This week I was off to Wiesbaden in Germany (outside Frankfurt) presenting the Keynote at the IIR ITIL event. To get there I had to use Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow again. Now this time things are really looking quite good. No queue (or line) for the security checks (I know amazing!!) easy flow to the lounge, although to entice you to spend money, you do have to walk through a row of shops, down one floor, back through another row of shops, and then up one floor! Not what one would call “user friendly”, but I guess its good business to get you to part with your hard earned money. Even the boarding was smooth and on time departure made it a pleasure. However, we have to remember that it is not even at ½ capacity as they delayed moving most of the long haul flights over until they were sure things would run more smoothly.

On my return the only issue (after landing 15mins early) was that one has to walk miles up and down floors, using trains just to get out. The Iris eye recognition device for Passport control fast track was slower than the normal manual line. Why? Well only one Iris device and about 6 desks all open. Now one would think that a brand new $8billion terminal would have more than one Iris device to cater for all UK residents. Then getting to the car, was in issue with only 2 elevators, one flight of stairs and yes only 2 ticket machines, per flow sector. Now I do not have the figures for the capacity of the car park on each floor, but even I could tell that at ½ capacity, at 8pm in the evening, this was insufficient. I spent longer waiting for my turn at this machine, than I did for passport control.

With this I will leave T5 alone for a while! However it all goes to prove that even in a major project and design, capacity planning with “common sense” is required. Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is also needed as the project proceeds, as I’m sure it is very difficult to use the “common sense” approach from cad/cam designs, but as things get built, then Pilots run, the capacity demands needs to be reviewed to ensure the Client (passenger) is served appropriately.

When did you last review your project for an implementation of technology or service from a capacity perspective and a “common sense” perspective? Using the knowledge management method of DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) , where often the “wisdom” element is our own interpretation of the DIK and therefore utilising our “common sense” to make appropriate decisions for the benefit of our customer, whomever that is.

Why are things always frantic when you come back from holiday? Well it’s been an interesting week in many respects, not least trying to catch up on things relating to Userworld in Lisbon. We are now into May, and so only 2 full working weeks to go! For those of you in the EMEA region, please consider coming along. We have more customers speaking than every before, and yes I have the Best Practices track to manage again. Within it I have Sharon Taylor, ITIL v3’s chief architect and chief examiner, representatives from Accenture, the CIO from General Dynamics and of course our very own Peter Armstrong! This year I’m actually presenting in the track too, apparently feedback from previous events were that they’d like to hear what I have to say, rather than just facilitate the track. So you asked you it, you’re going to get it!

This year each of the tracks based around our solution offerings will also be brown down to match the new ITIL v3 lifecycle approach to Service Management. This ensures that each tack and solution area will show you how it fits in with Service Strategy, Design, Transition, Operations and CSI. Obviously some will have a stronger alignment in one area then the other, but this should help you both understand more of our solutions and of ITIL v3.

Now Lisbon I’ve been to several times before and it’s a nice compact coastal city. Great history to catch up on, architecture, and food! Combining all these elements should make Userworld in EMEA as great an place to attend as Vancouver was last year, with the added advantage that in May Lisbon will be warm, if not even hot!

Looking forward to seeing many of you there, please look out for me and say “hello”. It’s always great to meet others interested in ITIL and Service Management for the Business.

Back from holiday and had a great time exploring the Nappa/Sonoma wine valley, Yosemite National Park and San Francisco. Even the weather was kind to me, with clear blue skies, though a little chilly at times.

When flying out I had the pleasure of Heathrow T5 (see blog on T5), but I was pleasantly surprised. It was quiet, smooth transition even through security and yes my bags actually arrived at my destination. All this just goes to prove that the “big bang” approach is really not the way to go. It’s nearly always best to start off small, perhaps with a “pilot” (not a good pun in this example) with a few internal flights transferring over first, to prove the processes, products, partners and people (the ITIL 4 “p”s). Then when you review with your Continual Service Improvement (CSI) programme you can resolve any issues and move onto the next scaling up of the transition, until you have completion. British Airports Authorities (BAA) and British Airways (BA) have had to revert to plan B, and slow down the transition, in doing so they are able to cope with issues and lesson customer impact. I had no problem 3 weeks after the opening with my travel experience, and as they slowly now scale up they are much better able to cope.

