Is there a simple ITIL philosophy that can be used as the guiding light for implementing ITIL. The general consensus about six-sigma was that if the top leaders in the organization understood that six-sigma was about “removing variability from a repeatable process“, and then they empowered their people to go achieve this the implementations were enormously successful. This was because the statement was actionable for people, it tied very closely to some metric they were evaluated on and it made intuitive sense. In organizations where they created a group (inside or consultants) to come up with the six-sigma plan, almost always resulted in failure.
Now as IT organizations look at ITIL, how could we describe it in a simple phrase like “removing variability from repeatable processes? What is the equivalent statement describing the ITIL philosophy?
When I searched on the web, here are some interesting possibilities:
- separate administrative tasks and technical tasks
- develop a common-lingo for communication about process and solutions
- automate repeatable process
- get budget from the CFO, wait for the next wave
- provide a service (like a resturant), not technology (cooked food).
What do you think?
January 17th, 2007
Vijay Anand (the force behind Proto) posted this note from a Demo Conference Veteran to help people have the maximum impact during their product presentations ( You can get the original posting from here).
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Shel Israel
Date: Jan 14, 2007 9:43 PM
Subject: RE: Proto.in Presentation Tips
To: Vijay Anand
1. Be humble but proud. Remember the star of your presentation is the product not you. Your audience wants to see the technology. Spend as much time showing it as possible.
2. It is far more memorable to make one point very well, then to make several points.
3. The objective of a good presentation is to get the people who matter most in the audience to want to come up to you after your talk and say, “tell me more.”
4. Remember to always play nice. Your worst competitor in today’s conference is tomorrow’s business partner, employer or employee.
5. Speaking without hype, in a style that is authentic and in the tones you would use when meeting a new business partner.
6. If there are potential investors in the audience ignore them. They are going to follow the buzz you make with the technologists in the audience. Focus on the technologists.
7. If you are a star of the conference, remember that you just did well at one event and on one day. If you do poorly remember that you just had a bad day and the world has not collapsed. In either case, you will have learned a very valuable lesson to take with you moving forward.
8. You, your product and your company are being judged at every minute during the conference, not just when you are speaking from the dais. The conversations and networking are the most important part of any business networking event.
9. Do not exaggerate what your product can do. Do not be overly optimistic about when it will be ready.
10. Make it clear that you want as many partners as you can get.
–~–~———~–~—-~————~——-~–~—-~
January 14th, 2007
It’s that time of the year again. Superbowl is a few weeks away. The playoffs are well underway, people are arguing about the Patriots, Chargers, Colts … winning it all. GoDaddy’s co-founder has been talking about how his ads were rejected by the ABC censorship committee. People almost expect something dramatic after the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction shocked the country in 2004. That it was broadcasted to millions of homes in the US was a big “control” failure.
One of the important things about controls is whether they are pro-active and reactive. Reactive is do something after it happens: like MTV & CBS apologized for Janet’s failure. Pro-active is what is done before … a system which would have not aired the snafu. The Janet Jackson’s control failure highlights that in some cases having reactive controls is just not good enough. The damage has been done.
Yet if we look at the IT world most of the process inside organizations to control change are reactive. They do-stuff after the change has happened not before it. They are waiting for a Janet Jackson control failure?
Should you control change pro-actively on some of your infrastructure?
January 14th, 2007
from moneyball …
” Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was dound afterwards at the bottom. Now as he was sinking — had he got the gold or the gold him?
– John Ruskin, Unto his Last
VP of IT Operations at a Fortune 1000 company mentioned that the way he figures out whether there is going to be downtime after a change window is to look at the pattern of change events during a change window (using Solidcore). He says good change windows have the pattern of a lot of change in the begining and then nothing. Bad change windows have two peaks: a lot of change in the begining, then a lot of change in the end. I know at that point Has he the change? Or the change him?
January 12th, 2007
I was recently driving down a deserted highway in Texas when something on the dashboard of my car began blinking red. I called the service center and the technician (quoting as much as I can remember) said, “ Pull over, turn off the car, and start it again. If that doesn’t work, there is a service station about 10 miles away that can download the latest software. This is a known problem.”
