industry-standard) metrics. This means that one often "teaches to the test" so to speak rather than encouraging substantive improvements. Thus many management frameworks, whether ITIL (for IT), COPC (for call centers) are usually based on obvious and good ideas but implemented as bandaids over bigger problems that need to be solved first (to make COPC actually be substantive, one must also first create a customer-centric culture, for example).

Interestingly enough--

einhverfr — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 06:26:04 GMT

I am still in the early stages... But it seems clear to me that some of the major challenges include tracking installed and managed services, and being able to provide for various contingencies such as disconnected operation, etc. Some of the major issues involve: 1) Version and Upgrade Tracking 2) Configuration management. 3) Policy management 4) Single Point of Truth (this is actually the most difficult aspect, especially when disconnected operation is required). I am not a big fan of most business process management frameworks. Industry standards are just the best that some people can think of and while they are worth reading, they are usually not worth following (businesses are notorious for lacking an ability to objectively look beyond measurements to root benefits or costs). This is not to go too much into my approach to managing these sorts of things but I will say that software must support divergance from the accepted industry-recognized best practices.