Making ITIL Work For You

What's this Blog About?

I work with customers every day who not only want to talk about ITIL, but who want to build a production implementation of ITIL that helps their enterprise IT environment every day.  As many of us have learned, there is a big difference between sitting in an ITIL class for some days or weeks, and going live with a production service management solution that really improves the lives of your most important IT users and customers. 

So what are those differences between theory and practice?  In particular, how do we map those high level ITIL flow charts and processes down to the bits and bytes traveling around a network, sitting in your database server and eventually putting business information into the hands of your users?  I'm hoping to help with that mapping.  More specifically, I'll provide some ideas and direction on practical choices you'll need to make to deploy such software, and how those choices can improve your IT business.

Is it for Techies or Business people? 

My background is pretty techie, including a PhD in computer science, but my passion is in making this all work for your business.  Along those lines, I'll make a few basic assumptions:

With those ground rules in mind, these are some of the specific things that myself and my team are thinking about now.  We have a performance lab and a fair bit of smart folk and good hardware, all working on the following questions:

• What's the best tradeoff between building a really big CMDB that has every bit of data you could ever want in it, and buiding a smaller CMDB that can be built quickly and kept very up to date on modest sized hardware?
• If you have IT users spread across the globe, what are the costs and benefits of choosing a single global instance of IT service software, versus building regional centers around the world?
• How can a customer know that their hardware investment is sufficient to provide the IT services they require now, as well as scalable for the future as new users and workload are added into the mix?

So I'm interested in practical questions that I hope help you to improve your IT business, but with data from our own performance and scalability labs. 

How you can help improve the state of IT service Management products...

The most exciting thing about my role here at BMC is that I get to help set direction within R&D, but I'm also very much customer facing.  So I challenge the readers of this blog to help me identify what we could be doing better with future versions of the product, and I can then work with product development to make those changes happen.  I hope there is no one reading this blog thinking "yeah, but these products still can't solve this or that problem".  If there are things that keep you from getting the maximum gain out of enterprise implementations of these products, then its my role to understand those issues, characterize them in our internal labs if necessary, and then help drive new features or fixes to make them more useful.  So I hope the real deliverables of this blog are both on your plate and on mine.

Who is this Tim guy anyway?

If you're still reading, you're probably starting to wonder about how credible I am, and if I'm really qualified to give you any interesting tidbits.  My real passion in my 20+ years of IT involvement is to solve tough problems really really fast.  I got started in this area as a 19 year old tyke, when working summer jobs at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.  I wrote some code to see just how fast these fancy CRAY machines really were, and a few days later got an angry phone call from accounting to tell me that I'd racked up $15,000 worth of compute time.  Oops!  I was a bit embarassed (luckily they didn't charge my internal team), but I was also hooked on seeing how such big iron can really crank.

A bit later I joined a very cool MIT spinoff named Thinking Machines, where we had over 64,000 small processors inside one machine, and we spent alot of time scratching our heads on how to make them work well together to solve big problems.  12 years ago I got more interested in business problems, and joined Oracle corp.  In my 10 years at Oracle, I mostly worked on ERP applications and how to make them run like the dickens. 

At BMC we like to think that IT Service Management is the new ERP.  We also talk about how IT is kind of like the old story of the Cobbler and his kids.  The story goes this way: the cobbler was always so busy making everyone else's shoes, that he never could find the time for his own kids.  So the cobbler's kids were the only barefoot kids in the village.  For the last 10 years IT folks worked hard to deliver HR applications, Payroll applications, Order Management applications, you name it.  But who worked on delivering good IT applications?  Finally we're in an exciting time when we get to work hard to help ourselves, and our IT friends and colleagues.  In particular, I hope to make ITIL compliant solutions that run fast and are easy to deploy, so we can finally get some shoes onto the feet of our poor IT family.  I hope you'll all work with me in that quest...

Thanks for reading!

Tim