VitAL Magazine - March-April 2008

Inspiration for the modern business Volume 1 : Issue 4 : March / April 2008

Working the Network Getting social with colleagues ITIL: what it can do How you can use it

Change is gonna come Get ready and able

Made for the modern world Postcodes for the database

FEATURE FOCUS: Understanding ITIL pages 32-36

Supportworks ITSM puts people at the core of ITIL

Service Management with The Human Touch Supportworks ITSM puts the customer at the heart of ITIL adoption, so people can implement processes to improve service quality in line with the way the business wants to work.

Read our latest ITIL whitepaper: “Service Management with The Human Touch Embracing the ethos of customer focussed service� email marketing@hornbill.com to request your copy

Employee Support Solutions Business Support Solutions

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LEADER

LEADER QUESTIONS ABOUT POWER, AND ACHIEVEMENT

B John Hancock

USINESS SHOULD be fun. Not Solitaire instead of resolving business problems or spending company hours exchanging pointless information on ‘youbook’ — or whatever is the latest craze. But people’s minds should be more occupied with the uplift of achievement than with the need to shield their posterior.

Business is about power; however, power generated by fear is a brittle thing, certainly not, in the current parlance, sustainable, but instead likely to generate hostility. On the other hand, power generated by achievement (and especially achievement shared, credit freely given) knows no bounds. The emotion it is most likely to generate is loyalty.

In this issue of VitAL, we continue to explore the evolution of ITSM, how to manage the changes it will bring about and what powers it might put in the hands of Service Managers. But, as our brilliant new columnist, Sharon Taylor, says in her new VitAL Lessons column, when you get the power, what will you do? After a working lifetime focusing on the process, being the one to whom everybody looks to keep things running smoothly, how will Service Managers adapt to looking up to the far horizon? In her article elsewhere in the magazine, Sharon talks about ITIL being valued for the quality and integrity of its business processes,

not solely as a way to manage IT. Glyn Yarnall writes about the application of Social Networking principles to a working environment and how that free exchange of ideas can benefit everybody. But, if people fear who might be watching and how they might interpret something, what chance is there then of any value (except negative value) being gained.

David Perry writes about applying IT power to help people work better, not simply to record what they have already done. Sir Muir Gray tells us more about how IT is being used to help the NHS perform better and Ben Clacy takes the opportunity of having many IT professionals together to ask them not only how they view today but where they see Service Management in the future; their answers are interesting.

As relative newcomers to the halls of power, Service Managers (the ‘IT’ is becoming more implicit than explicit) can use their relatively sociable management style to herald a newer style of business, not stymied by the fear of failure but motivated by the power of achievement; informed by the power of IT and what it makes possible; happy to let people be creative, enjoy their work and revel at the end of the day not in how they’ve managed to avoid trouble but in what they’ve achieved.

John Hancock

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March / April 2008 : VitAL

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CONTENTS

Contents Inspiration for the modern business

8 VitAL NEWS News that affects your job as well as some of the latest developments in products and systems to support what you are doing

22 FIT FOR PURPOSE, FIT FOR USE SHARON TAYLOR

THE VitAL COVER STORY

12 GETTING SOCIAL AT WORK GLYN YARNALL

Editor John Hancock john.hancock@31media.co.uk Assistant Editor Camilla Dunwell camilla.dunwell@31media..co.uk Advertising Sales Grant Farrell grant.farrell@31media.co.uk Production & Design Dean Cook dean.cook@31media.co.uk Editorial & Advertising Enquiries 31 Media, Crawley Business Centre, Stephenson Way, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 1TN Tel: +44 (0) 870 863 6930 Fax: +44 (0) 870 085 8837 email: info@31media.co.uk web: www.vital-mag.net Printed by Pensord, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood. NP12 2YA

You may think that it’s just for your children but Social Networking has already been tested to destruction and found to work; market tested and found to be popular: so perhaps we should consider what the idea might do if applied in the workplace

VitAL SIGNS – life in a world with IT

17 HUNT DOWN ALL TROUBLESHOOTING TEAMS OF SEVEN!

STEVE WHITE Throwing people at the problem doesn’t always work and may, at a certain point, actually makes things worse

Thinking about ITIL as an evolving software product is not right. To get the best out of ITIL, forget the versions and look for how it can add value to your business

26 CAPACITY UTILISATION IMPROVEMENT?

ADRIAN JOHNSON We all seek to optimise capacity utilisation, but do we consider the consequences and plan for them? Adrian asks the pertinent questions and shares some answers

28 FIT OR FATIGUED? GRAHAM OAKES

18 WHOSE BUSINESS IS IT? LISA HAMMOND

© 2008 31 Media Limited. All rights reserved.

VitAL Magazine is edited, designed, and published by 31 Media Limited. No part of VitAL Magazine may be reproduced, transmitted, stored electronically, distributed, or copied, in whole or part without the prior written consent of the publisher. A reprint service is available.

Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or VitAL Magazine or its publisher, 31 Media Limited.

ISSN 1755-6465 PLEASE RECYCLE Published by:

As the CIO moves from supporting role to centre stage, the business must adapt to and take steps to get the best return from the situation

Change creates a dynamic environment but, as Graham suggests, only organisations that have made themselves ready for change will be able to harness its energy

SUBSCRIBING TO VITAL MAGAZINE VitAL Magazine, Proud to be the UKCMG’s Official Publication ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

VitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business.

Subscription Rates: UK £30.00 per year, Rest of the World £60.00 per year Please direct all subscription enquiries to: subscriptions@31media..co.uk

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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CONTENTS

Contents 32 UNDERSTANDING ITIL ROSEMARY GURNEY

VitAL NEW COLUMN VitAL LESSON – informed by experience

41 BE CAREFUL WHAT WE WISH FOR

44 OUT OF SIGHT: NOT OUT OF MIND DAVID PERRY

SHARON TAYLOR

Managing a mobile workforce has always been a challenge but good management backed up with effective systems can resolve the challenge

46 THE SERVICE DESK & IT SUPPORT SHOW As with any good idea, ITIL works best when you understand it; what it is, what it was intended to do, what it actually does and how it can be used in your organisation – some experts share their experience with you

40 THE HIDDEN POWER OF THE POSTCODE TIM POTTINGER

Another great columnist for VitAL. We are truly fortunate in having the services of Sharon Taylor, architect of ITIL, whose understanding of ITIL, how it works and, more important, what it does is almost parental. This issue: having long championed the acceptance of service management in a business context, how will IT Service Managers react if that happens? Will they be prepared? The VitAL lesson is, be ready for the change when it comes.

43 THE LIFE IN LETTERS CAMILLA DUNWELL

If you want to keep up to date in the fast changing world of IT Service Management, then you’ll need to know more about the 2008 Service Desk & IT Support Show

48 USE A NET TO CATCH FRAUD ORI EISEN

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If the people who devised the UK’s postcode system had intended it to be perfectly suited to the computer age, they could not have made a better job of it

Even in the computer age, we still write to each other but do we write in a manner appropriate to what we are doing?

Any organisation will be targeted by fraudulent emails from time to time: ten common sense steps that can help to identify trouble, if it comes

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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CONTENTS

Contents 50 TAPPING THE POOL OF KNOWLEDGE

56 A SYSTEM FOR HEALTH

VitAL PLANET – keep it clean

59 WASTE NOT

JOHN HANCOCK

BEN CLACY

CAMILLA DUNWELL Waste not, want not was what your mother said, waste not or pay the high price is what we say; and we’ll even give you a few tips on the three ‘R’s

VitAL ENDING – the last word for information

64 WORKING AND MOVING When you ask ten experts in their field to consider some of the burning questions of the day, you’re going to get some very interesting answers

Sir Muir Gray and his team don’t simply value our health, they have to make sure that the right knowledge is in the right place at the right time to maintain that value

GLYN YARNALL Mobile computing, once the simple idea of moving between work places, is now a ‘modus operandi’ in its own right and, as Glyn demonstrates, a serious business

Contributors Tel: Email: Web:

LISA HAMMOND CEO and co founder Centrix Independent business and technology consultancy 01491 873 323 Laura.hawksfield@goode.co.uk www.centrix.co.uk

Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

SHARON TAYLOR President Aspect Group Inc Consultancy 001 613 697 5949 taylors@aspect360.net www.aspect360.net

Name: Title: Company: Business:

ADRIAN JOHNSON Executive Performance Engineering Consultant & UKCMG Committee Member Company: HyPerformix & UKCMG Business: UKCMG is an Independent User Forum Tel: 020 8421 5330 Email: ukcmg@ukcmg.org.uk Web: www.ukcmg.org.uk Name: Title:

Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

GRAHAM OAKES Principal Graham Oakes Ltd IT and Management Consultancy +44 (0) 7971 546288 graham@grahamoakes.co.uk www.grahamoakes.co.uk

Name: Title: Company: Business:

ROSEMARY GURNEY Director Wardown Consulting Ltd IT Service Management training and consultancy 01582 488242 rosemary.gurney @wardownconsulting.co.uk www.wardownconsulting.co.uk

Tel: Email: Web:

Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

SHIRLEY LACY Director ConnectSphere ITSM consulting and training 0845 838 2345 shirley.lacy@connectsphere.com www.connectsphere.com

Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

DAVID PERRY Head of Marketing Cognito Mobile Workforce Management systems +44 (0)1635 50834 david.perry@cognitomobile.com www.cognitomobile.com

Name: Title: Company: Business:

LINDA KING Head of Marketing G2G3 Helping the understanding of complex messages 0131 461 3333 lk@g2g3.com http://www.g2g3.com/

Company: Tel: Email: Web:

VCM EVENTS 01273 836800 events@vcm.co.uk www.servicedeskshow.com

Name: Title: Company: Tel: Email: Web:

ORI EISEN Founder and ChiefInnovation Officer The 41st Parameter 020 7712 1671 info@the41.com www.the41.com

Name: Title: Company: Tel: Email: Web:

BEN CLACY Business Development Manager itSMF 0118 918 9503 Ben.clacy@itsmf.co.uk www.itsmf.co.uk

Name: Title: Company: Tel: Email: Web:

STEVE WHITE KT Resolve Application Nature of Business 01753 856716 swhite@kepner-trego.com www.kepner-trego.com

Name: Title: Tel: Email:

GLYN YARNALL Management Consultant 07734 591267 glyn.yarnall@ntlworld.com

Name: Title: Company: Tel: Email: Web:

CAMILLA DUNWELL Assistant Editor ViTAL Magazine 01736 793363 camilla.dunwell@31media.co.uk www.31media.co.uk

Tel: Email: Web: Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

JOHN NOCTOR Consultant ICCM Service Management Software, Training & Consultancy 01666 828600 john.noctor@iccm.co.uk www.iccm.co.uk

Tel: Email: Web:

BETH SHERLOCK Implementation Consultant Infra Corporation IT Service Management software developer 01483 213200 info@infra.co.uk www.infra.co.uk

Name: Title: Company: Business: Tel: Email: Web:

TIM POTTINGER Database Solutions Director EuroDirect Database marketing specialist 0113 242 4747 webenquiry@eurodirect.co.uk www.eurodirect.co.uk

Name: Title: Company: Business:

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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NEWS

Study links Corporate Performance to Employee Enablement Tools, resources and autonomy all important factors in lifting worker effectivenessen

C

OMPANIES SEEKING to improve their performance should focus more attention on their employees, giving them the tools, resources and autonomy they need to do their jobs well, suggests a new study by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Microsoft.

Whether a firm’s employees can do their jobs effectively is determined by a wide variety of factors, including organisational structure, budget, availability of appropriate tools, and whether employees are given a reasonable degree of freedom to take certain kinds of risks. In July 2007 the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted an online survey of 1,351 senior executives worldwide to determine how these factors affected employees’ level of enablement—their ability to do their jobs well—and whether any relationship could be identified between enablement and corporate performance. The findings of this research are contained in Ready, Willing and Enabled: a formula for performance, a paper reported by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Microsoft.

T h e re s e a rc h d e f i n e s enablement as giving employees what they need to do their jobs well: organisational structures, appropriate technologies and other resources that let employees make decisions that contribute to the firm’s profitable growth. Enablement provides the organisational and information conditions that allow staff to make opti¬mal decisions. These include the following: autonomy sufficient to make the best decisions for the company; tools to do the best possible job; access to financial resources that may be needed to buy these tools and allow for enough people to handle the workload; a collaborative working environment that motivates people and reduces the cost of working together; performance incentives, both financial and non financial; and clarity of policies and procedures.

“The study clearly shows a positive correlation between employees’ degree of enablement and its self-reported financial per formance,” says Nigel Holloway, Director of Research

at the Economist Intelligence Unit in North America. “That positive correlation exists across dozens of variables including profitability, revenue growth, tangible assets and strategic success.”

A statistical analysis shows this positive association. Firms that responded to the survey fell into one of four distinct groups, each exhibiting distinctive behaviour with respect to enablement. The group with the highest level of enablement also contained the highest proportion of companies that were more profitable than their competitors.

Overall, the research found that many employees already feel adequately enabled. Sixty three percent of survey respondents indicated they have a high degree of autonomy, while more than one quarter (25.2%) say they collaborate frequently with others.

Yet the findings also suggest that employees could be much more enabled than they are. On the technology front, only about one half of companies surveyed (53%) indicated they have the IT tools they need, while roughly

the same proportion said they have access to the information they need. One third said they have the teamwork structures necessary for enablement, while only 17% feel that their organisations have enough employees with the necessary skills and training to work independently. Just 10% feel there is enough money in the budget to enable individuals and teams to accomplish their tasks.

The research also suggests that if firms want employees to be more effective, they should allow them to take prudent risks within parameters that limit potential losses.

Encouragingly, nearly two thirds of survey respondents (64%) say that their organisa¬tions tolerate reasonable risk taking.

Yet a full 20% say their firms discourage it and only 13% say their companies actively support it.

• Ready, Willing and Enabled: a formula for performance is available free of charge at www. eiu.com/sponsor/microsoft/ enabled/

KEEPING TRACK OF BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT system provider, Tesseract, has launched a

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new website for its Service Centre v.5 browser based system.

With dedicated sections for online system demonstrations, user case studies and global contact addresses, the new site (www. tesseract.co.uk) clearly details how the functionality of Service Centre can generate benefits across the complete enterprise - for service managers, IT managers, sales staff, financial controllers, logistics managers and, importantly, customers.

With integrated modules embracing Customer Assets, Call Control, Parts, Repairs, Quotes and Prospects as well as Remote Engineer Access, Invoicing and Meter Billing, Tesseract’s Service Centre 5.0 service management system offers powerful functionality for service centric companies of every size: • Asset tracking and configuration control with serial/asset numbers and full audit trail; • Contract administration with SLA, billing, warranty control and third party support; • Meter billing; usage, minimum and block together with

VitAL : March / April 2008

consumables; • Service call logging with diary, SLA escalation and full audit trail; • Engineer despatch with job update, parts usage and job invoicing; • Logistics control for warehouse and van, both repairable and disposal parts; • Full workshop repair module including booking in/out wizard and full audit; • Sales tracking system with remote access for salesmen; • Generation of sales, service or contract quotations using simple wizard.

The new look website site also lists Tesseract’s partners – 360 Scheduling, Five Go Live, Intermec, NEC, Oracle, Sage and Syspro, and highlights how it is a Microsoft Solution Provider.

Being browser based, Service Centre offers 24/7 follow the sun service management, if required, and is also available on a web hosted basis or via a rental agreement.

IT’s hottest topic.

Are you prepared? infraEnterprise is the solution!

First it’s fast: ITSM software that’s designed for rapid deployment and easy integration with your existing infrastructure.

Then it’s smart: Automation minimises process complexity and simplifies audit compliance.

And forward thinking: with all ITIL processes in one application, future integration is never an issue.

Putting ITIL to work within your organisation…

There’s the hard way… then there’s the Infra way.

