Yesterday I heard Cal coach Jeff Tedford on the radio talking about preparation for this week’s big game. Tedford said he would not prepare any differently this week than any other week in the season because 1-if he knew a better way to prepare he would use it every week and 2-if he changed something and something unplanned happenned in the game he would not know if the new practice plan was the cause or whether it was something else. It struck me that what Tedford was saying is that controlling and managing change is a key part of his plan-thus the tie back to key ITIL principles.
Go Bears!
November 15th, 2006
There are so many help desk tools out there, most of which now call themselves service desk — that I find it very confusing to understand all the nuances. I found this forrester report really useful (and it is avaliable for free, from the altiris web site).
It compares Altiris, Axios Systems, BMC Remedy, BMC Magic, CA, Front Range Heat, HP Peregrine, HP Openview Service Desk, Numara, Touchpaper and Unipress.
Here is an excerpt from the begining which I thought was simple and insightful …
“The organization formerly known as the help desk is growing up. Under the moniker of “service desk,” it is expanding its footprint and adding such functions as problem, change, and configuration management to its previous incident-focused role. The classic help desk was somewhat limited
in its scope and parochial in its focus: Users would call with a problem, and technicians would endeavor to fix it as quickly as possible. Help desk software would track incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. Once solved, reports would point out potential hot spots for further study and possible proactive action. Only rarely would the help desk have incidents opened directly from systems management utilities or be tied into any formal change management process.
As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure following the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations.
Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale change to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop life-cycle management, with (but not at the expense of) workflow, tracking, and reporting tools.“
November 15th, 2006
I was with the VP of Operations of a Global Fortune 500 company which had just deployed Opsware on thousands of end-points. Opsware is a provisioning system which can be used to push patches, updates etc. Like most other provisioning systems, such as BladeLogic, Radia (HP), it also keeps track of “known” good state and reports when deviations happen from it.
The company liked opsware as a deployment engine. It had simplified thier life considerably. But it had complicated thier life considerably when it came to reconciling change with the change tickets.
The VP mentioned that there was no easy way to integrate the two systems. Also the volume of change which was bieng reported by Opsware was so large that it made their earlier procedures which were manual just infeasible.
Opsware had taken them almost a year to rollout and they wanted to quick fix to this problem. Has anyone else seen this problem? Have any suggested solutions?
November 15th, 2006