The main lesson to be learnt here is that no matter what type of project you are planning (CMDB implementation, Virtualisation, BSM), it is best to start with a pilot and in a small manageable impact reduced manner, and over time scale up whilst reviewing at each phase with the CSI processes. Big Bang fails in 90% of cases, so why do we always think of going that way?

Yesterday I presented in a Webex on "hints and tips for your CMDB implementation" which can be viewed here, along with the other 2 in the series. One of the tips was about starting small and working up once you've been able to iron out the problems and test all the 4 "P"'s. Have a listen if your working on your CMDB implementations.

As few years ago, when I had just moved home, renovation was the order of the day. Amongst the total refit was the kitchen. Little did I realise how difficult designing a kitchen can be, fortunately the company I used gave some great advise, one of which is the “perfect triangle”. It appears that this consist of the Sink, in one corner, the Hob/oven in another corner and the Fridge in the 3rd. Apparently these are the most utilised elements within a kitchen and so should be easily accessible from each other in the perfect design. Unfortunately my kitchen is not perfect, I simply did not want the Fridge where they suggested and so mine is down a bit from the oven and hob, no triangle for me! It would be interesting to find out where yours is?

What has all this got to do with ITIL and IT Service Management, well actually quite a lot! The perfect triangle of elements that are most frequently used to deliver Service Management can actually be categorised into three distinct areas.

Service Support, Service Automation and Service Assurance. These areas are the basis on which ITIL V3 also stands as they are the core components of Business Service Management. As the focus is all on Service, then we need to know the Utility and Warranty of that service(s). Is it Fit for purpose and does it perform as requested removing the constraints that we had before, and is it fit for use (available, capacious, continuous and secure). To ensure we can deliver on that we must be able to support the service (warranty), assure and insure that it is available, secure and stable (warranty) and where possible automate to ensure integrity, repeatability and adherence to standards (utility). These 3 areas, the perfect triangle, are important areas to be matured en route to achieving BSM. Watch this space as you see more in the coming weeks on each of these areas of focus.

The good news is I'm off tomorrow on holiday (vacation) and looking forward to exploring more of Nappa Valley and Yosemite National Park, so I’ll not be blogging next week! The bad news is that I have to use Terminal 5 tomorrow - think of me!

This week I’ve been enjoying the delights of Houston at our HQ, leaving today for Tulsa, Oklahoma where I’ll be presenting at the local User Group.

Fortunately for me my flight from London, whist from Heathrow, was not from the new Terminal 5. A huge sigh of relief was given when I discovered this when checking in on-line.  Now there is an example of the failure of not taking a “life-cycle” approach to service. Whilst I do not know all the specific details, I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that many of the service elements were tested in silos and not as the integrated whole. Some examples given were that whilst the staff did turn up on the opening day, they could not get into the staff parking area as quickly as normal due to new security equipment. This meant that the staff were queuing up to get parked and not where they should have been within T5. Add to this the failure of the new state of the art baggage handling equipment and you have the disaster we heard on the news. The most worrying element was the lack of contingency plans in the event of a failure of a major business critical process or service. Business continuity management was obviously left aside, to the huge determent of both the British Airports Authorities (BAA), actually owned by the Spanish! British Airways the main customer of T5 and of course as the countries main carrier the whole country received the reputation damage to the extent that questions were tabled in parliament. From this sad warning, please take note and avoid the losses (£16million or $32million after one week) and damage that failing to take a life-cycle approach to services can cause. Whilst ITIL v3 is perceived as being relevant only to IT, the concepts are not, they are relevant to any service, Business, IT or Passenger Terminal! Maybe they should have played our BMC Airport Simulation tool!

Well as always, I’ve been busy and just released 6 BMCTV interviews (top right box) with ITIL Chief Architect Sharon Taylor. The 6 short interviews cover each of the new books, yes including the “Introduction to Service Management” book, and we explore some of the key areas in each book. Check them out when you have time, each one lasts 15mins or less.

Back again! Last week I was in Paris presenting on ITIL v3 again, and as you will have already seen we’re about to acquire Bladelogic, so life has been a little hectic.

However never short of good innovative ideas, we’ve just launched an ITIL v3 game. Yes, an online game to test your ITIL and BSM knowledge. If any of you have ever taken the BMC Airport simulation training day, you’ll recognise the concept. So check it out here. This was the invention of my colleague, Linda Donovan who after attending the Airport Simulation thought it would be a great way to spread the word, both within organisational departments and at conferences. So a few months of planning have now paid off, I hope you enjoy this bit of educational fun.