The IT service management specialists

Email ITIL@infra.co.uk for your FREE whitepaper;

‘Achieving Best Practices with service desk automation’ www.infra.co.uk

NEWS

Tell everybody

Desktop notification and alerting solution now available for the corporate enterprise

M

ANAGEMENT SOFTWARE developer, NetSupport, announced, in January, the worldwide release of NetSupport Notify — Desktop Alerting and Notification solution as the latest addition to their portfolio of desktop and network management solutions.

Building on experience from their classroom management solution, NetSupport School, and recently updated NetSupport Protect desktop security solution, NetSupport Notify has been produced to deliver a cost effective, secure and powerful desktop notification and alerting solution for both school and corporate networks.

The philosophy behind NetSupport Notify is quite simple — to provide a method for delivering key information (notifications) to all desktop users across a LAN or WAN instantly. The selling point of NetSupport Notify is its ease of use, installation and ability to be deployed across any environment without the need for configuration changes to an existing network.

At the core of NetSupport Notify is a unique notification gateway which maintains connectivity with all desktop agents, irrespective of their location, and delivers notifications automatically to all connected agents immediately on receipt. NetSupport Notify supports both Windows and Mac desktops, including Windows Vista.

The product includes, as standard, support for multiple notification gateways, as well as inbuilt redundancy should a specific gateway become unavailable. An administrator installs a simple notification console as a desktop application, or accesses the technology via a local web page, and within seconds can deliver both a notification and accompanying instructions, select the level of visual priority for each message and enable an audible alert if required. All alerts received by desktop users have both the receipt and acknowledgement recorded in the system log file for future review.

Technology Performance Coaching

Clearvoice Consulting launches technology performance coaching programme

C

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LEARVOICE CONSULTING have launched a programme offering to all sizes of business.

In today’s economy, it is imperative to achieve a competitive edge. This programme provides it and helps businesses maintain it. In the same way a business has an external accountancy firm and an internal accounts department or book keeper, Clearvoice act as the external support to ensure that all technology is fully exploited to derive maximum profitability and productivity supporting internal individuals or IT departments.

Clearvoice Senior Partner Nigel Maine says, “If we are to purposefully participate in the world of commerce we have to understand and embrace the fact that technology is fundamental to our participation. Without it we cannot compete on the same level as our competitors. Technology Coaching closes the gaps between knowing what you want to achieve in your business and how to go about implementing it. This strategy ensures that it is possible to establish the required technology resources without being sold something you don’t want or don’t necessarily need.”

In the programme, Clearvoice Consulting act as the facilitators through one or several sessions, as the customer feels is necessary, which pinpoint specific areas of concern. The sessions are designed to: • Help businesses to understand effective technology and integration.

• Help businesses to specify and source effective solutions.

• Help businesses to support and coach staff in its use.

• Provide businesses with the tools to review technology on an ongoing basis within the business environment, i.e. the workplace, industry and market.

• Help businesses address technology needs embracing the expectations of the customer and how they want to communicate with.

Whilst being informal, the sessions are highly customised based upon business and personal coaching models. Clearvoice Consulting aim to work closely with an individual business and culture – not to shoehorn an organisation into their way of thinking. With over twenty years experience in both business management and technology sales, Clearvoice is perfectly positioned to empower organisations and make recommendations from experience.

VitAL : March / April 2008

Has the Spam Storm passed?

Marshall has some good news… and some not so good!

T

HE INFAMOUS Storm botnet, which has deluged mailboxes with spam for a full year, seems to be passing according to security experts at Marshal’s TRACE Team. However, the forecast is not good, with multiple new botnets emerging to replace the Storm, Marshal’s TRACE team expects spam volumes to continue to rise.

The Storm botnet first appeared in January 2007. TRACE experts believe that Storm reached its peak around September 2007 when it could be linked to approximately 20 per cent of all spam in circulation. Marshal believes that contribution has slowly dwindled to around 2 per cent as of January 20, 2008.

“It is hard to say with any degree of certainty why the Storm botnet has been declining. Just last week we saw a renewed campaign to distribute the Storm malware under the guise of a love letter. It could be surmised that Storm is a victim of its own success.

Microsoft has been targeting Storm with its Malicious Software Removal Tool since September last year.

They claim that they have cleaned around 200,000 computers per week of the Storm bot since then.

If that is accurate, it must be a key reason for the decline of Storm,” explained Bradley Anstis, Marshal Vice-President of Products.

“Unfortunately, the news is not positive. We have been tracking a number of other botnets that have stepped up to replace Storm. Storm is one of five botnets that we have been monitoring that we believe are responsible for approximately 75 per cent of all spam in circulation.

One particular botnet which heavily promotes a certain brand of male enhancement pills accounts for nearly 30 per cent. This one bot has already exceeded Storm’s records and it has done it quietly without attracting too much attention. This might signal a new strategy by some of the spam crews to try and draw less attention to themselves through high profile email campaigns,” said Anstis.

Launching April 2008 www.customermagazine.net INSPIRING CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

www.31media.co.uk

COVER STORY

In one day, MySpace can receive 114 million visitors, YouTube users will watch 100 million video clips and the average FaceBook participant will stay online for over three and a half hours.

Getting social at work Social networks work so, says Glyn Yarnall, why not use the idea to add value to the workplace?

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E ALL accept that staying in touch, whether at home or work, has become a 24 hour/7 days a week challenge — just visit any airport and you will see dozens of people huddled over their Blackberries, making themselves available whatever time zone they happen to be in. Even with an extended working day, research suggests that ‘despite the advances in communications technology — or ironically, possibly because of these advances — business users are

VitAL : March / April 2008

clearly experiencing a frustrating, complex and fragmented environment’. This same report, sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications, suggests that, ‘reaching out in real time to communicate with individuals or multiple team members becomes increasingly difficult’.

The survey looked into the cost of workers wasting time spent in repeatedly trying to reach colleagues. The research suggests that an individual can waste almost four hours a

week failing to collaborate with key colleagues.

The commonest pain point identified by almost all workers surveyed was the five hours lost simply waiting for information.

The answer according to Siemens is Unified Communication (UC), a single view of all channels open to personnel (voice, email, instant messaging and video) before they try contacting colleagues, showing the status of a person’s availability.

But does an organisation have to commit

COVER STORY

resources and budget to such a comprehensive solution? Beyond the realms of most companies, UC may be seen as relevant to the elite but of little interest to the rest of us.

So let’s consider a different perspective and look at a cheap tool that’s already familiar to most of us. In one day, MySpace can receive 114 million visitors, YouTube users will watch 100 million video clips and the average FaceBook participant will stay online for over three and a half hours. According to comScore, at almost 25 million visitors, UK usage of social networking is the highest in Europe, equating to 78% of web users.

These statistics confirm, as if it were needed,

that social networking is here to stay. Yet, despite such runaway success, according to research by library services provider OCLC, business related networking sites are accessed by only 5% of users. This may be due in part to employers limiting time spent on social networking sites by staff. One report last year suggested that almost half of businesses have banned or limited access to FaceBook in particular, with many of the remaining companies fearing a backlash from staff if restrictions are put in place.

Yet more research, this time from Global Secure Systems (GSS), suggests that employees’ time spent on FaceBook, Bebo

and the rest is around 30 minutes a day.

While that may sound quite reasonable, GSS calculate that to be worth almost £6.5 billion a year in lost productivity.

So does this mean that social networking is destined to remain the domain of the teenager who ‘gets it’, while equally computer literate 40 and 50 somethings don’t?

Hemanshu Nigam, Chief Security Officer at MySpace, does see it as both a long term cultural and business phenomenon, “Social networking sites have become part of the fabric of communication and are overwhelmingly positive channels for people to meet, talk, learn and share ideas. We’re only seeing the beginning of the possibilities this new medium will open up.”

According to OCLC, there is “a new classification of ‘social’ Web sites where users are not only the audience but they create content, design pages and architect entirely new social networks”.

So what can we take from social networking that will help us harness a facility that is already surreptitiously used in the workplace anyway? A starting point may be to think of it less as a ‘social’ activity and more of a ‘user’ one. In other words, contributors can be based around any common theme, not just an interest in genealogy or the latest gossip from the schoolyard. In both large and small organisations, there are often temporary and ongoing projects that are shared by a number of staff across several departments. Under these circumstances, it would make sense to use social networking as a cheap channel for anyone wanting to maintain a contact with colleagues anywhere in the company.

It may come as no surprise that one early adopter of the practice is Google, with every employee able to blog their ideas and comments. Maybe it’s their background — going from a start up to commanding around 72% of the global search market in just a decade — that makes the concept readily acceptable but they are not leaving

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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Sharing Best Practices & Experience Performance Testing

Performance Engineering

Capacity Management Performance Management

Capacity Planning

SLM

Performance Assurance

UKCMG ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION An educational Centre of Excellence covering all Capacity Management disciplines 19th - 21st May 2008 Whittlebury Hall Hotel, Whittlebury, Northampton

A must attend event with excellent papers from industry experts, US guest speakers, education specialists and end users. The three-day event will cover hot topics and issues in Performance, Capacity Management, Service Management, Distributed and Mainframe including beginner sessions.

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS ITIL Accredited Training courses embedded within the conference programme.

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COVER STORY

it there. Having mastered social networking in house and using this experience, Google have now announced their new API to help create and manage sites easily. As with FaceBook, the company plans to join the Data Portability Project, with the intention of developing standards to enable easier sharing of user generated content through social networking sites.

But will this translate into a benefit to business or just play to the consumer market?

To some extent, the answer is up to us. As both consumers and employees, I.T. managers can take a growing domestic experience of social networking into the office, delivering an intelligent solution to an evergreen problem — getting staff to talk, raise issues or make suggestions, whatever their role, position or department.

One man who knows a thing or two about social networking from within a large organisation is Euan Semple, who pioneered the use of weblogs, Wikis and online forums while at the BBC. His work there continues to enable staff to work more effectively and more collaboratively across the entire organisation.

In his view, if organisations are to capitalise on social networking and emulate the consumer model, it’s essential that they build on the existing day to day relationships within the company.

“Social networking differs from other waves

it would make sense to use social networking as a cheap channel for anyone wanting to maintain a contact with colleagues anywhere in the company. of software that have been oversold and under developed because it is seen as low cost, easy to use and user driven. For example, FaceBook is probably the most extensive site and yet can still be mastered by today’s teenagers.”

The BBC introduced informal learning — not institutional but seen to be more a democratisation of the workplace, creating a combination of bulletin boards, Wikis and blogs across multiple networks. The result was a user base of regular contributors plus a large number of ‘lurkers’ — people who would read and watch developments before joining in. Some would go on to de lurk, as it became known, once an issue became important enough for them to surface.

Semple points to business guru, Peter Drucker, who believed that ‘In a knowledge economy, there is no such thing as conscripts, only volunteers. We train our managers to

manage the conscripts’. In social networking terms, this means the popular sites succeeded because of the enthusiasm, trust and collaboration of their users.

But one element that the BBC had to contend with was the early adopters often being the most fervent, meaning it must be made easy to get involved, not putting off the lurkers, but allowing them to surface.

There must also be the means to draw in those lurkers who find fault with the network but don’t express their opinions through the blogs. This had to be balanced with the BBC, who would not allow anonymous postings, resulting in better behaviour from users but not necessarily encouraging lurkers to engage with others.

Euan and his team recognised that people in business can fall into the half empty category — scared, out their depth, feeling as though they are giving information away — or can see things as half full — confident, feeling as though they are getting things done, supporting others. This helped them identify how to work with the different types of user within the organisation.

Staff within PR and marketing departments were offered RSS links to enable searching for relevant external information, while HR staff could access software and solutions that provided the ability to set up small groups.

Interestingly, the most specialised sector — R&D — had already been meeting their own needs

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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COVER STORY

The ability to hold an open dialogue, often with colleagues and external contacts you may not even know of, must have an appeal.

16

by small numbers of them communicating away from the glare of senior management.

All this demonstrated the existence of a basic desire to have a conversation with co workers, despite the more formal setting created by internal communications and this is one aspect to consider — who has already established ad hoc networks within your organisation that you just don’t hear about? Be careful if you chose to approach them though — collaborating with them may sound a good idea but, these sites are built on trust, where it’s OK to ask an apparently dumb question and users must be confident enough to offer an answer. Compromising this ‘safe’ environment would simply change it into a company notice board, again, something the BBC discovered through trial and error.

From today’s position where a degree of unfamiliarity with social networking still exists,

VitAL : March / April 2008

especially for the risk averse, Euan Semple expects it to be taken for granted within five years and, after another five years, we will see it having a real effect on how organisations see themselves, their roles and expectations.

All this is fine for the BBC but what potential is there for SMEs and the likes? With a limited audience inside the company, we must look outside, where some believe that social networking with clients offers brand identity, more web traffic, up selling opportunities and customer loyalty. All this would come at a cost dramatically lower than that of early commercial websites at the same stage of development as social networking and, quite possibly, less than today’s support costs for online facilities.

The reality is that, while social networking is not for everyone, it does undoubtedly have a potential role to play where even a small

the popular sites succeeded because of the enthusiasm, trust and collaboration of their users. workforce is spread across multiple sites or even countries. The ability to hold an open dialogue, often with colleagues and external contacts you may not even know of, must have an appeal. The skill is in harnessing it to deliver a channel of communication for all, yet secure enough where necessary.

With such a high knowledge base already available (let’s face it, a majority of staff will already have their own social networking likes and dislikes), a quick survey of

VITAL SIGNS – LIFE IN THE WORLD WITH IT

HUNT DOWN ALL TROUBLESHOOTING TEAMS OF SEVEN! Steve White tackles a Servicedesk reality

The moment a case moves out of the experience or available knowledge of one person, the case takes on average twice as long employee opinions will help a company define the ground rules — what facilities can and can’t cross over to the business environment, plus what restrictions are needed that are lacking from the more relaxed ‘anything goes’ world of Bebo, et al.

And doing this research through an existing social network means its application can be tested through the very tools that will be used, should the application go live.

It’s at this point that we should maybe start to appreciate the benefit of testing these services on consumers before the business environment adopts them. At least, with tens of millions of users putting social networking through its paces each day, we can assume some degree of confidence it will work! If only CRM, ERP, MRP II and all the other major IT investments of recent times had had such a tough proving ground.

W

HEN WE phone a Servicedesk we know that if the person answering the call can’t help, it’s going to be rough on us.

Perhaps we get questioned multiple times by multiple people – the questions being the same each time. Perhaps we’ll be asked to do the same operation over and over again.

Perhaps we’ll be asked for log files, then more, then more.

I’ve just had the genuine pleasure of analysing the performance of the Servicedesk of a global support organisation, and amongst a number of aspects of their organisation we looked at was time to close mapped against the number of people involved in the handling of the case.

Clearly more members of a team added to a problem is an indication of the complexity of the problem, so some additional time could be expected for complex cases to

close, but this graph shows the penalty for not empowering the front line staff with an effective Knowledge and a Troubleshooting framework. This Servicedesk is good at closing calls when the call is effectively over, so this data is reasonably accurate. The moment a case moves out of the experience or available knowledge of one person, the case takes on average twice as long to close.

We know that we need to do everything we can to empower the frontline to be able to answer the customer concern (KM) themselves. We know that if the case is going to involve others, a structured involvement process to maximise the effectiveness of data handover is essential, so that the next person can carry straight on with the issue. The new information from this sample of 1000; we need to hunt down all teams of seven, and remove or add one person.

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

Whose business is IT? Lisa Hammond and Sukhenda Pal consider how CEOs are having to adjust to the increasingly important role that IT is playing in business in the 21st century

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18

O LONGER the remit of the techies down the corridor, IT is now the fourth business dimension, along with people, finance and machines, for any successful organisation.

