10 most common mistakes IT makes

In my twenty years of IT consulting, I found following 10 most common mistakes businesses make;

1. Having no clear vision or strategy for IT (or its services)
2. Accountability is subjective than objective (tangible)
3. Select tools first and later expect it to deliver to their expectations
4. Business doesn't know what IT cost drivers are
5. No processes are defined and documented to establish well defined metrics (KGIs and KPIs), therfore can not measure achievements
6. Resources are not planned to meet demand
7. Can't allocate cost per use for each service to justify service offerings
8. Ensuring business and IT are aligned
9. Trying to cut cost without knowing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or ROI on each investment.
10. Identification and implementation of key controls, so when their is any variance right flags are arised so as to adopt corrective actions

If you see these indicators in your organization, it is time to seek professional help, there are many companies who specialize in ITIL, itSMF, COBIT, SIX Sigma and other disciplines that can bring about positive change into your organization.

You may contact author of this blog with your comments or specific requirements.

How to Manage IT Organization

How to Manage IT Organization
How do you steer your company’s IT organization to deliver high return on their investment.

Everyone realizes the importance of having a motivated, energetic quality work force but when they don’t understand the process they won’t be able to deliver to their full potential. Process, People, and Technology are the major determinants of product, cost, schedule and stakeholders satisfaction.

Three most common challenges faced by IT organization are;
* They know they are delivering the best value but no one recognizes their contribution
* They know all services are delivering best value but when it comes to integration with other services or applications they don’t connect well
* They know something is wrong but cannot pin point where is the organization hurting

How can Statêra help?
Statêra’s Business consulting services has exceptional track record and a proven methodology in improving company’s efficiency, service quality and customer satisfaction levels.

Business & IT Analysis
Workshops or Discovery engagement to enhance governance of a business's process environment to improve agility and operational performance. Define key metrics required to deliver best value to the organization.

ITIL
Help define and develop the baselines and benchmarks against which your IT organization performance can be measured and when you see deviations, it provides focal point what needs to change or exploited.

Project Management
We know the typical tasks, time required, resource skill needed for this type of project and associated project costs. Our experienced project managers will keep you on time and within budget.

Knowledge Management
Quickly and efficiently gather information about your company’s data and records. We help you convert data and information to a knowledge so others can benefit
CMMI
Show you where do you scale on the maturity model and what steps are needed to improve your levels.

Risk Management
Managing risk starts by identifying risk, knowing threats vs. opportunities. Minimizing the threats and exploiting the opportunities.

SOX
No matter what size is your company, you must abide by SOX guidelines to show your stakeholders that company has taken all necessary steps to minimize any objections by finance or IT auditors.

www.statera.com 972-560-1500

ITILSME@Gmail.com

IT Governance Assessment

Holistic Approach to IS Governance Assessments

In the 80s and 90s, most people that were implementing process improvement efforts were using the reengineering approach. It is also an approach that is still used by various consultants and vendors today. Basically, reengineering implies that a consultant or process owner engages a team in the following way:

1. Stating that their processes are neither optimized nor efficient.
2. Informing the team that standardized processes should be used instead.
3. Plugging the standardized process in to the team environment.
4. Leaving the team with the expectation that the standardized process would now be

followed with increased efficiency.

Process improvement efforts conducted in this way clearly showed that the reengineering approached failed. In fact, the plug and play process efforts only succeeded 50% of the time. These projects failed because they assumed that every organization had the same pain points and goals.

It was overly focused on standardization and one-size-fits-all solutions. As a result, processes failed to evolve flexibly as customers' needs became more differentiated and their expectations grew. Moreover, the last round of adopt only efforts failed to take sufficient account of the organizational and people factors that lead to true behavioral change. While processes were reshaped, accountability was not institutionalized. There was plenty of talk about process owners and cascading change, but decision rights, coordination mechanisms, governance structures, and other organizational elements were not explicitly addressed until later - if at all. Process efficiency trumped organization alignment. Consequently, the substantial savings often quickly dissipated.

A more diverse approach to process redesign was needed.