Read the article at the data center journal.
January 12th, 2007
Companies employed 450,000 workers, generated $52B in sales in 2005
By Rachel Konrad
Updated: 7:08 p.m. PT Jan 3, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO – Foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four U.S. technology startups over the past decade, according to a study to be published Thursday.
Read the article at MSNBC.
January 4th, 2007
Rob: did you hear?
Tony: hear what?
Rob: The NFL decided they wanted the equivalent of the yellow line to help the referee’s determine whether the team got the first down or not. They announced a contest: million dollar prize to the winner.
Tony: Its about time they fixed all those mistakes.
Rob: should we try?
Tony: yup … million dollars buys a lot of beers dude!
Rob: any requirements?
Tony: the solution is expected to: (1) tell us in real-time that the line had been crossed; (2) also it should only get tripped when the person carrying the ball crossed it and in the right direction; (3) not effect the normal play.
Rob: any ideas?
Tony: not really … but I remember hearing that our IT uses a product called Tripwire. Let me go ask them what it does … seems like something we could use
Rob: wow man … we could ski al year long
[ … next day …]
Rob: whazz up man … did they let you in?
Tony: yes man … but I got very confused there. They use this thing called tripwire … but it doesn’t trip. Someone could cross it a million times but it trip’s only when the manager decides to go run it.
Rob: that wouldn’t work.
Tony: nope. It will be like having chains … you got to go check each time.
Rob: I can’t imagine using chains on all the machines they have, no wonder they look beat like our referee’s with everyone shouting at them
Tony: It gets worse. This Tripwire they use doesn’t even tell you who crossed it. Or it kind of does, it tells you the last person who crossed it.
Rob: but we would want the first person wouldn’t we?
Tony: yes we would and also not just one person … but every person who crossed the line with the ball.
Rob: so this Tripwire stuff can’t tell you who or when they crossed … what do they use it for?
Tony: I don’t know man …
Rob: maybe your guys are not upto snuff on this stuff … I have a friend who works at this big company and he does something to do with SOX. I remember he was up one night and mentioned tripwire … maybe they already have something like that in baseball … I will check him out.
Tony: later dude
Rob: cya
…to be continued …
December 19th, 2006
I was at an ITSMF meeting recently and the speaker did a show of hands:
- How many people had deployed a CMDB? One hand went up.
- How many folks had actually seen a live CMDB? Only one hand went up.
- How many folks had projects to evaluate a CMDB? Entire room put up their hand.
- How many folks think that these projects would lead to implementaion? About 4 hands went up.
One of the things which came out of the meeting was people were struggling with what to put in a CMDB. Most people felt that ITIL was synonymous in most organizations with either service desk, incident management or change management. But how that translated into a CMDB was not clear.
December 15th, 2006
1. Outsourcing will reduce cost of my product release
At some point or another in the life of a startup, the question gets asked: why dont you outsource your development to India (or China)? And ofcourse everyone on the board talks about how this would save money and reduce the burn rate.
These days my advice to most companies is don’t do it. For most companies the length of the development cycle more than doubles when they outsource, because of the communication overhead and the distance eliminating hallway conversations and face to face interaction. So even if you reduce your engineering burn to 1/3 (which is roughly what it works out to be), the total cost of the product is increase in cycle time * burn = only 2/3rd of the original cost.
In addition it also slows you down, which coupled with the fact that you are spending some money on other functions also, may cause the total cost over a product cycle to achieve the same results be higher than without outsourcing.
2. We will do joint projects
One of the most common pitfalls is people say lets get a few people at a outsourcing vendor to be part of this project. This ican be a fatal mistake. Defining the boundary between the team in India and US is a very key part of ensuring success. The boundary should be drawn to minimize communication and dependepency: crossing the 12 hour time difference introduces inefficiencies. The only cases where it seems to work is where the Project Manager is really good and extremely detail oriented.