Until recently any Chief Executive looking round his or her boardroom table would not only have immediately recognised the faces of their sales and marketing director, the personnel director, the finance director and the manufacturing director, but they would also have felt comfortable in his or her own knowledge and understanding of the responsibilities of each department. These days there is an extra chair at the boardroom table and this is for the IT director or CIO (Chief Information Officer). Now, with this one, the chief executive may be out of his or her comfort zone; a fear of the unknown or of showing their own lack of knowledge and understanding may lead them to bury their

VitAL : March / April 2008

head in the sand when it comes to IT matters.

This can have long term detrimental affects for the entire organisation.

The key to overcoming this all too common but rarely discussed situation is for CEO’s, and their boards to change the way they think

a fear of the unknown or of showing their own lack of knowledge and understanding may lead them to bury their head in the sand when it comes to IT matters.

about business today. IT is no longer an add on, IT risk and business risk are inextricably linked and consequently decisions about the one must be taken with reference and in parallel with the other. How the CEO goes about managing the IT area of business responsibility will depend on the company’s previous use of IT, the market it operates in, its financial state, its future ambitions and the quality of the senior management team. The majority of organisations will find themselves in one of the following categories and it may be that over a period of time they will modulate from one to another, or even find that different parts of the organisation, either departmental segments or physical offices are in different categories.

What is IT for?

The four categories are: 1. IT is the cost of doing business – a lot of

VITAL MANAGEMENT

Table 1.

service and gain a competitive edge, which may result in certain functions being outsourced. Again the CIO does not have a direct line to the CEO, and often reports to business unit heads.

4. IT is for business growth – IT systems are used as part of a strategic plan to develop the business and provide real competitive advantage and dominance in the market place. In these organisations the IT directors or CIO’s have a direct reporting line to the CEO and have had business and leadership experience across a wider remit than just IT.

Help for the CEO companies fit this model, especially those involved in manufacturing and transport where the IT director will often report to the Financial Director and the cost of IT is balanced against an acceptable level of operational reliability.

2. IT is for making the business efficient – all companies are looking for ways to increase efficiency and productivity and this category is particularly relevant to pharmaceutical, energy and utility organisations which often grow as a result of mergers and acquisitions. IT solutions are implemented one after another, getting more and more complex, but no more efficient and not bringing the integration and benefits for which they were, theoretically, designed.

In this instance the CIO will often have a technical background and will report to the business heads but not the CEO. 3. IT is for making the business agile – This state, which applies to many multinationals, may precede the previous category and is best applied to those organisations looking to streamline processes in order to improve

Help is at hand for the CEO needing to take a new approach to IT in his business. The table below gives a simple to follow decision making process that will help to ensure organisations capture value from their IT investment.

Running parallel to this process the CEO and his board should bear the following guidelines in mind when evaluating at IT expenditure.

[See table one].

1. IT investment should be targeted at the productivity levers that are important for their industry and themselves as a company. These will be different for each market and each organisation.

2. Success is in the planning. A meticulous attention to detail and timing of an IT investment can make a huge difference to its overall success in terms of implementation, acceptance and business benefit.

3. Big is not always beautiful. It is not always the largest IT providers or the biggest schemes that will bring the best results.

Smaller, independent technology providers may be more likely to act in the true interests of their clients by helping them to deliver efficiency and operational excellence.

Equally a relatively small adjustment or enhancement to an existing system may simplify an business entire procedure.

4. IT investment should not be undertaken in isolation, it has to be developed in parallel with the development of the business.

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March / April 2008 : VitAL

VITAL MANAGEMENT

‘It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it’ Identifying the right IT investment is only part of the story. Equally important are the quality and strength of the management practices across the organisation and it is here that research has shown some discrepancy between US and European based companies.

Figures indicate that US output was growing at a faster rate than European, especially in areas of the economy where technology is used

20

Equally important are the quality and strength of the management practices across the organisation and it is here that research has shown some discrepancy between US and European based companies VitAL : March / April 2008

intensely. Others attribute the difference in output to a difference in regulations, tougher competition or different operating and management practices in US organisations.

This may be reflected in superior IT investment strategies that have resulted in a higher return for investment.

Whilst the right IT investment decision is important and aligning business needs and IT objectives is a key element, the significance of good management practices cannot be underestimated. Promoting and supporting top performers and cutting underperformers from the organisation, combined with devolving responsibility for managing IT to local organisations and business heads, under the leadership of these key players, can play a pivotal role in raising the returns on IT investment. Within this a rigorous framework of responsibility and joint accountability between CIO, IT suppliers and business heads can result it a far more effective operating environment which brings real productivity improvements and not multi million pound write offs when investments do not bring the anticipated benefits.

IT and business units must develop a joint roadmap with the CEO at the forefront of the process. To draw a modern day analogy

the CEO can be seen at the voice of the navigation system – guiding and showing leadership, based on an understanding of the environment within which he is operating and the various options available.

It is the CIO and other business unit leaders that need to work together to produce the clear route, avoiding delays and hazards that will take the organisation to its chosen destination, allowing the CEO to proclaim, ‘You have arrived!’

a rigorous framework of responsibility and joint accountability between CIO, IT suppliers and business heads can result it a far more effective operating environment which brings real productivity improvements

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

Fit for purpose, fit for use Sharon Taylor asks of ITIL, v2 or v3… which is it?

And is this the correct question to be asking?

I

22

N THE early years of ITIL V2, IT Service Management discovered that it was Best Practice to use processes to manage service delivery to the customer. That sent us all scrambling to develop new processes to replace our old fashioned functions. As we did, we realized that we didn’t just have functions. We actually already had processes and the new best practice guidance simply allowed us to see them. It also helped us to determine if what we had was weak or flawed, thus allowing us to improve both the processes and our service management performance.

Now that ITIL v3 is here, they’ve done it to us again! The new thing to have is a service lifecycle – to push out our old processes and adopt a new way of doing things. A closer look

VitAL : March / April 2008

When new methods and practices are released in our industry, we tend to think of them as something never before done however, shows us that isn’t really the case at all. We still need our processes, and like before, we discover that we already have our lifecycles. Again, the new guidance allows us to see them and set about improving them.

When new methods and practices are released in our industry, we tend to think of them as something never before done. Take

a close look at your organization and you will find that in fact you are already doing some of these things, but haven’t called it a formal method or practice. There is a lot of hype in the airwaves right now about whether an organization should move from ITIL v2 to v3.

But, isn’t that the wrong question? It’s time to stop talking in v2 v3 terms, and start talking Service Management. While there is no doubt that using industry best practices can save time, money and avoid reinventing what is already there, the right question is, what makes sense for you? The answer lies within how much fits your purpose and how much fits your use and when.

When we were in our twenties, a cool, fast sports car fitted our purpose; impress our friends, be adventurous, or make a statement

VITAL MANAGEMENT

the best way to get it right is to do what makes sense for them, not what version they find it in about ourselves. When we moved on to our thirties, and we started families, the sports car was no longer fit for our purpose. Safety, room to grow and usability became fit for purpose. It changed because our needs changed.

Look at the business customers you serve.

• Are they the same as they were three years ago?

• Will they be the same in three years from now?

• Will the way you provide services today work for your customer three years from now?

These are the right questions to ask.

ITIL itself has always been positioned as guidance to be adapted to individual circumstances and needs. The differences between v2 and v3 are significant in terms of expanding the scope and areas of practice, but insignificant in terms of how much of the existing v2 practices have changed. So when asking the question about what is fit for purpose and use in your individual context, there isn’t any argument to say one or the other is better for you. v2 is intact inside of v3.

When my clients ask me this question, here’s what I tell them. Examine the content of V3 and see how much of it you are already doing today. Then consider how well what you are doing is working. If you are meeting your service objectives, your customers understand the value you provide and you are not at risk of becoming optional, then the practices you have in place now are working… for now.

The next thing I tell them is, ask your customers to help you understand where

they are headed, then look again at your practices to see if they will continue to create value, meet service objectives and keep you competitive. Chances are you will see areas that need improvement, vulnerabilities that should be addressed and areas of V3 that can satisfy these needs.

The adoption of v2 in any organization will have provided a step forward in gaining efficiencies and cost effectiveness by executing and measuring process and performance. If your business customers have evolving needs, so will you and that might be a great time to begin eyeing up what v3 can do in helping you improve your service management practices.

ITIL has been successfully used this way for decades. Apply the practices that are fit for your purpose and for your customers use.

Then keep an eye on improving, expanding and maturing into more practice areas when it makes sense for you and your customer.

An example of this could be maintaining your current Incident, Change and Release Management practices as they are today, but add Service Portfolio management to help plan for future customer needs. Adding a Service Portfolio can help illustrate opportunities that you didn’t know were there. Understanding how you create value can also help you find areas that are underperforming and need help or a complete rethink. We are often too concerned with running fast to keep providing the current level of utility and warranty to our customers to see that we may have investments in service areas that no longer provide value.

One of the major differences between v2 and v3 is the addition of value creation and ways to quantify it to the business. Service management has become more about meeting business outcomes and expectation, than about bit and bytes. Some of the questions high performance service organizations never stop asking themselves can be found in ITIL as basic tenets.

• Which of our services are most distinctive?

• Which are the most profitable?

• How are we different from competing alternatives?

• How do we create value for our customers?

• How can we build a case for strategic investment?

• How do we define service quality? … and, most important of all…

• What do our customers value?

What remains consistent with Service Management in general, no matter who you are, what business you support, your size or complexity; implementing Service Management and having it work well and ensuring that you are creating value still relies on the same critical factors: • Management commitment ITIL reinforces this over and over again.

Fortunately many CIO’s and senior managers are starting to realize that a bottom up approach does not work. It must be on the radar of the management of the organization and demonstrated by applying the resources, knowledge, skill, funding to

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

The differences between v2 and v3 are significant in terms of expanding the scope and areas of practice, but insignificant in terms of how much of the existing v2 practices have changed

24

maintain momentum.

• Program not Project ITIL is not a project that finishes and everyone goes to the pub. Using project disciplines in transforming ITIL practices into your organization will work in the short term, but embedding them into everyday language, culture and behavior is an ongoing event.

• Thinking ITIL is about IT ITIL is not about IT, it is about creating business value with service assets, many of which just happen to be IT. Today, most businesses cannot execute their processes without IT and ITIL practices have evolved to recognize that there are people, products, technology and partners that have to work in harmony for IT to make a difference.

• Adding it to your day job One of the most common pitfalls organizations make is adding the management of ITIL practices to an already overloaded job description. High

VitAL : March / April 2008

performing organizations understand that key Service Management roles need attention, dedicated resource and profile in the company. Treat Service Management like an afterthought and that’s exactly how it will perform.

Every major IT vendor in the world uses ITIL in their Service Management products and services. Research analysts predict that the growth in ITIL adoption in the next few years will surpass its combined growth thus far.

Why? It’s simple. High performing service providers know that it’s really about realistic service management that creates value for customers. They also know that the best way to get it right is to do what makes sense for them, not what version they find it in. The sooner we stop thinking that ITIL versions are like software that you upgrade, the better off we’ll be. The sooner we drop the ‘IT’ from IT service management, the clearer we’ll see the business!

Ask any CIO what keeps him or her up at

night. They’ll tell you it’s worrying about how to quantify value from IT services and meet business outcomes. They’ll also say it’s about changing the business’s perception that IT is a cost centre, to IT as a profit centre that offers value the business can use to prosper.

What keeps your CIO up at night will ultimately cause you sleep deprivation so why wait? Start looking at how your organization adds value to the business and I’ll bet you find lots of reason to take a deeper look at the current ITIL service management practices.

So you can forget about whether it’s V2 or V3 now. This isn’t about which version at all.

It’s about using service management to create value for your customers so they will continue to be your customers and not someone else’s.

And wherever within ITIL and ITSM in general you find the guidance that helps you do this, this is where you need to be focused.

You have a service lifecycle already so go look for it. You and you CIO will sleep better for it!

VITAL MANAGEMENT

Capacity utilisation improvement?

Adrian Johnson asks the pertinent questions

‘W

E WON’T really know how the system performs until it is out there in production.’ Once upon a time, this was considered an acceptable reason to not take performance and capacity seriously prior to the release of a new application. Servers were often regarded as commodity items, at least in comparison to mainframe technologies, and it was simply easier if each new project brought in its own set of machines. The team that had to build the system were rarely the same people who had to manage it in production, and the explosive growth in the number of machines often went unchecked for far too long.

Analyst reports quote average capacity utilisation statistics of the server farms across the industry as being between 15-20% during working hours. No other corporate asset, such as real estate or manufacturing plant, would be allowed to continue at that level of utilisation — serious questions would be asked at board level. In fact, with space, cooling and power in the data centre becoming real issues, and the notion of a corporate carbon footprint

the key to the success 26

of all these trends will be effective use of common components and shared resources VitAL : March / April 2008

starting to tug at the consciences of senior management, these questions are starting to be asked.

When we question why the IT infrastructure has been allowed to reach this state of under utilisation, we hear about the business risk attached to allowing customers direct access via the web (exposure); we hear about beating competitors to the market opportunity window (time pressure); and we hear about the rate of change of new technology (risk to existing operations). But as the IT industry matures, surely some of these reasons begin to look more and more like excuses?

Many of the current trends, such as Web Services / SOA and virtualisation, are being driven by a variety of perceived needs including maintainability and manageability.

Whatever the driver, the key to the success of all these trends will be effective use of common components and shared resources; improvements in the capacity utilisation of the server estate should start to be achieved as a result. However, there is a potential cost — whilst capacity utilisation may improve, the impact on performance and response times also needs to be considered. Web service reuse may save development time, but if only a small portion of the current functionality is actually required in the new application, how much unnecessary computing effort will be expended? Almost by definition, virtualisation is replacing real stuff with virtual stuff — if emulation is more time consuming than direct operation, what does that do to performance?

Does this following scenario seem familiar?

The operations team is handed a new application to manage. It comes with a whole new set of servers and SLAs; it is held together by some new middleware technology

buzzword; development suffered slippages but the release date was held fixed by the business requirements so QA and test was compressed; and now the team that built the application has dispersed on the four winds to the next project/contract, so access to anyone who knows how it works is limited.

We’ve probably all been there, but there are signs of hope. IT Service Management has become a hot topic globally in recent years, so comprehensive and cohesive vendor and tool support is starting to arrive at last. The same Systems Management tools used in production are starting to appear in test environments; corporate standards and reference architectures are being brought in, although not yet always adhered to.

If a career in the IT industry is to be considered seriously as a profession not just a job, engineering discipline that is beginning to emerge within IT development and management practices must continue, and become standard practice not just best practice. Applying engineering discipline to IT development means designing and building in appropriate functional and non functional requirements from project conception, and seeing them through the system lifecycle. Time to market is commonly cited as a reason for project time scales that render such laudable goals as unrealistic, but this misses the point.

A well engineered system should be extensible such that additional functionality can be added with minimal change to existing services. Not only can time to market still be met, but the future maintainability and manageability of the system is also improved. Distributed responsibility for distributed systems can work, but only if end to end is seen as being applied to the system lifecycle as well as the infrastructure itself.

To summarise, in order to derive best value from new system implementations or major enhancements, it is imperative to manage the capacity and performance throughout the project lifecycle from inception to implementation and on through the lifetime of the system. Establishing a set of robust processes in support of this objective will provide the full end to end Capacity Management solution that is needed.

UKCMG UKCMG IS an independent User Forum where End Users, Industry Experts and Vendors

meet to share ideas and experience regarding Performance Engineering, Performance Testing, Capacity Modelling, Capacity Planning, Performance Monitoring, Performance Tuning and Capacity and Performance Reporting, and by sharing this knowledge provide its membership with a Centre of Excellence for Capacity Management.

If you would like to learn more through our regular events, please visit: www.ukcmg.org.uk

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

Fit or fatigued?

Graham Oakes considers whether it is change or people’s unfitness for it that creates changes fatigue

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UPPOSE I decided that I want to run in next year’s London Marathon. I’d probably start on a training programme. For example, I might plan to run two miles tomorrow and then gradually ramp up the distance each day until I’m marathon fit.