Now back to the acquisition of Bladelogic. The area we will see most attention and growth is around Release Management across the datacenter. BladeLogic enables the following components of a release management process as defined under ITIL best practice:
• Design, Build, and Package a Release—they provide the ability to document and package configurations, installation routines, and deployment instructions for software releases across various environments. It also provides the ability to document the policies that need to be complied with for any given software release across various environments.
• Deploy & Install—BladeLogic automates the promotion and distribution of software across platforms and environments while ensuring compliance against the release policies. It does this by taking into consideration the configuration changes from the build environment to test and production environments and the impact of that on application configuration integrity.
This will be an integrated enhancement to our earlier Marimba acquisition ensuring we more tightly comply with ITIL v3 for software, applications and OS releases, utilising the power of knowledge within the Atrium CMDB. This is a very exciting time for BMC as we deliver more capabilities within BSM whilst embracing ITIL v3. Check out the recent Webinar with my good friend Kurt Milne, Managing Director at the ITPI and Bladelogic on the “Top 10 Management Principles that Lead to IT Operational Excellence”

One final thing -  I love BladeLogic’s Symbol for share trading – BLOG!

Off to Houston, Texas and Tulsa, Oklahoma next week.

This week I’ve been in South Africa at various Client meetings and was a keynote speaker for the ITSMf in Johannesburg. This was a well attended event for the region where I gave a presentation on Integrating IT with the Business focussing on ITIL v3 and BSM. It obviously went down well as many positive comments and questions afterwards.

Obviously when you travel a fair amount you come across many good and annoying things, well this morning has one of the annoying ones. The hotel I was staying in next to the office can only give me a late check-out of 12 noon, but my flight out is not until 10pm! So I even asked how much to buy some extra hours to keep the room the room for longer, to be informed that it would be a full daily rate. (health warning: a rant is about to start). This got he annoyed. Surely a daily rate would infer by definition of the word “day” to last from at least dawn to dust – a day. In which case I had already paid for that. But no, it appears (and I’m sure you all know anyway), that a daily rate is actually from about check-in (normally 2pm) until check-out (normally noon), so in fact you’ve paid for only 22 of the 24hours, and of course we also know that Business travellers tend not to check-in until evening anyway and checkout generally after breakfast heading to meetings or office, so the same rate for probably only 12hours. So now I’m homeless from noon until my taxi to the airport comes at 8pm. Oh the joys of travel!

Now that the rant is over (you can tell I was annoyed this morning), it is great to report that many of the clients in this region are moving forward well with BSM taking a step by step approach through an improvement plan focussing on the major business benefit areas, like Change Management and CMDB. It’s good from my perspective to keep in touch with these clients I’ve spent many days with over the years to see their progress and see how they put in action best practices with ITIL v3’s 4 “P”’s People, Process, Product and Partners. The extra “P” I would like to add is Performance. When you get all the other 4 “P”s in place my 5th “P” is the automatic return, improved performace of both the business and IT services. These organisations are all top performers in not only their sector but also in country. Proof indeed of the benefits that can be realised.

So, off tonight on the homeward journey. Next week I’ll be in Paris speaking to an audience on ITIL v3 and BSM.

Back from my holiday and it was wonderful, South Africa is such a beautiful place. This time I drove along the “Garden route” with the coast on one side and the mountains on the other it was truly stunning, oh and vineyards dotted along the way - perfect!

Also back travelling as usual, this week I’ve been at the ITSMF annual event in Antwerp, Belgium, with over 300 delegates. The keynote speaker was Paul Wilkinson, co-author of the book ‘IT Service Management from Hell” and co-owner of Gaming Works (of simulation games fame, such as ‘Apollo 13’and ‘The Challenge of Egypt’). Paul made a great opening address with the “ABC’s of ICT”. So what are the ABC’s? Well really quite simple, but it always appears impossible for organisations to be cognisant of and manage. This is the main reason for so many IT project failures including many ITIL ones. Paul first gave this presentation 10years ago, and shamefully for the industry it’s still relevant.  A is for Attitude, B is for Behaviour and C is for Cultural change. So many times we focus on the Process, Products and event Partners but still fail on the People side of ITIL v3’s 4 “P”’s to manage the ABC’s.