The IT Governance processes that can be purchased and adopted should be considered as a starting point - not an end. Every company, organization, or team can benefit greatly from leveraging existing process frameworks. The key is leveraging, not just adopting. Consultant or a Subject Matter Expert (SME) inevitably has unique core values, business rules, and constraints that beg for a variation from the standardized process in parts of the framework. This is where an assessment is most helpful and an organized change management effort is important. Before you begin adopting the standardized process, learn where you need to massage the framework to meet your unique needs. The initial analysis will help you discover gaps before you begin adopting something that doesn't work for your organization. Then, plan a change management cycle that is the appropriate pace for your needs.

To this end, the consulting team should conduct interviews, meetings, and correspondence with client's management and key staff members to ascertain:

Current Workflows
Current Pain-points
Current Technologies, Applications and Components
Current Constraints and Guidelines

Now the consultant should compare his/her finding against the several guidelines to identify the weak spots in the existing model.

Following are some of the key model and frameworks that are being used to assess any IT departments for compliance and risk management.

• ITIL


• COBIT


• SOX


• COSO


• CMMI

ITIL: Is a framework that aligns IT with Business, establish Key Performance Mertics, define and assign Roles & responsibilities.

COBIT: Define Control Objectives for Business related IT organization.

SOX: It makes senior managemnt accountable for implementing controls for all financial reporting systems

COSO: The COSO framework defines internal control as a process, effected by an entity’s board of directors, management and other personnel, designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of objectives in the following categories:

• Effectiveness and efficiency of operations
• Reliability of financial reporting
• Compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

CMMI: All CMMI models contain multiple Process Areas (PAs). A PA has 1 to 4 goals, and each goal is comprised of practices. These goals and practices are called specific goals and practices, as they describe activities that are specific to a single process area.

With all the information listed above and clear picture of your "desired state" a gap analysis can easily be conducted with all this in-hand, a solution road map can be derived.

If you are interested in any of my blogs, please contact me via contact information provided in this blog or visit my website http://www.statera.com

Preparing a company for an ITIL audit

For my current client I came onboard to do some technical documentation - they were being audited by Cisco as they had applied for Gold and Managed Service Partnership status with them.

After joining them I realized many members of their staff were ITIL certified but when it comes to practical use or application they needed some serious help.

They had applied for Managed Service status in the following disciplines;

1. Incident Management
2. Problem Management
3. Change and Release Management
4. Configuration Management
5. Capacity Management
6. Performance & Availability Management
7. Security Management
8. Knowledge Management
9. IT Service Continuity Management

And Cisco would audit them in above disciplines using ITIL best practices framework. They had done some work in Incident and Change but required some major overhaul and they needed someone to come and start the initiative from the scratch.

My biggest challenge was to where to begin?

My initial starting point was to conduct a quick assessment of their documentation and their processes as that gave me a good feel what I am dealing with.

I gave my initial assessment to my client and explained them that this is going to be more than a standard documentation engagement as they need some training, current process mapping and then we will compare current processes with ITL best practices model as that will give an accurate picture of where the gaps are and based upon that we will mutually decide on our solution road map. They realized the importance of what needs to be done and they gave me a green light to go ahead with the plan.

My game plan was to start with the two documentations they already had; Incident and Problem Management. I started by training the relevant staff in these two disciplines, while I was training them I was also inquiring them about their current practices, this gave me a short-cut to gaps documentation.

This made me and my client realize that what they have documented versus what they practice are two poles apart, therefore we started to align are documentation with our practices. This gave us an opportunity to adopt few good practices while letting go bad habbits. Our initial focus was to make each discipline/practice have some degree of accountability also to develop right metrics to gauge are activities. This gave us an opportunity to define some baseline values and criteria to benchmark our progress.

Covering Incident and Problem Management were easy to consider them ready for the audit now came Change and Release Management on which no previous documentation was done. In this case it was bit unique as my client is a Managed Service provider. They manage network, infrastruce and telephone networks for different clients all over the world, so in this case Changes come as a result of any one or combination of scenarios; Request by Customer, underlying root cause of the problem, business policy, technological changes, regulatory requirements, multiple incidents and many more but in any case the Change Advisory Board reside with customer not them while they did execution of the change - Release part.

We started with training internal staff on Change and Release while training we developed our internal change and release policies by marrying our practices, and ITIL best practices framework tharesulted in the templates for these two disciplines. We adopted Release model as our new guideline whilst we made our customers bind by our new change model into their standard practice.

Similar approach was taken to address remaining areas. To find more about our solution approach please contact us via contact information provided in this blog post.

To find out how we can improve effeiciencies into your system please goto: http://www.statera.com