So, tomorrow morning I go for a run. After a mile, my lungs will hurt. My legs will hurt.

I’ll be hot and bothered. I probably won’t feel great at all. Does this fatigue mean that running two miles is impossible — that no human being could reasonably be expected to run two miles? Or does it mean that I’m unfit?

I hear a lot about change fatigue when I talk to people in some organisations. ‘We’ve just restructured that department,’ they say, ‘so we’d better not talk to them about new systems right now.’ ‘Our ERP implementation has been a little painful,’ they protest, ‘don’t bother us with new processes.’ (ERP systems are amazing. We roll out new systems to increase organisational flexibility, then everyone’s so bruised by the experience that they resist all change for the next couple of years.)

VitAL : March / April 2008

I suspect these are often signs of change unfitness rather than change fatigue. Some organisations seem to take such changes in their stride. Teams are restructured every few months as new projects come along.

New products are launched every week, with accompanying shifts to processes and systems.

People rotate through a variety of roles, enjoying the opportunity to try new things.

These organisations have built the capacity to change along with all the other elements of their infrastructure.

This question of change fitness has always been on the agenda for IT. Vendors push new tools and technologies at an ever accelerating pace. New methodologies appear and evolve all the time. Our organisations demand ever faster introduction of new capabilities and services. And many of the trends currently in the air are explicitly calling for us to up the tempo. For example: • Lean and Agile development. Methodologies such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming are built around rapid iteration and frequent introduction of new systems into

Some organisations seem to take such changes in their stride production. After all, they say, it’s only when a system is in production that you earn any value from it: code in the project team’s repository is simply costly inventory. The whole theory of lean development (with a strong pedigree at manufacturers like Toyota) is built on making small batches of work flow smoothly through the system.

That means constant change.

• Service Oriented Architectures. The premise of SOA is that by partitioning our applications appropriately, we increase our ability to flex our systems and reconfigure them to support new products and processes.

Of course, object oriented programming tried this with objects. Component based development tried it with components. Will we be third time lucky with services? The ones who’ve learned the lessons from those

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past attempts do appear to be upping the pace of change.

• Business Process Management. Is BPM complementary to SOA, or antithetical to it? The gurus seem divided on this. I think they’re just different ways to look at how we partition our systems. Depending on which lens we look through, we see either services or the engines that choreograph them a little more sharply. Eventually the two will come together, and again the rate of change will go up.

• Web 2.0. Out of left field comes the ability for users to knock together their own ‘mash ups’ of content, data and applications. Does anyone really know what web 2.0 is, let alone what impact it will have on the way our organisations use IT? I suspect not. But

VitAL : March / April 2008

even if it fizzles into nothing (which I also doubt: people will eventually build some interesting stuff on web 2.0), people will look at what can be done on the web and ask IT, ‘Why can’t you do things as quickly as them?’

• IT Service Management. No matter which way the above trends go, one thing seems clear. There will be calls to make frequent, small releases as projects deliver new increments of functionality. This is going to put pressure on regression testing and service introduction processes. It will stress configuration management systems. The deep heartbeat of regular, structured releases will become a clamour of constant change.

There are plenty more, but that list alone would give ample reason to cry change fatigue and drop back into our comfort zones. I think

this would be a mistake. I think there is a real opportunity for IT to come out of the back room and engage as business leaders if we can harness these trends. They all have the potential to give us tools to focus our attention on strategic business value, and on how we can deliver such value more effectively.

That means we need to build up our change fitness. How can we do that? Here are my top five tips: 1) Strong feedback loops. You can’t effect meaningful change if you don’t know where you are right now. Without a clear understanding of the current state and sound feedback on the course you’re steering, you end up on a random walk that takes you from one fad to the next.

Nothing saps your energy and change capability faster. (That’s probably why many organisations really are suffering change fatigue.) Anything which builds visibility and feedback is likely to help you change more quickly and effectively: regular project and process reviews, for example.

VITAL MANAGEMENT

there is a real opportunity for IT to come out of the back room and engage as business leaders if we can harness these trends

2) Practice makes perfect. An old adage, and a good one. However, you need to practice the right things. We all like to practice the things we’re already good at (and playing to our strengths is a good thing). The things we need to perfect, however, are the bottlenecks in our processes. If there’s something that’s slowing us down, then it may be that we need to do more of it. Paradoxical but true. For example, if testing is the bottleneck for our development teams, then maybe we need to test more. Not in the same way we do now, in big batches at the end of the project, but in smaller batches throughout the lifecycle. Doing things in small batches naturally increases our control over variability and hence ups the pace of flow. (The principles behind lean production make this clear.) Better still, the more we practice something, the better we get at it.

3) Maintain some slack. Another paradox — you move faster if you have some slack in the system. Very high utilisation rates mean that there is no spare capacity to

respond to variations, so every glitch slows you down. This slow down is often dramatic: people go into firefighting mode and the flow of work suffers. Likewise, you need some capacity to monitor trends, develop new skills, adopt new tools, and so on. There’s always a point in the learning cycle where efficiency goes down as new processes ramp up. To gain long term improvements, you need capacity to accommodate this short term dip. Overall, the only place where it makes sense to seek extremes of efficiency is an environment that never changes — there you can focus on building efficiency by matching your capacity exactly to the demands. No organisation operates in such an environment these days.

4) Find stable points. Every lever needs a fulcrum. Buildings need foundations. No organisation can change everything at once — there need to be points of stability that people can refer to and build from. These stable points may come from core values and a clear strategic vision. They may come from a well defined enterprise architecture,

or from a solid network of partnerships and relationships. So here’s another paradox to consider: the organisations which change fastest are often also the ones which have the greatest stability.

5) Make some bets on the fringes. You may learn something useful by trying out some new tools or piloting a new methodology.

This learning can then be brought back into the organisation to improve the way it does things (provided you have some slack to do it, of course). More importantly, many people will get enthused and revitalised simply by having the chance to try something different. By doing new things, they will also be increasing their ability to change. And organisational change fitness is only the sum of the change fitness of all the people within the organisation.

These five points are all about learning. Any teacher would recognise the need to provide stability and feedback, allow risk taking, and encourage continuous practice in their students. Change fitness is simply the ability to learn quickly and respond effectively to what we’ve learnt.

Change fitness is also a self reinforcing process. As we practice change, we get better at it. This gives us the courage to make new bets on the fringes, helps us to find stability within ourselves, and so on. Conversely, organisations that avoid learning, and the change that accompanies it, find that their change fitness declines over time. That’s when change fatigue starts to set in.

Of course, there’s still a question about my marathon attempt. Was the right way to build marathon fitness to start with a two mile run?

Maybe one mile would have been better?

And how fast should I ramp up? Designing the right training regime is tough. But if we don’t begin to build some underlying fitness, any organisational change is going to be painful. Conversely, I suspect that change fit organisations can get significant benefits from almost any tool they try.

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

Understanding ITIL Rosemary Gurney traces the development path of the world’s favourite Service Management best practice guidance

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EVELOPED IN the late 1980s, ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools, all of which were updated with the release of version 3 at the end of May 2007.

ITIL was developed by the CCTA, now the OGC, during the late 1980s when the UK government’s reliance on IT was increasing. A working party set out to document a common sense approach to managing IT services that would improve reliability while maintaining costs efficiency. The result was a published

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The IT Infrastructure Library documents industry best practice guidance. It has proved its value from the very beginning collection of best practice and common sense and the first IT Infrastructure Library was created.

From the beginning, ITIL has always been publicly available. This has meant that any organisation could use the framework as described in the books published by OGC and

TSO. Because of this, the IT Infrastructure Library guidance has been used by a wide range of organisations, local and central government, energy, public utilities, retail, finance, and manufacturing. Very large organisations, very small organisations and everything in between have implemented ITIL best practice processes.

The IT Infrastructure Library documents industry best practice guidance. It has proved its value from the very beginning.

Initially, OGC collected information on how various organisations addressed Service Management, analysed this and filtered those issues that would prove useful to OGC and to its Customers in UK central government. Other organisations found that the guidance was generally applicable and markets outside of

VITAL MANAGEMENT

government were very soon created by the service industry.

Being a framework, ITIL allows organisations to be flexible and pragmatic in the way they implement the processes. The various models show the goals, general activities, inputs and outputs of the various processes, which can be

incorporated within IT organisations. ITIL does not set in stone every activity required on a day to day basis because that is something which will differ from business to business. Instead it focuses on best practice that can be utilised in different ways according to individual requirements.

Because of this framework of proven best practice, ITIL can be used within organisations with existing methods and activities in Service Management. Implementing ITIL best practice processes doesn’t necessarily mean a completely new way of thinking and acting.

However, it will provide a framework within

APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING ITIL®

Shirley Lacy sets out some steps that will help those moving along the ITIL path to understanding YOU MAY be just starting your journey

or you may already have experience of adopting some or all of the ITIL v2 and v3 practices. Your approach to understanding ITIL will depend on this experience, your organisation’s current adoption of ITIL and its business requirements.

A BASIC INTRODUCTION A first step is to understand whether adopting IT service management or moving to ITIL v3 is something that will help your business.

Attending seminars and reading articles will help you to understand the potential benefits for your organisation. The OGC/TSO ITIL v3 publication ‘The Official Introduction to ITIL’ explains the basic concept of IT service Management and why the service lifecycle approach is best practice in today’s business environment.

AN ORGANISATIONAL APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING ITIL V3 In today’s business environment, there are more regulatory and legal requirements than ever before, many other constraints and new business challenges. ITIL v3 is a great opportunity for management teams to refresh their knowledge. A successful approach for management teams is to host and attend ITSM seminars, courses and workshops together. This helps to develop a shared vision and improvement strategy that can deliver value on investment and better services for customers.

HOW AN INDIVIDUAL CAN UNDERSTAND ITIL As part of an individual’s professional development, the ITIL foundation course helps people to understand the breadth

and value of the ITIL service management.

Successfully completing the examination provides an individual with a basic and valuable qualification in IT service management. The OGC/TSO publication ‘Passing Your ITIL Foundation Exam - The Official ITIL Foundation Study Aid’, is endorsed by APM Group, the official ITIL Accreditor, and contains information on this qualification.

Individuals who already hold the v1 or v2 certificates can update their v3 knowledge by taking the ITIL v2 to v3 Foundation or Manager’s Bridge courses. They will be able to identify gaps and improvements in the ways that they and your organisation currently work. This stimulates and motivates people to go back to their workplace and improve service management in their organisation.

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any lack of communication and cooperation between various IT functions can be eliminated or minimised. which to place existing methods and activities in a structured context, providing a strategic context that improves tactical decision making.

By emphasising the relationships between the processes, any lack of communication and cooperation between various IT functions can be eliminated or minimised.

ITIL provides a proven method for planning common processes, roles and activities with appropriate reference to each other and how the communication lines should exist between them.

An important part of any ITIL implementation project is getting people to speak a common language. That is why education is the essential basis of an implementation or improvement programme. Sharing a common language is a critical element to the efficiency and effectiveness of any project.

ITIL focuses on providing high quality services, placing particular emphasis on Customer relationships. This means that the IT organisation should provide whatever is agreed with Customers, which implies a strong relationship between the IT organisation and

their Customers and partners.

Specific benefits gained from implementing ITIL processes can be described as: • Improved quality service provision; • Cost justifiable service quality; • Services that meet business, Customer and

User requirements; • Integrated centralised processes; • Everyone knows their role and knows their responsibilities in service provision; • Learning from previous experience; • Demonstrable performance indicators.

ITIL: EXPERIENCE IS UNDERSTANDING

Linda King says that, to truly understand ITIL, you have to experience it THE MAJORITY of organisations seeking to understand and adopt ITIL

best practices tend to opt for formal, classroom based ITIL education to Foundation level (or higher). Traditional education communicates theory and provides learners with a valuable industry qualification — but the way people learn has changed significantly over the last decade. The speed of change, the complexity of information, all combined with today’s rapid work pace make training courses of a formal classroom nature often inappropriate and too slow for many people. People need learning that is immediate, relevant, and in the context of their work.

A new generation of learning is here. Simulations, or gaming solutions as they are also known, are a high impact, energetic way to accelerate understanding, involvement, and acceptance of ITSM best practice such as ITIL across organisations. ITIL simulations bring to life the service management and process issues faced by organisations through a realistic scenario which participants can directly relate to and have actual experience of.

ITIL simulations are also highly effective enablers of change. A recent report from industry analysts Forrester suggests that in over half of organisations undergoing a change such as an ITIL implementation,

internal resistance occurred — to such an extent that 52% of organisations listed it as the most significant negative element of the entire implementation. Transforming an IT organisation to successfully implement a best practice framework such as ITIL requires commitment and understanding at every level of the organization — from the CIO, to the Help Desk staff — all the way through to the senior business managers. The problem is — positively influencing the mindset of such a wide spread of staff using traditional education will be virtually impossible — due to time, budgets, availability and other constraints. ITIL simulations can help by practically demonstrating the benefits of best practice to large audiences and fast. All those involved will immediately understand the ITSM terminology and ITIL processes in the context of their roles. So within a day — everyone is talking the same language.

Taking an interactive and contextual approach such as this can help make change irresistible. ITIL simulations create a practical and holistic understanding of the reasoning for implementing ITIL best practice as well as an awareness of the role that individuals play in making that change a success. When it comes to understanding ITIL — experience is the best teacher.

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VITAL MANAGEMENT

Just because we’re moving from v2 to v3 doesn’t mean the older version isn’t relevant anymore

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ITIL was originally produced in the late 1980s and consisted of ten core books covering the two main areas of Service Support and Service Delivery. These core books were further supported by 30 complementary books covering a range of issues from Cabling to Business Continuity Management. It was then restructured to make it simpler to access the information needed to manage the services.

The core books were amalgamated into two books, covering the areas of Service Support and Service Delivery, in order to eliminate duplication and enhance navigation.

This is the version now referred to as ITIL v2, which was introduced during late 1999 and the library then consisted of seven central books which dealt with the processes widely accepted as the best practice framework for IT Service Management (ITSM).

The overwhelming driver for the latest refresh, launched in 2007 was to keep the guidance up to date such that ITIL continued to be fit for purpose as the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.

The project team wanted to improve the usefulness and applicability of ITIL by addressing the changing needs of users as the technology base and business requirements continue to evolve, to make ITIL easier to apply and improve its applicability to small organisations. OGC’s ITIL publications are only part of the story; this refresh also embraced the close integration between the core guides and the ITIL qualifications, and other interfaces in the IT service management arena.

Although it wasn’t perfect, the publications we taught from for certification purposes concentrated mainly on the two books, Service Support and Service Delivery and we’ve all been quite happy with that, but cracks had started to appear.

Therefore in 2005, the ITIL® Version 3 (v3) refresh project began, with Sharon Taylor appointed Chief Architect. Sharon led a very robust benchmarking and consultation exercise within the industry asking what was liked about the existing system, and what wasn’t.? It also asked the customers about it — these are the people who implement it and

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TOP TIPS FOR UNDERSTANDING ITIL John Noctor offers experience in 12 easy bites

WITH SO much debate and talk about ITIL®

(v2 and v3), the best advice I can give to an organisation looking into how ITIL® can benefit them is to highlight some key tips built up using my own experience and understanding. Ultimately, successful service management teams are those that are able to align product, processes and people.

Noctor’s Top 12 Tips for Understanding ITIL: 1. Remember it’s a journey and not always a destination; 2. Planning is key, Gap and Readiness assessments can be vital; 3. Training, training, training!

4. Senior Level buy in and ongoing support is essential; 5. Make sure you communicate effectively to both the business and your own department; 6. Set realistic milestones but also be bold where you can be and make sure you measure achievements in order to gauge success;

7. Don’t Stop! CSIP; 8. You’re not alone, see what peer organisations have done and learn from them, join the itSMF; 9. A good Service Management toolset will help you visualise and implement your vision; 10. Don’t forget complimentary skills such as customer care, negotiation and time management; 11. Make sure you regularly review your processes to make sure they still support business requirements; 12. Put controls in place to ensure integrity of process and data is maintained.

I would advise anyone to take heed of these pointers as not only do they help in preparation for an implementation but they keep you on track throughout the course of any project. Another suggestion would be enlisting an expert to assist you throughout a project and sharing information within your department and with your peers.

it is rarely productive for the IT department to try and drive the business to define processes if they do not already exist. use it on a day to day basis. The outcome of the consultation was that v3 differs from v2, changing from being process driven to service lifecycle driven.

As well as the paper publications and the qualifications, OGC intends to work with partners to provide a unified package of web based support offerings for ITIL users, both existing and aspiring. Examples of web material includes the process models and ITIL definitions, but might also include other support material like discussion papers, role definitions, case studies as well as examples of ITIL forms and meeting agendas.

The books for v3 were published at the end of May 2007 and some of it will be familiar: The processes we all know are, by and large, still there, but there are new processes, new functions and new roles.

From a training provider point of view, it has meant that we now have a whole new certification scheme; we have needed to devise new training courses to reflect the new syllabuses and exam structures and trainers have also had to go back to the class room to ensure that they have the appropriate level of knowledge and skill to be able to guide their students through the new processes.

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With regards to the new version, there is no need for undue worry. Just because we’re moving from v2 to v3 doesn’t mean the older version isn’t relevant anymore. Organisations should still take the pragmatic approach and implement processes that meet their business requirements. It may be that they are more comfortable with the v2 process based approach but could add some of the new ideas from v3 into the mix. Adopt and adapt is still the best approach. The new version provides transition models whereas the previous one didn’t — you couldn’t easily make the transition from design to operation. Version 3 improves the way we implement things and, because Service Management is about people and culture and the way we work (how do you demonstrate that you’re actually providing value?), it improves how we measure value, which was one of the biggest areas of concerns within IT departments.

There is much more emphasis on the integration of IT and the business, previously we used to use the word alignment. We now need to talk about integration. And we shouldn’t really be talking about IT Service Management anymore, it is just Service Management and how IT fits in with the way the business itself wants to develop.

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VALUE FROM THE SERVICE CATALOGUE Learning to speak a common language benefits IT professionals and business managers in equal measures, says Beth Sherlock

ITIL V3 has sharpened the focus on the Service Catalogue; and rightly so given that IT

Service Management is after all a service driven philosophy. It is now increasingly accepted that the Service Catalogue provides a logical layer of common ideas and understanding through which IT can align itself to the needs of business.

Certainly the onus is growing on IT departments to provide business managers with a set of products/services that are clearly defined. This is a task which requires IT to have its finger on the pulse of the business; which in turn leads the wider organisation to take account of the IT investment required to deliver and receive a certain service. The end result is that the business becomes more open to releasing the necessary funds, which ultimately allows IT to better respond to the business.

However, creating a Service Catalogue is a process that has the potential to expose flaws as well strengths. Thus it is essential to ensure that the IT environment is in good working order and can deliver the goods. What’s more, the IT team should have already established good working relations with the business, as small yet successful initiatives are the best way to prepare the ground for the Service Catalogue.

Assessing the readiness of the business itself for a Service Catalogue is also crucial. The Service Catalogue model maps top tier business services directly to business functions, thus providing a guide for service development and enabling the IT department to visibly align itself with the business. But it is rarely productive for the IT department to try and drive the business to define processes if they do not already exist.

The benefits of the Service Catalogue are there for the taking, both for IT and the business, but the question of timing is certainly a key factor in planning a successful implementation.

For more on the Service Catalogue see www.infra.co.uk

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VITAL SERVICES

The hidden power of the postcode The ultimate database interrogation tool, as Tim Pottinger explains, has found a purpose far larger than was ever envisaged by its designers

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’M SURE that when Royal Mail initially brought in the UK postcode system back in the fifties, its potential as a key piece of business intelligence for future marketing and IT strategies couldn’t have been further from their minds. And yet as database marketing and IT development has progressed over the years, the humble five to seven digit code has become something much more important in terms of customer management strategies.

Indeed the postcode has become arguably the single most crucial piece of customer data an organisation can hold for an individual, as it not only locates a person but at one stroke can also quickly identify them if needs be. This is why when you contact a call centre, the first piece of information generally requested is a postcode.

In a country of over 60million individuals the postcode is often the most accurate and simplest way to match a person with their record in a database. This becomes especially important in a time when databases are increasingly attempting to embrace a Single Customer View, linking information together

VitAL : March / April 2008

In a country of over 60million individuals the postcode is often the most accurate and simplest way to match a person with their record in a database from multiple points of customer contact to ensure that the most up to date information is available to every account handler on any individual, not matter which channel they use to contact a company. Therefore the postcode has taken on a much greater role than simply as an entry in a database field for mail merging or as a simple and effective way for the postal services to ensure the rapid delivery of mail — as a piece of data, it can impart an amazing amount of information to companies.

Originally created by Royal Mail to aid

postal delivery, the postcode can be traced back to the introduction of ten postal districts in London by Sir Rowland Hill — founder of the penny post — in 1856. During this time, mail was often vaguely addressed which had become a particular problem in London due to the capital’s rapid expansion, and the introduction of these codes served to accelerate mail circulation in London. In the 1860s, the postal district system was extended and applied to other large towns, followed by a number to denote geographical district. This system developed over time until the modern postcode as we know it today was introduced, initially in Norwich in 1959, and extended to the rest of the country by 1974.

The strength of the British postcode lies in its composition. It is one of only a handful of countries to have an alphanumeric code rather than simply being composed of digits.

The postcode can be initially broken down into 120 different Post Areas (for example, LS), which indicates which sorting office in the UK would sort the mail. The second part of the code (i.e. LS3) indicates the post

VITAL LESSONS

BE CAREFUL WHAT WE WISH FOR Sharon Taylor says what will you do when your wishes come to pass?

district, of which there are 2,500, and tells the sorting office which delivery office mail should be sent to. Then comes one of 9,000 Post Sectors, (LS3 1) telling the delivery office which local area or neighbourhood the mail should be sent to. And finally the postcode is complete with the addition of the final two letters (LS3 1EP) of which there are 1,500,000.

It is this sheer diversity of codes which is the key to its use beyond mere postal logistics.

Because the postcode is relatively complex, one code can apply to an average of only 15 houses in the whole country, allowing for very precise segmentation of the UK population.

Many other countries are unable to offer this kind of level of detail in terms of the way their codes are set up: for example, the vast majority of European codes can only support broader style segmentation.

This technique of geodemographics — grouping individuals in a database based on their location — began to be developed in the early 1960s when organisations first began clustering their customers by area. Reader’s Digest for example analysed census data to generate a profile of its current subscribers and identify similar potential customers in other areas. What makes this kind of technique possible is that the postcode denotes much more than a physical address. Geographers and spacial awareness specialists have discovered that birds of a feather do indeed flock together: similar types of people tend to cluster in certain areas and do indeed choose

the best thing that could happen to Service Management was taking it to the boardroom and not talking about technology, but talking about business issues.

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WATCHED a webcast this week with four CIO’s from some of the world’s largest companies. As the Chief Architect for ITIL, I was delighted to hear them taking about ITIL and how the latest version is spot on with its focus on business integration, business value and the service lifecycle. As a Service Management professional I see a paradigm shift developing that has benefits and drawbacks to those of us in the trenches of service management.

Three years ago, I sat in a room of CIOs and remember saying that the best thing that could happen to Service Management was taking it to the boardroom and not talking about technology, but talking about business issues.

As a Service Management professional I am pleased that after a long overdue wait,

we may finally be getting the business attention and focus that we need. A major issue in developing and maintaining ITSM momentum has always been management commitment. We generally assume that this means IT management, but think for a second what it could mean if the business was championing ITSM practice development in organizations.

The sticking point in this shift is that we as service providers must be able to articulate benefits in business value so when we have the attention of business leaders, they will understand why this is not only an IT issue but a business one as well.

Are we ready to have that conversation? I hope so, because this shift could be one of the most major advancements in the history of ITSM.

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VITAL SERVICES to locate in regions where they can be deemed to be similar to their neighbours. This shared identity reflects the way individuals behave; how they consume, for example, what media they buy, broadly speaking what they are likely to earn etc. Therefore the postcode can be used in databases to identify certain types of people which can be especially useful in terms of marketing. Because they provide a geographic grounding to this information, postcodes therefore mean that companies can find out a wide range of information from where their customers are, who nearby is likely to be interested in their products or services, to whether a new store should be placed in Leeds or Bradford and why a certain shop attracts so many visitors for a broad catchment area.

Often marketers are limited by the level of individual level information they can use as consumers are rightly protected by the Data Protection Act. Postcode level information means powerful insight can be provided as individuals are aggregated at postcode level and their individual rights and information are protected. For example, marketers aren’t allowed to use credit data at individual level for marketing but can aggregate at postcode level to make accurate assumptions about the consumers within an area, their likely credit ratings and suitability for particular offers. It is because postcodes allow for this kind of grouping which makes them such a powerful database marketing tool for this type of customer analysis — individual level information would make databases much

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too large and complex, while post sector level can be too coarse with detail ironed out by aggregating to large groups of people.

The postcode provides the main cornerstone on to which greater levels of information can be built. Varying types of information from different sources such as behavioural and attitudinal insight can be appended to customer records and through this, companies can construct a much more in depth picture

through this, companies can construct a much more in depth picture of their customers and prospects alongside insight on how these people are likely to think and act of their customers and prospects alongside insight on how these people are likely to think and act. And yet as well as being the foundation of any successful database, the postcode is equally important when it comes to maintenance; in terms of keeping records up to date, the postcode is one of the first tools used. Royal Mail offers a product called PAF — the Postcode Address File — which is the most up to date and complete address

database in the UK, containing over 28 million addresses. When it comes to creating and maintaining mailing lists and databases, PAF can be invaluable as it enables database managers to track and update any changes in the data, like people who have moved house and new postcodes which may have been introduced. Equally, suppression files which remove the deceased, goneaways (people who have now left that place) or those who have opted out of receiving information through the Mailing Preference Service (MPS) or Telephone Preference Service (TPS) from databases use postcodes to identify one entry from another.

This kind of maintenance is imperative when it comes to the success of any database, and again the postcode plays a central role.

Its function in databases is not only central when it comes to new prospect leads.

Information is increasingly being sourced from different areas — digital in particular as traditional sources of information such as the Electoral Roll and the census can not provide adequate levels of recency for modern purposes or ever growing numbers of people opting out of making their data available for marketing purposes. Digital also allows for a faster turnaround and much more up to date and responsive information. However there are frequently hurdles encountered in terms of accuracy of information gleaned using online means and here once again database managers turn to the humble postcode. As PAF is so regularly updated, screening online data against postcodes means that information can be tied, if appropriate levels of permission are given, to a name and address. The postcode and the real world information it provides are also useful in terms of screening out any inaccurate data as well as ensuring that if the information is to be used for marketing purposes, any undesirable or irrelevant entries (such as those individuals registered on the TPS and MPS) are flagged or removed. In the same way, online data can be positively validated as accurate.

As customer data becomes ever more central to the success of both UK and worldwide organisations, the postcode is likely to remain an integral part of any database in terms of tying customer data, whether it be transactional, behavioural or otherwise to real world addresses. The postcode is a versatile tool for mapping, planning and even screening and updating databases and one of the best ways to ensure any information an organisation holds is up to date and correct.

It also acts as a building block towards adding more insight and making databases still more useful when it comes to tracking all points of customer contact from telephone and post to internet and email.

VITAL SERVICES

Perhaps the time has come to think about the way we communicate and its purpose, and to consider a style appropriate to whatever we are doing

The life in letters Camilla Dunwell considers getting writing right

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KAY, SO I may have exaggerated a little but until perhaps 40 years ago, this style of letter, dictated by the manager and typed by the secretary with one copy made using carbon paper and stored in the paper file, would not have seemed as unusual as it does today. To us it seems a pointless communication saying in a few lines what we would say in one, “please settle your bill immediately”.

The truth is that the world has changed a great deal and the type of letter attempted above would never be sent from any UK business today. But have things improved?

Does the easy slang of the email or the over familiarity of the marketing letter with your first name ‘hand written’ at the top represent a better communication or just a different form of empty platitudes?

Whether in the 1950s or the early 21st century, the purpose of writing is to communicate. No, I don’t mean to sound facetious, it is just that much modern writing really doesn’t always communicate anything. As to the reason why that might be, some would blame the education system, some would blame the broadcast media for publicising the kind of lazy language that makes for words that communicate nothing (‘at this particular point in time’, ‘speaking personally for myself’) and others blame IT for making communication so easy that people cease to think about it – and it shows.

Perhaps the time has come to think about the way we communicate and its purpose, and to consider a style appropriate to whatever we are doing. Although the email is now the ubiquitous written communication of choice it is by no means a homogenous communication.

If messaging is included, electronic mail can range from gossip to full blown business

communication: so really, one style, in this case, cannot suit all.

Perhaps it all starts with the way that we open. A communication that starts ‘Hi Charley’ has not really got off to the kind of start that will fit naturally with any formal purpose that has to follow. Neither does the use of terms such as ‘LOL’, ‘grin’ or even ‘cool’ suggest any importance in the information that may precede or follow. Punctuation pictures such as :-( or ;-) or even might convey an emotion but not much more.

On the other hand, any communication opening with ‘Dear Charles’, Dear Mr Smith’ or ‘Dear Sir’ will suggest a seriousness of purpose without having to then go on and be pompous or archaic. You don’t need me to set out a letter writing guide but perhaps the best guidance could be, consider, who you are writing to, the purpose of the communication and is this just between the two of you or is it for the record? With all permutations of answer from those questions, you should be able to rely on common sense to determine an appropriate style. But remember that, unless you delete it, most email ends up on the record which some people (now unemployed) have found to their cost and with the easy facility of the ‘Forward to All’ button, you cannot really designate an email as between the two of you. Think, when composing your letter, would I be happy for this to be broadcast, for my boss to read it or for it to be used in a dispute?

This is not a plea for a return to the old letter style which would, in today’s world, have all the relevance of a top hat in the Six Nations Rugby tournament. But, perhaps it would be as well to include in training a set of guidelines that ensure that, in an electronic age when increasing numbers of managers write their own letters, there are still distinctive styles for different purposes.

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VITAL SERVICES

Out of sight: not out of mind David Perry explains how improving mobile workforce productivity depends on the real time integration of task, time and location based data

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CCORDING TO Aberdeen Group, best in class companies lead in three key performance criteria for enterprise mobility: employee responsiveness, employees’ ability to gain knowledge or data from others and increased workforce flexibility. Aberdeen identified the need to be close to customers as a key need for mobility.

Aberdeen has previously looked at the use of mobile data in the field service market, where companies are closest to their customers. Here research has shown that a 30 per cent increase in work orders completed per technician is achievable through intelligent investments in mobile workforce management solutions.

The most powerful of these integrate task, time and location based data, to provide managers and field based staff with exactly the information they need at exactly the right time so that customer service along with operating efficiencies can be maximised.

Service based organisations are facing intense pressure from increasingly demanding

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Service based organisations are facing intense pressure from increasingly demanding customers, many of whom require contracts that formally establish service level agreements (SLAs). customers, many of whom require contracts that formally establish service level agreements (SLAs). If companies don’t meet these they face penalties and, worse, lost business as

customers simply look elsewhere. At the same time, managers are expected to derive increasing productivity from the resources at their disposal.

Service management systems alone cannot enable organisations to guarantee service levels and maximise productivity. Leading firms are investing in technology which optimises field service by aligning demand (work orders and SLA commitments) with supply (the availability, capacity, aptitudes and proximity of workers) as efficiently as possible.

Such solutions typically integrate intelligent hand held mobile devices, scheduling, tracking, service management software and real time data.

They enable managers to easily gather data that gives them an up to the moment understanding of what’s going on at the frontlines of the business – the status of all activities, where field based workers are, who is working on which job and how near to completion they are.

VITAL SERVICES Managers can also access information which brings that data to life in a business context; for example, SLA commitments, overtime restrictions, customer preferences and external factors like road and weather conditions.

Armed with this information, managers can use expert systems to make decisions as to how best to schedule and assign work, to manage field workers more profitably and productively and ensure customer service levels will be met.

The real time integration of task, time and location enables the balancing of workloads and more efficient distribution of resources to realise opportunities for service improvement.

For example, schedules can be re optimised throughout the day to meet changing patterns of demand. This avoids an all too common problem among mobile workers of two engineers travelling to opposite locations and crossing paths, when the optimal solution would have been for each engineer to be allocated the customer that is nearest to their current location and convenient for the next job.

Combining the right information can also enable issues that risk interrupting service to be dealt with before they become problems.

If there’s a traffic jam, for example, the manager is alerted, and can quickly reallocate resources to ensure the targeted standards of performance are achieved.

Mobile workforce management solutions can also be synchronised with corporate applications, giving workers in the field instant access to the very latest data on orders, schedules and priorities, customers, assets and inventory.

For maintenance engineers, for example, having the right information at their fingertips – including detailed technical data and schematics – greatly increases their chances of being able to fix a problem first time. This has a positive impact on the customer as well as reducing the cost of operations.

Analysing a typical day in the life of mobile workers can bring to light opportunities for optimising productivity by eliminating idle, misspent, or over committed time. The data can also be used to forecast service demand and worker capacity, enabling more intelligent planning and the reaching of new heights in performance through adjusting resources to meet anticipated demand.

All in all, mobile workforce management solutions can bring a range of business benefits that yield higher customer satisfaction, and increased productivity. These include faster and more efficient resolution of work orders; more work orders completed per worker per day; reduced travelling time; improved response times; less administration; lower operating costs and emergency service calls

Mobile workforce management solutions can give organisations the power to proactively improve their field service, control costs, increase productivity, deliver value and achieve consistently high levels of customer satisfaction. that are escalated properly.

Aberdeen Group has found that companies which have deployed mobile field service solutions have realised, on average, a 27 per cent improvement in worker productivity, a 19 per cent increase in customer satisfaction/ retention, a 17 per cent increase in overall profitability and a 13 per cent increase in service revenues.

But these improvements will not be realised if employees don’t accept the new technology, systems and workflow processes they are expected to use. All too often, the need to maximise worker acceptance and adoption is ignored in favour of a pure focus on the technological aspects of the mobile workforce management solution. Yet is the field based workers themselves who should be at the centre of the solution; they are the organisation’s best assets, with the greatest understanding of the job and its requirements.

Service organisations should take the time to understand the user requirements of their field force, and the solution should be designed to work the way they work, with their effectiveness and productivity at its core.

Applications and processes must follow a logical workflow. The organisation’s existing business systems should be extended so that staff can operate within the environment in which they are most comfortable. The field based worker needs to receive the information that allows them to proceed effectively through

a job – with neither missing nor superfluous data, which can confuse rather than aid.

Reporting and management tasks should be kept simple, and the software and mobile devices selected need to be intuitive and easy to use, so staff can focus on the job they are there to do.

When the new solution is put in place, the organisation needs to encourage mobile workers to engage with and tap into the new developments. It should support staff, highlighting the value and benefits the solution will bring, and providing training in the new systems. Continuing support should also be available – an end user helpdesk which gets users back up and running fast if they experience an issue is crucial.

The organisations which are most successful at this vital element of implementing a mobile workforce management solution are those that partner with suppliers who are experts in these aspects of design, delivery, training and support. Mobile workforce management solutions can give organisations the power to proactively improve their field service, control costs, increase productivity, deliver value and achieve consistently high levels of customer satisfaction.

When the worker is put at the centre of the solution, equipped with the right information at the right time and dynamically linked back into the enterprise systems, customer service levels can be continually improved and company wide efficiencies achieved.

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VITAL EVENTS

The Service Desk & IT Support Show Where professionals can meet, exchange ideas and learn the latest news and developments in IT Service Management

it is where you can assess the latest tools and services that will help your organisation 46

to reach new heights

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HETHER YOUR goal is to achieve best possible IT service management, to motivate your teams to perform or to make your department highly valued, they all depend on technology and a human touch.

The Service Desk & IT Support Show is the UK’s leading event for IT service management, helpdesk, and support professionals. Taking place on 22nd & 23rd April at National Hall, Olympia, it is where you can assess the latest tools and services that will help your organisation to reach new heights.

Over two days you can meet with over 100 leading suppliers in the exhibition and develop your industry knowledge in the show’s biggest ever programme of seminars, case studies and keynotes devoted to today’s technical challenges and management issues.

The exhibition floor will feature the industry’s most innovative suppliers showing the latest service desk, remote support and asset management tools. Many of these will be launching new modules and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with existing suppliers and compare existing systems.

Away from the exhibition, you can hear the latest thinking on ITIL�v3, learn new ways to promote your department, and get to grips with benchmarking, configuration management, and much more.

Other key features of the most impressive speaker line up in the show’s history are new case studies from the London Olympic Delivery Authority, Admiral Insurance, the London Ambulance Service and Metropolitan Police Service.

VITAL EVENTS

There is also an opportunity to take part in real life service management scenarios in the Simulation Workshops

There is also an opportunity to take part in real life service management scenarios in the Simulation Workshops, and hear presentations from the country’s top analysts – Noel Bruton, Malcolm Fry and Jennifer Macniven.

The 2008 show is packed with new features including the HDI Network HUB where you can get introduced to like minded professionals for coffee table chats on your burning issues.

This year sees a special focus on the

changing face of the ITSM professional with the publication of a brand new White Paper. The research will focus on the changing roles and quality standards required of those working in an IT service management department. All pre registered visitors will be able to collect a complimentary copy of the paper at the show.

This paper will also be discussed at a Breakfast Briefing on Wednesday 23rd April at 8.30am.

A panel of practitioners will describe how their

own organisations have changed the way in which first, second and third line are recruited, trained and developed.

With a completely fresh look and feel, vibrant networking areas and a full event programme, there is no better way to spend your day. <FYI> For more information and to register please visit www.servicedeskshow.com. Entry to the show is free.

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VITAL PROCESSES

Stop thief!

Continue to conduct manual investigations

Ori Eisen suggests ten ways to enhance your anti Fraud tactics

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S FRAUDSTERS continually educate themselves to circumvent many traditional anti fraud systems there are still possible lines of action that companies can take to detect more fraudulent transactions. Using a combination of tactics is the most effective because it creates a complex net that fraudsters would have to negotiate. Here are ten key approaches to fighting fraud through your organisation.

Check for billing and shipping address Check if the billing and shipping addresses are different. In many cases the crook will send the goods to another address than the billing address. Additionally, if a crook uses a ‘drop shipment’ address, you can spot that many orders are diverted to this address and place it on a negative list.

Increase device ID data Instead of focusing on single data elements, such as the IP address, it is essential to construct a more comprehensive profile to establish the true identity of the device being used to complete a transaction. Visibility of the time that a transaction is made, compared to the time zone and the language settings of the device itself, can highlight inconsistencies. For example, if a device is supposed to be in France, but has Russian language settings and runs a transaction in the Pacific Time Zone, there is cause to investigate that case further.

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Know that IPs can be spoofed Monitoring IP addresses is not an entirely fraud proof approach. More sophisticated fraudsters are able to appear from anywhere in the world by spoofing the IP address of another computer. Where the IP address of the genuine card holder is available, they are able to make a transaction appear entirely legitimate if the IP address is a key parameter of assessing cases.

Check for lazy keystrokes Flags for suspicious activity should be raised if there are instances where names, email addresses, passwords etc. are entered using keys grouped together on the keyboard. For example, if someone uses combinations of the letters ‘asdf’, it may be because they are saving time to rush through vast amounts of data entry. These small give aways can be another tell tale sign of a suspicious customer profile.

Be wary of anonymous email addresses While many legitimate customers will use popular email clients such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, these are also an easy way for fraudsters to set up many new addresses. As email platforms, they are open to anyone, which means that you cannot trust a transaction simply because it has an easily created email address that matches the card holder’s name.

Maintain standard checking systems

Check for ‘email tumbling’

Address Verification Systems (AVS), Card Verification Values (CVV2) and Verify are all important security mechanisms. They cut out a lot of low level fraud, especially from one off or unprepared fraudsters. These systems put up an important barrier that legitimate consumers do not find difficult to overcome.

A quick and easy way to pick out organised fraud is to spot sequential email addresses — signs of ‘email tumbling’. If you have transactions from joebloggs001@, joebloggs002@, joebloggs003@ etc, then these are signs that a fraudster is automatically generating email addresses.

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While automatic analysis tools will pick out links between some transactions based on data that may not be obvious to a fraud investigator, there is an important place for human reviews. While it should not constitute more than around five per cent of all fraud analysis, it is important to establish themes that a computer would not be aware of. For example, would a computer pick out the names David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard as all being linked if they were disparate in almost every other way? This is where a human eye can pick out cases that require further investigation.

Capitalise on discovering bad transactions If you uncover a fraudulent transaction, it can be the key to discovering a raft of similar cases. Use every parameter of information relating to the original case that you can find, and search for any others that share the same details — even if that is only in one parameter. The similarity may be small — it could be the email, postal address, phone number, or the time zone — but as these correlations build, you will be able to pinpoint more cases that could be bad.

Use free mapping tools Free to use mapping services, such as Google Maps, can be used to add more weight to an investigation. If someone has given a ‘residential’ address, then you can check that it is residential and not commercial. If someone has different shipping and billing addresses, you can ascertain whether the addresses are close together.

If they are miles apart, there is reason to be suspicious.

Many of these approaches will raise red flags on suspicious cases. However, focusing in on only one or two will mean that there are still many transactions that can slip through the net. The parameters that you choose to set as a business will depend on a wide range of factors — from the characteristics of your customer base to the capability of your fraud team — but within these ten steps are approaches that will cut some fraud from your business.

The CFO wants better margins.

The CMO wants higher brand awareness.

The COO wants better ways to manage costs.

The CEO simply wants results.

The CIO has to deliver all of the above and now has a way to make it happen.

Welcome to Business Service Management from BMC Software.

Business Service Management (BSM) means the goals of IT are the same as the goals of the business. And with proven software and processes from BMC Software, BSM can be implemented in stages, demonstrating the value of IT as you go. ITIL v.3 incorporates BSM as a best practice. All business success stories have to start somewhere. With BSM from BMC Software, they begin in IT.

Visit us at stand H8/9 at ITSMF on 12-14 November 2007 to find out more about BSM and ITIL v.3.

Š 2007 BMC Software, Inc. All Right Reserved.

VITAL PEOPLE AND PROFESSIONS

Tapping the pool of knowledge Ben Clacy asked three questions of ten Service Managers; the answers will make you think

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E ASKED ten itSMF members three questions on the role Service Management; how it improves the business now and likely changes in the next five years, what its relationship is with the CIO, and where Service Management should fit in the organisation.

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Our first question; ‘How does Service Management improve your business and how do you expect that to change within the next five years?

The benefits of using service management throughout the business ranged from: ensuring customer needs are considered at many different levels, establishing robust and repeatable processes for the delivery of quality IT services and providing a structured

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approach to the delivery of IT. So we asked four members to explain further: Andrew Hibbert (AH), Head of Infrastructure Services, Department for Work and Pensions: “Service Management allows us to identify where service requirements are being met or if they fall short of business expectations.”

“This provides a vehicle for assisting the business in making investment decisions, and working with internal and supplier groups to identify and then prioritise service improvement needs and activities. As service offerings are still a predominant driving force in differentiating organisations from each other I do not see this reducing, but increasing over the next five years.

“A fundamental change over the last few years has been ITIL qualifications and experience no longer being a key differentiator between job candidates, but moving to be an expected essential in IT professionals, which will become more of the norm as ITIL pervasiveness increases further. Service Management will potentially be forgotten about as something special, and be seen as the normal way of operating an effective, efficient IT operation and business unit.”

Dieter Kraftner (DK), Head of IT Services at Bournemouth University offered an entirely different perspective on the changes he anticipated happening in the education sector: “Service Management ensures IT professionals

VITAL PEOPLE AND PROFESSIONS us to keep up with increasing user demands without increasing our cost, which benefits the business financially.”

Many itSMF members have observed that ITIL v3 with its full service lifecycle approach will provide value for money for the business.

Ian MacDonald (IM), Head of Service Improvement, Co-Operative Financial Services: “Service Management establishes the framework to enable IT to deliver quality IT services on a consistent basis. Proactive dialogue with the business ensures IT services evolve with changing business needs. It also has a key role as the ‘conscience’ of the IT organisation to ensure a business focus is maintained.

“Looking forward, Service Management capability needs to evolve to meet the challenges of rapid business change, increasing dependency on suppliers and greater exploitation of technology to deliver new ways of doing business. The expectation and demand to deliver value for money and ROI of course are ever increasing.

“ITIL v3 recognises these challenges and positions Service Management now to exert more control over the full service lifecycle to have a positive impact on service quality, cost and risk. The emphasis on Continual Service Improvement is also important in influencing the business view of ‘value for money’.”

The Audit Commission use Service Management in an innovative way which could also be adopted by organisations looking for ways to cut down on training when introducing new staff to the company.

“Service Management will potentially be forgotten about as something special, and be seen as the normal way of operating an effective, efficient IT operation and business unit.”

speak the same ‘language’, vital in larger IT departments, which often become silos amongst themselves in specialist areas. Having Service Management processes, standards and terminologies helps us to be more efficient in the way we communicate with each other internally, which improves service delivery to the benefit of the end user and as such to the business.”

“For example, in the University, the students joining us mostly come from a ‘digital household’ and are expecting access to systems and information anywhere and anytime. So for us it means that we have to do far more with the same resources. Without Service Management we would be struggling to do that. Having effective Service Management processes with continual improvement, allows

Martin Neville (MN), Head of Service Management at the Audit Commission: “We have a new starters process — when an employee comes into the organisation there is a combination of IT, HR, Finance: all of these people have to get together to make sure that the new person when they arrive has the right equipment, got a desk etc., By applying the techniques we learnt during the ITIL process, we map the whole process out, we know who does what, when and where. We’ve got that down from originally two weeks to go through the whole cycle down to six days. That’s pretty powerful for the whole organisation.

Martin goes on to predict the next five years.

“At the moment we’re just reviewing all of our processes and we’re seeing more areas where we can improve and cut down on the duplication. We’re cutting lead times on delivery areas, we’re starting to implement some good reporting, and we are trying to tie our balance score card into the corporate balance score card, showing how we directly influence

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VITAL PEOPLE AND PROFESSIONS

corporate targets. As a result we’re actually showing the business how we are supporting their goals and demonstrating opportunities for future strategic development.”

Second question; ‘How do you see the role of Service management changing in five years time and its relationship/value at CIO level?’

We have already learned how some organisations are using service management and how they expect that to improve their business over the next five years, but this next question focuses on service management changing over the next five years and its relationship and value at CIO level.

Andrew Watson (AW), Chief Information Officer, British Transport Police: “Over the last five years the biggest change for Service Management was to have come to the fore as a discipline in its own right.

Over the next five years it has to mature into a profession in its own right.

“You could restate that as businesses now expect the management of technology services to be more understandable, repeatable and business focused, it is almost impossible to meet this expectation with a traditional,

IT should live under IT Service Management! helpdesk. A CIO needs a stable and repeatable set of technology services to leverage business change and improvement from them, so it is in their own best interests to have best of breed service management across the full gambit of services.

“The disciplines of Service Management demand active and objective monitoring of all facets of services offered by and through technology. There are numerous advantages to this approach, but mostly it allows CIOs to demonstrate a justification for staff and budget provisions through a relationship to services.”