3. Microsoft, IBM are moving thousands of jobs, it should work for my company also
The dynamics of outsourcing are changing rapidly. I heard recently there was a rally in Bangalore to protest against jobs moving to China from Bangalore. The reality is that costs in India have risen substantially (as happened in Israel a decade ago). Real-estate today costs more in Bangalore than Silicon Valley, so does electricity. Good people cost about 60,000 USD. — which is not much different than North Carolina.
For companies like Microsoft and IBM it makes a lot of sense as their cost of employee in the US is about 200,000 – 300,000 USD per year, because there is usally a high overhead in addition to salaries in big companies.
But for a startup, where the overhead is minimal the equation has changed dramatically over the last few years.
4. It is just an engineering thing
There are companies with 50-100 people in India, where the CEO has never been to India. Even if these people are employees of some outsourcer, this simply boggles my mind. If you are going to outsource especially in software, these people are part of your future. They need to see the executive team often and require communication about the company as much as the folks in the US. If you are not prepared to travel as a CEO don’t outsource.
5. Let’s try it for six months
Outsourcing is a long term investment. If you go in with a six month philosophy it will become a self-fulfilling failure. It is the wrong thing to do, when you are out of cash to extend your runway. It is a long term thing, which requires investment of time and energy to succeed.
December 13th, 2006
Perspective from some work I did at Cornell (with S. Keshav) in the late 90’s …. YouTube has changed the video paradigm completely. But most video’s today are short clips, as the clips become longer …. I believe that the evolution of YouTube will cater to a model of “micro-viewership”:
… Out of the nearly 5.6 billion people in the world, 1.2 billion own television sets, 800 million have phone lines, and less than 200 million have access to the Internet. One way broadcast of video, therefore has a large and well established audience. However, TV broadcast is economical only when each channel is viewed by millions of people. In contrast, with the Internet, we believe that channels viewed by hundreds or even a few thousand geographically distributed viewers are economically viable. Moreover, the Internet can support tens of thousands of simultaneous channels and other multimedia content associated with video. We call the one way delivery of video content on the Internet “Internet TV”.
…
Video on demand requires quality of service guarantees as it attempts to provide VCR functionality over the network. Supporting operations like fast-forward or rewind requires the applications to rebuild the video playout buffer. This requires bandwidth and delay guarantees from the network.
[ ... which is difficult for the Internet to provide ... ]
In view of the above arguments it seems unlikely that video on demand will succeed on the Internet. On the other hand broadcast television without VCR controls is a one way transmission from the TV station to the viewers, and is more tolerant to delays in the work[1]. One-way transmission leverages the strengths of the Internet architecture and is a more realistic model to send video on the Internet.
Figure 1.1 Premium paid for the timeliness of video content
But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.
But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.Figure 1.1 shows that people are more willing to pay a premium, or be more tolerant about video quality, for watching movies in theatres or for watching events live. Although live events with large viewer populations can be broadcast efficiently on the television network, it is uneconomical to do the same for small viewer populations. Television channels have three main sources of revenue: (1) subscription fees, (2) advertising, and (3) pay per view. For channels with comparatively small viewer populations the bulk of the earnings come from the subscription fees. Only channels with 80 to 90% market penetration earn significant advertising revenue. It seems unlikely that it would be ever economical to broadcast to an audience of 1000 to 2000 viewers.
On the contrary an audience of 2000 viewers is considered large for the Internet. The Internet will have a distinct advantage over the television network in broadcasting live events to these small viewer populations. We also believe that there will be a large number of events of interest to only small audiences. The Internet already transcends national and international boundaries and united people with similar tastes and interests across geographical boundaries. Several events can therefore be broadcast live to these small communities.
Further, video from these events can be integrated with other media to build powerful applications. For example, the live broadcast of a chess championship may be accompanied with a chat-session with the leading chess players of the world. Internet TV allows video to be treated as a data type to build larger applications.
To summarize we believe that Internet TV will have the most impact to broadcast live events, video in conjunction with other media types, to a small geographically distributed audience. This thesis addresses the problems encountered in making Internet TV feasible. This chapter presents an overview of the various problems.
[1] As a existence proof note that the radio and the television networks already have different amount of delay. The viewer receives the same event being broadcast on both the networks at different times.
But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.
But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications. But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.
December 10th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts
