ITIL 2011 - The Differences

ITIL 2011 - The Differences

New presentation available from our mother company, UXC Consulting, on the differences between ITIL v3 and 2011.

Have a read and let me know your thoughts!

Hint: Not much has changed!  just a clearer picture (which is most welcome)...

ITIL 2011 versus 3

itSMF - Achieving Operations Excellence with Knowledge Management

itSMF - Achieving Operations Excellence with Knowledge Management

Attended an interesting talk this evening by Henrik Savia (Microsoft) regarding a practical solution to the mystical SKMS (Service Knowledge Management System).  For the uninitiated the SKMS as described by ITIL is:

"The Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) is the central repository of the data, information and knowledge that the IT organization needs to manage the lifecycle of its services. Its purpose is to store, analyze and present the service provider's data, information and knowledge. The SKMS is not necessarily a single system – in most cases it will be a federated system based on a variety of data sources."

In IT we have to manage multiple data sources which underpin the delivery of our Services to the Business.  Typically these data sources are managed independently i.e the network team focuses purely on the network, the server team looks after our servers, application specialists focus purely on their apps etc etc.... but who 'really' is coordinating 'end-to-end' service??

Despite what we may be led to believe the silo culture is still very much alive in IT departments around the world (the right hand does not know what the left is doing) and whilst this is a commonly shared issue, it should not be accepted.  Quite simply, the silo mentality does not foster the efficiency and effectiveness that is expected by our Customers.

The 'good-practice' framework ITIL and others have long since touted the risks associated with such segmentation however, few organisations have 'found the time' to address it.  Partly because our beloved frameworks are purposely generic i.e they do not reference any vendor specific (real-life) solutions.  Whilst we can appreciate the unbiased nature of our beloved frameworks, it does leave a significant gap for the ambitious CIO, on how to transform the theory into action.

If we refer again to the ITIL books (Service Transition), a clear picture is presented on the scope of the SKMS:

All of our tools: Service Management (Incident, Request, Problem, Change, Service Level Management), Technical (Network, Server, Desktop, Application), Policies/Procedures/SOP's and everything else need to be managed as one 'source of truth'.  The ultimate purpose being to ensure that our data/information/knowledge is stored, maintained and re-used with maximum efficiency.  In doing so, we remove duplication of effort, ensure integrity and have confidence in the decisions we make.

The solution proposed by Henrik, was to use Microsoft SharePoint as a central repository to store/track all of the various data sources we use to manage IT.  Thinking about it, it does seem like an ideal platform.  Almost all organisations nowadays use the Microsoft suite to store and manage data, add to this the built in support for standard communication protocols (SNMP etc) and you can easily visualise all of your tools supplying a live feed of relevant data to a common SharePoint portal.

Whilst this is not a complete solution to Knowledge Management i.e as an organisation we still need to define our own Corporate Standards (templates, gui formats, access permissions, process workflows etc), it does give us a clear picture on how we can easily access and use our information from a single integrated portal.