The use of a common IT language in service management was raised as a benefit a number of times especially when used between supplier and organisation.

Amanda Clow (AC), IT Customer Services Manager, English Partnerships: “The role of Service Management is set to change. With the release of ITIL v3, Service Management will be considered as a strategic asset of the organisation and not just a service

provided to the organisation.

“By adding business value through developing strategic assets and services, the importance of IT will be placed much higher on the agenda of most organisations but particularly those enlightened enough to recognise that their main asset is information.

By IT professionals talking the same language as the business, CIOs will be able to understand what Service Management is aiming for in adding business value through a portfolio of services that meet their particular demands at that point in time, but most importantly in supporting their changing needs and exploiting new opportunities as they emerge.”

Our third and final question; ‘Should Service Management remain predominately in IT or another department, if so which?’

This is one of those questions which often spark debate with Service Management professionals and we did get a valuable insight from itSMF members with each offering their own view on where the Service Management role should be best placed within an organisation.

Views divided into three broad camps: the IT camp; the customer services camp and the ‘lets spark a debate’ camp. The overwhelming

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VITAL PEOPLE AND PROFESSIONS point on which they all agreed was that IT is becoming more integrated into the business, and only, if really pushed, was a camp chosen and a reason offered for the choice;

IT CAMP DK: “I personally see Service Management as the way of management of IT. In other words if you take it out of IT then there would not be much left in IT, because essentially it’s about managing the IT service.

“Service Management is the way to align IT with the business, moving it outside the IT department would be counter productive as all the benefits gained over the recent years of gradually moving IT closer to the business would be lost.”

AH: “While Service Management is IT focused it should stay with IT, as this is principally the area that Service Management is used within, and provides a direct link and control to the IT Services and associated infrastructure.

I do however hold a view that ITIL Service Management disciplines are at least as valuable within a business a context as to an IT context.”

Alim Ozcan, Head of IM&T CS & Networks, London Ambulance Service NHS Trust (AO): “I don’t believe IT should live under a ‘traditional’ IT department. However I believe that service management should live within IT, but in a department that has energy, enthusiasm and focus. So you need to challenge those attitudes. So my key point is that service management should be within IT, and IT should change to adopt service management.”

CUSTOMER SERVICES CAMP Neil Larvin (NL), Head of Operational IT, Warrington Borough Council: “Service Management should be embedded into the culture of any organisation providing a service. It shouldn’t be solely owned with IT. Let’s face it, all the IT profession has done is to formalise the various disciplines that make up Service Management - an ‘accident black spot’ was a problem identified on our roads and around long before ITIL. “The Service Management role should be owned and developed by the organisation’s customer service function, irrespective of the customers being internal or external. Service Management terminology is now commonly used throughout organisations so it should hold no fears for those outside of IT.”

LET’S SPARK THE DEBATE CAMP Kevin Holland (KH), Head of Information Quality and Improvement, NHS Connecting for Health:

“Actually I’d like to turn the question on its head.

IT should live under IT Service Management!

Seeing as IT Service Management is the bridge between the business and IT, why would you want it managed by IT? “Today only a small number of CIO’s understand the true value of service management. We will know we have got there when we see a director of IT Service Management on the Board. And once we get there, we should then drop the word ‘IT’, because it isn’t just about information technology, it’s about delivery of service value into the business. Information technology is just one of the enablers of that value provision; we must not forget people, partners and process!”

AC: “If an organisation already works to ITIL standards and has a Service Management culture within their IT department it seems logical for this to be the starting point for bringing other services into the frame, after all why reinvent the wheel? However, if an organisation is starting from scratch it may well be worthwhile considering setting up a new department which can focus totally on the needs of their customers whether they be for services from IT, Office Facilities, HR,

My firm belief is that ITIL is the day job for everybody

Finance etc.

“The clear benefit here would the opportunity to design services without the baggage of ‘how things are done around here’ or put another way, a chance to change the culture of the organisation.”

AW: “This really depends on your business. If the provision of services that follow a service desk, incident resolution approach is not a core component of the wider business, then separating technology service management from the technology department is not a good idea.

“The simpler solution to this is to evidence the exceptional service management processes that ITIL has to offer and to absorb the SM components of other departments/functions into the technology department. We do this in BTP already with Finance service calls. The other component to this is to have a CIO that isn’t just a rebadged Head of IT. A CIO that owns and understands organisational processes and information flows should already be aware of the service management issues across the whole organisation.”

MN: “I don’t believe it should live anywhere.

My job title is Head of Service Management, but I think that’s misleading because that then pigeon holes ITIL into one little area. My firm belief is that ITIL is the day job for everybody, so pigeon holing it into one area is a big mistake.

It’s not what someone else does it’s what we all do on a daily basis. ITIL is the day job.”

IM: “I think the real question is not should service management live under IT, but rather is Service Management now more than just IT? In today’s complex and dynamic business environment, the business invariably now has dependencies not just on IT services but a range of business services. Whilst IT continues to have a major influence on the customer experience, ultimately all elements of the business process and service chain are key.

“The skills and experiences gained in IT Service Management are easily transferable to provide capability in managing the total ‘business service’. So, there is a case to challenge where Service Management best fits. But this needs to be less about ‘moving the deck chairs’ but leveraging existing capability to provide greater value.”

This has provided us with quite a lot to think about but, perhaps more than anything, it shows what a dynamic area Services Management has become and how much the people involved are taking the building kit that ITIL has given them to create a management profession suited to business today. Thank you to all of our participants for their well thought through and well expressed answers to some tough questions.

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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VITAL PROFILE

when one starts to consider the scale of that undertaking and, therefore the scale of everything it does, you begin to realise the awesome challenges that poses for its own Service Managers

A system for health John Hancock looks further into the body of the Health Service to find what will make it tick in the future

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OU HEAR it increasingly said these days that IT is no longer a function that works for the organisation but is more often a vital organ of the organisation. What organisation that didn’t have IT in the blood would attempt to make all of its information plus any information that is relevant to its work available to all of its own people and any other users who wish to know? You might as well burn a stick and write the information on a dry cave wall in the hope that passers by might see it.

VitAL : March / April 2008

But what then if that information happened to form one of the largest bodies of knowledge in the world; and was renewing at such a rate that there were 30,000 regular journals dedicated to the latest news plus countless academic papers and the notes of practitioners in the sector, all to be made available in real time? What, also, if your subject was one of the most popular topics ever and your core audience numbered 700,000 while your wider audience numbered nearly sixty million in your home country alone? What if people relied

on the knowledge you provided for life and death decisions, not the kind of life and death decisions that fabricate ersatz pressure in a TV Reality show but the kinds of decision which, if wrong, could really end with somebody’s death?

Its easy for journalists, from the comfort of our chairs to create some good ‘shock horror’ copy about the National Health Service and its eye watering IT budget but when one starts to consider the scale of that undertaking and, therefore the scale of everything it does, you

VITAL PROFILE

as a network of knowledge providers such as Nice [National Institute for Clinical Excellence] and the Department of Health. Once a piece of knowledge has been is procured, it is placed in the National Library for Health from where users can access it through either a search engine or by email notification [for those who have registered their interest in particular areas]. Essentially the National knowledge Service is a knowledge supply chain.

surveys of patient experience has shown that patients value knowledge and want more knowledge to help them make decisions related to their own health begin to realise the awesome challenges that poses for its own Service Managers and the potential value that everybody might gain if it can get it right.

In the previous issue of VitAL, we interviewed Ian McKinnell, Head of Development at the National Library for Health. For this issue we went to see Sir Muir Gray, Director of the NHS National Knowledge Service. The government is probably the single largest user if IT in the country and the NHS is probably the most extensive user of IT within the public sector;

plus, with the much publicised cost of new systems, readers may well be interested to know what is being planned and achieved.

We asked the VitAL questions.

VitAL: What is the NHS National Knowledge Service?

Sir Muir Gray: Our purpose is to first discover what clinicians, patients and managers need then having established what that is, we set out to find it, procure it and deliver its at the point of need. The knowledge service is structured

V: How does the Service fit in to the health service and what does it mean for the ordinary patient?

SMG: We supply our product to the health service wherever it is needed: it’s rather like being an electricity provider but we are delivering knowledge. [In the previous interview we learned the various ways in which clinicians and academics can access knowledge in the health sector] but will also serve patients; and patients can get their knowledge through NHS Choices. Picker Europe surveys of patient experience has shown that patients value knowledge and want more knowledge to help them make decisions related to their own health or procedures that they may be facing.

The fact is that the application of knowledge has a far bigger impact on the quality of health and combating disease than any new drugs or technology.

V: What are the ongoing issues and challenges that the Service faces?

SMG: Because of its considerable size and complexity, infrastructure is a major problem for the NHS and in particular for the distribution of knowledge within the service.

There is a major issue in getting knowledge from the source to the point of use and that is being tackled by Connecting for Health, to be found at www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk .

People want more information and knowledge and it is our job to get it to them.

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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VITAL PROFILE

the overarching ambition of connecting everybody who wants to use it to every piece of health related knowledge that they could conceivably want to use

V: What issues, challenges and opportunities has the Service faced as part of the current change climate in the NHS and in particular what have been the IT issues etc?

SMG: The way the IT is going [within all of the other changes] is both a challenge and an opportunity. We are dependent on Web 2.0 and really, on that side of our operation, things can only get easier with the progress of time and change. The enormous opportunity for us is that people always want knowledge and especially in an area such as health which impinges so personally on them. IT makes it possible for us to deliver to our users what they want, when they want it and in a form that suits what they are doing.

V: Who are currently the largest users of the NHS National Knowledge Service and will that change as a result of the current development programme?

SMG: Currently our largest users are General Practitioners, Nurses and Doctors in training.

They all use the service for checking clinical evidence and I think that that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

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V: What are the future plans for the Service?

SMG: We want to extend the service on two levels really. In the first case we want to extend the number of people who can access what we’re doing at the moment or whatever new services we are able to offer. Beyond that we want to extend the scope of the service, that is to say the type of services and the type of knowledge that we are able to offer.

V: Are there any other issues concerning this NHS National Knowledge Service and the IT developments that need to be recorded?

SMG: I think that most of those were covered during your interview last time with Ian McKinnell.

VitAL : March / April 2008

In this most recent interview as well as in our last meeting with Ian McKinnell, we have seen a very ambitious vision for what IT can do in terms of making more knowledge more widely available by more means.

Even the most cursory glance at the website NHS Connecting for Health will reveal a facility of considerable ambition. With no less than 27 first level facilities or capabilities, each one of which is simply a portal through which the user can drill further down into the service’s knowledge base, this website alone is already beginning to attain ‘BBC’ dimensions. Just going into the NHS Care Records Service reveals two further knowledge paths for Patients and NHS Staff. Beyond that, patients can access a further level in which more than a dozen alternative information routes become available.

And beyond this technical ambition of leading each user to the appropriate knowledge source for the task they wish to complete today, there lies the overarching ambition of connecting everybody who wants to use it to every piece of health related knowledge that they could conceivably want to use. In any sphere of human activity that would be a daunting undertaking: in the health sector where such massive amounts of knowledge published daily, where progress renders so much information out of date so quickly and where peoples thirst and knowledge is driven by the very human desire to maintain our physical condition at the best possible level, the undertaking is Herculean.

It is to be hoped that as the National Health Library and Knowledge Service both overcome the enormous challenges against which they have set themselves, they will also generate and publish the kind of useful information that every organisation out there will find valuable but which it might find prohibitively expensive to generate for itself.

In our two interviews with the service we have learned of its ambitions and of its current thinking as to how those ambitions might be achieved. Of course all of that will change and evolve as the programmes progress and so we hope that at some stage in the future we will be able to return to this subject and learn what further insights and methodologies have been developed to facilitate what must be one of the most ambitious programmes of its type ever.

Meanwhile our thanks to both Ian McKinnell for the previous interview and to Sir Muir Gray for this current interview and for revealing to us some of the work that is going on to put IT into our Health Service.

VITAL PLANET

Waste not If you thought that you’d left the ‘Three Rs’ at school, Camilla Dunwell suggests that you think again

T

HE WAY economic activities impact on the environment has become a defining concern of modern corporate behaviour. There are a lot of topics that define environmental impact such as land remediation and risk management but the best place to start is one that every office can relate to; waste, and what to do with it.

And before you answer, ‘throw it away’, I ought to explain that disposal is the most expensive option. Waste, once thrown away, becomes lost or polluting materials which has made commercial waste disposal an increasingly expensive choice. Councils charge over and above the business rates in order to collect trade waste and disposal in any local amenity (tip) or landfill site will incur a charge. These days, waste management is a cost effective application of any organisation’s resources.

Consumer taste is moving towards concern about the environmental credentials of products and services, and the organisations that supply them. Shrewd businesses already make their use of less packaging, which creates less waste, a part of their brand value. And if that packaging is constructed from former waste products, so much the better: there is a strong moral case for waste management as well as the obvious economic benefits.

What is more, organisations that think with waste management in mind about the materials and energy that they use will gain a better understanding of their supply

chain and that will most likely generate other useful information about alternative resources and what opportunities they might offer the business. Cost savings, marketing high moral ground and brand supporting design such as chairs in the restaurants at Cornwall’s Eden Project – memorable talking points made from recycled used plastic cups from the project’s cafeteria – can all make waste management an added value alternative. Waste management can also be stylish.

If none of the above moves you, then perhaps the law will. Poor waste management is increasingly the target of environmental legislation that aims to stamp out the archaic attitude that stuff you’ve finished with can simply be thrown away, burnt off or allowed to soak into the ground. From clean air acts to landfill laws to rules on disposing of toxins, and penalising disposal where recycling is possible, one of the fastest growing bodies of UK legislation is environmental law.

There is an idea that will kick start developing a waste management policy for any organisation. The three ‘Rs’ (‘Reduce’, ‘Re use’ and ‘Recycle’) offer a simple guide.

• Reduce use of materials and energy.

Discourage over ordering and stockpiling of materials, or overnight lighting of areas that do not need it. Encourage carrying unused material over to the next job, eliminating

unnecessary duplicates, triplicates etc. and considering whether product design could reduce material used.

• Re use any items that are not spent such as using nearly clean paper for note taking or refilling ink cartridges for a couple of extra uses. On a small scale, encourage people to re use envelopes and jiffy bags by supplying appropriate address labels and, on a larger scale, cascade replaced technology (hardware and software) from demanding customer facing or R&D areas to less demanding areas of the organisation.

• Recycling may not be so easy to manage inside the business but try to dispose of as much as possible to recycling specialists.

Equally, there is a growing range of products from recycled materials and their quality is now as good as the new made equivalents.

Then there is a fourth ‘R’ in Recovery of ingredients and energy from waste. Again, it may not be something that most organisations can do for themselves but it is an option when dealing with waste.

Inasmuch as it can reduce costs and mitigate damage to the planet, waste management is not rocket science; it is simply common sense, sensibly applied.

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March / April 2008 : VitAL

DIRECTORY

Address Management & Database Solutions CAPSCAN

Grand Union House, 20 Kentish Town Road, London NW1 9BB T: +44 (0)20 7428 1255 F: +44 (0)20 7267 2745 W: www.capscan.com C: Kate Overton, CRM Manager E: enquiries@capscan.com Capscan is a leading supplier of international addressing software and data integrity services. The company’s award-winning solutions enable you to capture, verify and enhance name and address data. They help organisations to lower costs, reduce fraud and improve customer service.

Enterprise Software Configuration Management MKS SYSTEMS LTD

Duke’s Court, Duke Street, Woking, Surrey, GU21 5BH T: 01483 733 900 F: 01483 733901 W: www.mks.com/uk C: Lara Sparkes, Marketing Manager E: lara.sparkes@mks.com Founded in 1984, MKS’s ALM solution and its single architecture, drives high levels of user productivity, facilitates rapid deployment, issue management and process standardisation while delivering a complete view of application development activity through real-time metrics, trends and reporting.