Check out Paul’s book on “The IT Service Management from Hell”, whilst it comical with cartoons, it’s sad with reality and worth a read to see how we address this problem. The first step as always, is with “Me”. We need to start owning and understanding the problem and little by little others will get the message and work on the ABC’s together. We, Atwell Williams, George Spalding from Pink Elephant and I,  wrote a white paper recently on “ cultural change and enabling the implementation of BSM” which is also worth a read in this area.

It was my opportunity to present later and it was now my responsibility to bring in the ABC elements into my presentation. My opening was to quote my very own CEO, Bob Beauchamp, who said a few years back now that “There is no such thing as an IT project; there are Business Projects supported by IT”. If we all starting thinking like this statement, then all we do will be related back to the Business, changing our Attitude with the inevitable Behavioural changes to ensure we only carry out our role in reflection to the business and the Culture will change as we all begin to think in this way.

So please consider the ABC’s and that all projects are Business projects supported by IT, hopefully we then become much more successful in delivering working, accepted solutions.

This week I’ve been attending the Pink Elephant annual conference here in Las Vegas. As always they run a fun packed event, this year with over 2,000 delegates. The Keynote this morning was from Dan Pink (yes I know – how did they manage to get an inspirational speaker named Mr Pink?). Dan has authored a book entitled “A whole new mind” and even Tom Peter’s described this book as “a miracle”. Really some insightful thinking of how the 1st world is moving and the sort of thinking we need to have to succeed. Moving from the analytic process driven “left” side which recognises and processes repeatable liner tasks which can be automated or outsourced, to the more creative, empathetic, orchestrated thinking. Dan mentioned leaders like Michael Dell who now says they are in the Fashion industry as desktops and laptop become commodities we all have already (think of Apple’s new slim!). We are all heavy consumers with all we really need and more, yet we are driven to buy again and again based on design. Actually Dan showed the storage industry with its $22billion annual turnover, greater than the film industry, for storing the excess we all now have. Most of the audience has 2 or more cars they owned. Why do we change them when they deliver the task they were designed for, getting you from A to B quickly and with little effort in comfort. We change them for “ a better design” or more enhancements.  Even the our toothpaste is “designed”.

So to remain relevant and to survive in the current and next economic environment we need to be more “right” mind thinking, expanding the things we as humans do that are difficult to automate or outsource, like empathy for sales and services. Recognising facial expressions is more powerful to Sales today, then understanding the process of selling.

Hopefully some of this makes sense to you, it did to me, another reason why in ITIL it covers more of the Strategy and Design phases, elements are they difficult to automate and outsource, relationship management of suppliers and partners becomes more prominent too. It all makes sense and we need to be aware or we will be “optional”, in the words of Accenture’s CEO, “How do we become not optional?” this is the new survival technique. We in IT need to start thinking in this new way, becoming part of the business, as well as supporting it. We need that empathy with our customers, and to design more with the right brain, to ensure we are not optional.

Off on holiday now for 10days, hopefully when I return I’ll have to stories to relay.

Last weekend I was in Berlin for the first time. What an amazing resilient city and people. The history, from belonging to Prussia until today, is chequered with tragedy and glory almost in equal measure. With the German capital officially moved from Bonn to Berlin the new Government buildings are truly amazing literally joining East and West across the river. It’s a vibrant place, where new buildings stand alongside old and new builds as old. It’s the only city I know in the Western world where rush-hour has little or no impact on traffic with underpasses and integrated systems. The city strategist and planners have completed an amazing vibrant capital, that both operates efficiently and aesthetically with the people and for the people.

From our IT point of view it simply proves that merging old and new together can achieve the overall objectives if carried out in a controlled, planned and integrated manner. Some things need to be rebuilt but look old or like the original to be accepted, other systems need to be updated and integrated and work alongside completely new systems, all to achieve the overall business objectives. No one has the luxury of a “green field” site these days, and so we need to review the existing infrastructure and plan our strategy in line with the business demands and constraints. Then we need to draw up the designs ready for the new transition to take place, and finally for operations to take control and ensure we keep the “lights on” as and when required to fulfil those Business objectives. Without continuous reviews and improvements being made we would fail, so this element is in no way a luxury, but a necessity in our fast changing world.

If a nation can do all this with a new city (how many new cities do you know of being created in the 21st century?) then we can achieve this success and more within our own organisations, especially if we have a set of guidance in our hands.