Malcolm Fry - ITIL V3 Essentials and the Role of a CMDB
I've seen a lot of presentations from Malcolm on-line but not had the opportunity to see him live so this was particularly interesting to me - if its possible to assess a presenter's style from an online web seminar anyway!
One of the things that I found interesting was his immediate acknowledgment of the v3 certification scheme being superior to that of v2. He strongly felt that in v2 everyone forgot about the other 7 ITIL books (true enough) and that with v3 the assessment of ALL core books will lead to more rounded ITSM professionals.
He also dropped a plug for a book that he is writing at the moment with working title: 'How to build a service management department'. I look forward to seeing what it has to offer.
His presentation faltered a moment for me when he talked about the v3 lifecycle and had the wrong order of the core books up on screen (had transition after operation instead of before). Something fundamental like that inevitably then makes you question the accuracy and validity of the rest of the presentation but thankfully that was the only error I spotted.
The slides showing how v2 and v3 work together were quite helpful, but most amusing was his use of a perfume analogy to achieve an ITIL implementation road map. Apparently in perfume making there are four key things: Primary, Modifier, Blender and Fixative. He expounded upon the analogy by showing how the various ITIL processes could slot into one of these categories, e.g. Incident, Problem, and Change Management came under Primary with Financial management listed as a fixative.
There wasn't really anything of note in the section on the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) except that he reiterated the benefits of template CIs. Towards the end of the presentation he did make a joke regarding how there should be a 'decision management' process in ITIL. Someone pointed out in the Q&A afterwards that this exists in the form of IT governance and went on to promote A 8015:2005 which is the Australian standard which has been taken to form the basis of a new ISO standard.
Harvey Davison's 'What Should Configuration do for Change?'
Of all the presentations I think that this was the most interesting and useful for me. This may be because he is working in the trenches of Lloyds TSB and using ITIL theory successfully in practice. I really liked the whole approach to identifying which areas to attack first in the creation of a CMDB and using change management as a driver for this.
The approach sounds simple enough... define the objectives, identify the results required, and ascertain what is needed to deliver those results. Actually doing this can be quite a challenge though.
When it came to defining their CIs they divided into type, role, and status. In doing this they were then able to produce a cube which showed where best to focus their efforts.
An analogy I liked was seeing the infrastructure as a jenga tower. The CMBD then tells you which brick you can pull out safely without the tower falling down.
To be honest there was so much good stuff in this presentation that, rather than me trying to summarise it here, I highly recommend that you sign up to the itSMF e-symposium and go listen to it and download the slides in the archive!
Check back on Tuesday for the final summary featuring Georges Ataya's and Rob Stroud's presentation on 'IT Governance for the Real World, Mapping COBIT & ITIL' and a summary of the roundtable Q&A.
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