Customer Service & Call Centre Solutions CUSTOMER SERVICE NETWORK

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Creative Industries Centre, Wolverhampton Science Park, Wolverhampton, WV10 9TG T: 01902 311641 F: 01902 311637 W: www.customernet.com C: Chris Walker E: chrisw@customernet.com Customer Service Network are experts in Customer and Employee perception measurement. We work with many of the UK’s leading names to help them better understand what their customers and people want. Contact us to find out how we can help.

VitAL : March / April 2008

EGAIN COMMUNICATIONS

ICCM SOLUTIONS

258 Bath Road, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4DX T: +44 (0) 1753 464646 F: +44 (0) 1753 464647 W: www.egain.com E: ukinfo@egain.com eGain is a leading provider of customer service and contact centre software.

Over 800 enterprise customers worldwide have relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centres, help desks and web customer service operations into multichannel customer interaction hubs.

Unit 4 Charlton Business Park, Crudwell Road, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, SN16 9RU T: + 44 (0) 1666 828 600 F: + 44 (0) 1666 826103 W: www.iccm.co.uk C: Jessica Yeung E: info@iccm.co.uk ICCM supply Service software solutions & ITIL V2 & V3 training and consultancy to over 400 global clients in both the private and public sector. e-Service Desk is PinkVerify™ Service Support Enhanced, proving compatibility and pedigree for organisations seeking to align their business with industry best practice.

General Training UKCMG

Suite A1, Kebbell House, Carpenders Park, Watford. WD19 5BE T: + 44 (0) 20 8421 5330 F: + 44 (0) 20 8421 5457 W: www.ukcmg.org.uk C: Laura Goss, UKCMG Secretariat E: ukcmg@ukcmg.org.uk UKCMG is an independent, non-profit, user group organisation targeted at improving members’ knowledge, skills and abilities in Capacity Management and related IT service management disciplines.

We achieve this through a combination of events including, a three-day Annual Conference and networking between endusers, consultants & suppliers

Helpdesk Internal/External IBERTEK

Venture House, Arlington Square, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1WA T: F: W: C: E:

01344 742835 01344 742935 www.ibertek.com Nigel Todd Nigel.todd@ibertek.com

IBERTEK specialises in delivering successful ITIL compatible Service Management and complimentary Solutions to organisations of all sizes in all ranges of vertical markets.

Industry body IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT FORUM

150 Wharfedale Road, Winnersh Triangle, Wokingham, Berkshire. RG41 5RG T: 0118 918 6503 F: 0118 969 9749 W: www.itsmf.co.uk C: Ben Clacy E: ben.clacy@itsmf.co.uk The itSMF is the only internationally recognised and independent organisation whose sole focus is on the on-going development and promotion of IT Service Management ’best practice‘, standards and qualifications.

The forum has 14,000 UK members and official itSMF chapters in 44 countries.

IT Asset Management BMC SOFTWARE

Assurance House, Vicarage Road, Egham, Surrey. TW20 9JY T: +44 (0) 1784 478 000 F: +44 (0) 1784 430 581 W: www.bmc.com/uk C: Michelle Sunnick E: michelle_sunnick@bmc.com BMC Software is a leading global provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to automate their IT and increase its business value. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management.

DIRECTORY

IT Service Management Systems EMC

Tower, Great West Road, Brentford, TW8 9AN, UK T: +44 (0)208 758 6750 F: +44 (0)208 758 6751 W: http://uk.emc.com/smarts/itil C: Suhela Dighe, Marketing Director E: EMCsmartsEMEA@emc.com As part of EMC’s Resource Management solutions, EMC Smarts for ITIL process automation and CMDB strategy empower customers to roll out their ITIL initiatives with minimum risk, automatically populate their CMDB with real-time information on Network, Server and Application resources.

Your VitAL Magazine News Views Strategy Management Case studies and Opinion pieces To advertise in VitAL contact Grant Farrell on +44 (0) 870 863 6930

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EPICOR

IXIF LIMITED

: 1 The Arena, Downshire Way, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG21 1PU T: 0800 3161155 F: 01344 468020 W: www.epicor.com C: Rachel Barber-Kebby E: Euromarketing@epicor.com With over 20 years experience and 15,000 customers, Epicor is a leading provider of ITSM Solutions.

Epicor ITSM provides a robust set of service management features that supports the key IT processes outlined by the ITIL.

Connect House, 21 Willow Lane, Mitcham, Surrey, CR4 4NA

FRONTRANGE SOLUTIONS

HORNBILL SYSTEMS

T: F: W: C: E:

020 8274 3359 020 8274 3393 www.ixif.net Royston Adamson-Green rag@ixif.net

IXIF’s MidGuard is a critical component within the ITIL framework Best Practice for Service Delivery and Service Level Agreement reporting.

IXIF is also a Jacarta Platinum Reseller for environmental monitoring products, essential for lowering your carbon footprint in the Datacentre.

™

100 Longwater Avenue, GreenPark, Reading, RG2 6GP T: +44 (0)870 401 7300 F: +44 (0)870 401 7301 W: www.frontrange.co.uk C: Kirsty Waller E: Kirsty.waller@frontrange.com With over 8500 customers worldwide, FrontRange are the leading provider of consolidated IT Service solutions, including: • HEAT Service & Support – Award-winning Incident Management & Helpdesk Automation • FrontRange ITSM – Fully integrated, scalable, ITIL aligned IT Service & Infrastructure Management.

INFRA CORPORATION

Connaught House, Portsmouth Road, Send, Surrey GU23 7JY T: +44 (0) 148 321 3200 F: +44 (0) 148 321 3201 W: www.infra.co.uk C: Lindsay Potter E: Lindsay.potter@infra.co.ukm Infra is the international developer of 100% web-based ITSM solution infraEnterprise - including Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release, Availability and Service Level Management. infraEnterprise supports industry best practice methodology such as ITIL and KCS, delivering best value for comparative depth of functionality.

Ares, Odyssey Business Park, West End Road, Ruislip, HA4 6QD T: 020 8582 8282 F: 020 8582 8288 W: www.hornbill.com C: Sales E: info@hornbill.com Supportworks’ Enterprise Support Platform (ESP) provides a fully integrated platform for automating and managing Service Management related processes.

Supportworks ESP is the foundation of Hornbill’s ITIL, Helpdesk, Customer, HR and Industry Support solutions.

Supportworks ITSM is certified Pink Verify Enhanced.

IT Service Management Consultants ICORE

60 Lombard Street, London. EC3V 9EA T: +44 (0) 207 464 8414 F: +44 (0) 207 464 8888 W: www.icore-ltd.com C: Jane Tweddle – iCore Sales & Marketing Director E: info@icore-ltd.com The UK’s largest independent service management consultancy, this year iCore celebrates ten years in operation. Our services include maturity assessment, process design and development, service improvement and more. iCore has consultants who are fully qualified in ITIL, COBIT, ISO20000 and PRINCE2.

March / April 2008 : VitAL

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DIRECTORY

IT Service Management Consultants PINK ELEPHANT

Atlantic House, Imperial Way, Reading. RG2 0TD T: F: W: C: E:

+ 44 (0) 118 903 6824 + 44 (0) 118 903 6282 www.pinkelephant.com Frances Fenn info.emea@pinkelephant.com

Acknowledged worldwide as niche, independent, IT Service Management Education and Consulting providers.

Having trained more people than any other company in ITIL related subjects since 1987, we have contributed to all 3 versions of the ITIL books.

G2G3

Panama House, 14 The High Street, Lasswade, EH18 1ND T: + 44 (0) 131 461 3333 F: + 44 (0) 131 663 8934 W: www.g2g3.com C: David Arrowsmith E: info@g2g3.com

Lewes Enterprise Centre, 112 Malling St, Lewes, E Sussex, BN7 2RJ

G2G3 is the leading provider of communication tools, gaming solutions and simulations that propel enterprise IT and business alignment. Headquartered in the UK, G2G3 has a strong global network of partners supporting the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

STI has been presenting Helpdesk courses since 1989. They are the longest established in the UK and probably Europe. We present at 7 UK public venues and frequently on-site. We are also an Authorised Training Partner for Help Desk Institute.

WARDOWN CONSULTING

IT Service Management Systems NETSUPPORT SOFTWARE

Prudence Place, Proctor Way, Luton, Bedfordshire. LU2 9PE

Towngate East, Market Deeping, Peterborough, PE6 8NE

T: F: W: C: E:

T: F: W: C: E:

01582 488242 01582 488343 www.wardownconsulting.co.uk Rosemary Gurney rosemary.gurney@wardownconsulting.co.uk

Wardown Consulting was established to help businesses capitalise from the substantial benefits that IT Service Management can deliver. Our consultants boast a wealth of industry experience and are accredited to deliver ITIL v2 and v3 training.

IT Service Management Consulting Training CONNECTSPHERE

IT Support Training STI

+44 (0) 1778 382270 +44 (0) 1778 382280 www.netsupportsoftware.co.uk Neil McLenahan neil@netsupportsoftware.co.uk

NetSupport are developers of desktop management and remote control software packages. The product range comprises NetSupport Manager Remote Control, NetSupport DNA Helpdesk (providing a web-based ITIL-compliant helpdesk), NetSupport DNA Asset Management Suite and NetSupport Protect desktop security and recovery.

TOUCHPAPER SOFTWARE

T: F: W: C: E:

01273 890922 01273 890513 www.sti-ltd.co.uk John Fahey enquiries@sti-ltd.co.uk

Publications, Events, Conferences CUSTOMER MAGAZINE

31 Media, Crawley Business Centre, Stephenson Way, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 1TN T: +44 (0) 870 863 6930 F: +44 (0) 870 085 8837 W: www.31media.co.uk C: Grant Farrell E: grant.farrell@31media.co.uk

Customer is a UK based magazine for senior proffeisonals who are committed to ensuring their businesses are totally customer centric. With a pragmatic eidtorial

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Business and Technology Centre, Bessemer Drive, Stevenage, Hertfordshire SG1 2DX T: +44 (0)845 838 2345 F: +44 (0) 845 838 2346 W: www.connectsphere.com C: Shirley Lacy E: shirley.lacy@connectsphere.com ConnectSphere has a great track record in delivering in successful service improvement programmes that deliver value. Let ConnectSphere help you to plan and apply ISO 20000 and ITIL service management practices using our assessment, consultancy, implementation and training services.

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Dukes Court, Duke Street, Woking, Surrey GU21 5RT T: +44 (0) 1483 744444 F: +44(0) 1483 744401 W: www.touchpaper.com C: Louisa Maguire E: intouch@touchpaper.com With over 20 years’ experience, Touchpaper is one of the most established international providers of IT Business Management (ITBM) solutions (covering IT Service Management, Customer Service Solutions and Network & Systems Management). Touchpaper serves 1,800 customers and 3 million users.

approach Cusitomer aims to bring clarity and vision to a sector that has become increasingly complex.

Published six times per year and distributed to over 10,000 managers and directors Customer is The Publication for any individual or business that wishes to understand how to align themselves so they can deliver a complete customer experience.

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VITAL FOCUS GROUPS

Your VitAL Magazine News, Views, Strategy Management Case studies and Opinion pieces

31 Media, Crawley Business Centre, Stephenson Way, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 1TN T: F: W: C: E:

+44 (0) 870 863 6930 +44 (0) 870 085 8837 www.31media.co.uk Grant Farrell grant.farrell@31media.co.uk

To advertise in VitAL contact Grant Farrell on +44 (0) 870 863 6930

The VitAL Focus Groups are peer to peer discussion forums that take

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place at regular intervals throughout the year and provide a solid platform

ISEB

Advertiser index

for senior IT professionals to discuss,

BMC .................................................49

debate, and hopefully resolve some of their key challenges. Each session

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is held at a prestigious London venue and is facilitated by a leading industry supplier who lends their expertise to assist in the discussions. Supported by VitAL Magazine, the leading industry publication, the Focus Groups are a ‘must attend’ for any professional that is serious about IT.

Qualifications and Accreditations AIM ACADEMY

T: +44 (0) 1793 417530 F: +44 (0) 1793 417570 W: www.iseb-exams.com C: Stephen Daniels E: Qualsmarketing@hq.bcs.org.uk ISEB is a worldwide IT exam body.

ISEB have provided 165,000 exams in the last 3 years to IT Professionals worldwide, covering eight major subject areas including ITIL, Software Testing, Business Analysis, Project Management, Systems Development and IT Law.

Recruitment BALE IT SERVICES

British Computer Society (ISEB)....25 Customer Magazine.......................11 Customer Service Network...........52 eGain ...............................................54 G2G3................................................29 Hornbill.................Inside Front Cover ICCM.................................................21 iCore...................................................6 Infra....................................................9 itSMF................................................65

Station House, Stamford New Road, Altrincham, Cheshire, WA14 1EP T: 0161 942 2121 F: 0161 941 4873 W: www.aimacademy.com C: Paul Flanagan E: paul.flanagan@aimacademy.com Aim Academy specialises in accredited training in: Prince2, ITIL, APMP, MSP. We are committed to offering the highest quality end to end service with courses delivered by experienced practitioners. Whatever your needs we can make your learning enjoyable and successful.

Wincombe Business Centre, Shaftesbury, Dorset. SP7 9QJ T: F: W: C: E:

01747 855607 01747 853579 www.baleit.co.uk Dan Jenkins dan.jenkins@baleit.co.uk

We specialise in your IT Service Management Permanent and Contract recruitment requirements. We have distinctive differentiators for both Candidates and Clients alike setting us apart from other agencies. Please contact us now to discuss your requirements.

NetSupport .....................................34 Pink Elephant..................................27 Servicedesk Show .........................39 STI ....................................................37 Subscription Ad................................2 UKCMG ............................................14 Wardown Consulting......Back Cover March / April 2008 : VitAL

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VITAL ENDING

Working and moving Mobile computing gets serious. Glyn Yarnell

I

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NCREASED DEMAND for laptops in recent years has resulted in mobile computing becoming more of a commodity, with vendors making less margin from high volume high value hardware, resulting in some vendors focusing on SMEs, where margins are greater.

This still doesn’t satisfy the needs of the professional user though, and so many users are demanding more integrated solutions.

Let Nigel Owens, VP at Motion Computing, explain, “The last couple of years has seen a huge growth in the use of GSM, 3G, wireless LAN and WAN, enabling us to move away from carrying standard but uncoordinated products towards a single piece of equipment capable of supporting multiple forms of technology.”

“Today’s solution may include barcode and RFID technology, wireless and camera facilities all within one box. But we find the more astute are unwilling to adopt the latest products at face value, preferring to use a tried and tested solution that supports their needs in the field.”

No longer a case of buying a laptop pre loaded with standard software, professional solutions now draw on systems integrators,

VitAL : March / April 2008

communications specialists, software vendors — some of them being silent partners, unseen by the client but managed by the coordinating partner.

Motion see this translating into a future of faster, more efficient applications drawing on new technology, as demonstrated in Microsoft’s Vista OS. But such complexity needs careful planning.

MobiTech is another company familiar with the demands of mobile computing. MD, Colin Stokes, finds “clients are often unaware of today’s capabilities using 3G, GPRS and WiMax, and are sometimes put off simply because of the perceived poor battery life.”

Stokes points out that laptops were originally intended to be carried between two locations, connecting to the mains power at each site, but today’s pen tablet, with lithium polymer technology, can achieve up to eight hours use.

Clients such as local council and highways departments need “true field computing on site and the most successful projects are where the manager holding the budget is ‘switched on’ to how a single product satisfies all the needs.”

To achieve this, Owens suggests that, “with

Clients such as local councils and highway departments need “true field computing on site and the most successful projects are where the manager holding the budget is ‘switched on’ to how a single product satisfies all the needs.” products designed for a specific application, IT managers need to consider the more vertical aspect — devices are hitting audiences ranging from healthcare to engineering, and you must keep tabs on applications beyond your own industry — one of them may be relevant to you.” It appears that mobile computing means business.

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