I had the great pleasure of attending training this week at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) . I attended the summer session at CISR which comprised classes on: IT Portfolios and Business Agility Enterprise Architecture as Strategy IT Risk and Oversight IT Governance...

Mike Turner has an MS Press book coming out soon on the Microsoft Solutions Framework . I encourage you all to get a copy when it is available. Mike has long been an expert on MSF and his learnings will provide some great insight into understanding and adopting the framework. “Get the hands...

Pretty good article here on ITIL adoption and MOF implementation . To quote from the article: “In February 2004, Microsoft consultants descended on ACC’s operations center for a one-week assessment of help-desk procedures for managing problems, changes, configurations and upgrades. The...

Tony put up a great list of ITIL and MOF links in a recent post. If you have others that aren’t listed, please let one of us know. You can find the list by clicking here .

One of the common results to a service improvement project is the stagnation that takes place after the initial assessment, design, and implementation. A “version 1” is typically realized but once the process changes are in place, the ball gets dropped and a repetitive assessment never takes...

If you are currently using the free Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) solution for SMS 2003 or are evaluating this functionality, there is a great blog on MSDN which digs into the technical details of this software. In case you are unfamiliar with DCM, this solution will allow you to automate...

Just came across a great article at www.govtech.net on ITIL adoption in the US. The author, Chad Vander Veen , delves into why this has taken off so much in the US the last few years, the expanded adoption in government IT, and where things are going in v3.0. It mentions that some in government circles...

Need sound operational and technical assistance to setup a production emulated development and test environment? Need this environment to support change and release management? If the answers are yes, then I highly recommend you examine the WSSRA (Windows Server System Reference Architecture) Virtual...

Evergreen Systems , a consulting firm based in Sterling, VA, recently reported its findings from an ITIL benchmark study. They surveyed 167 people representing 108 companies and organizations at the 5th Annual IT Service Management Forum annual conference. Some results that jumped out at me from this...

Are you very familiar with ITIL concepts and wonder why implement MOF? A new white paper on MOF: An Actionable and Prescriptive Approach to ITIL has been published to the Microsoft Download Center. This white paper explains how MOF builds on and extends (or adopts and adapts if you like those words better...

From the Desired Configuration Monitoring user guide … “Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) enables you to author desired configuration manifests, and to monitor and report on compliance of your computers against a desired configuration. DCM thereby strengthens the Microsoft systems management...

I saw an email recommending ITpreneurs.com as an excellent source for training classes. They offer traditional classroom delivered, e-learning (self paced, virtual instructor led), and Virtual Classroom style training. They have courses on: MOF ITIL COBIT HDI BS15000 Here is a...

Keith Combs presented a great webcast on a “ more secure and well-managed infrastructure ” by outlining effective implementation and optimization of MOF principles. Keith posted about this in a recent blog entry which outlines details from the webcast. If you haven’t viewed it yet, I encourage you to...

In a recent article in ict*World , Russell Steyn wrote about the “ love triangle in ITIL – configuration management, change management, and release management .” Interesting that this image arises as within the MOF training curriculum , there is a graphic similar to the following one which depicts a...

To continue discussion from previous post on risk management tied to IT decision making … First the “why”. There are many reasons listed in the MOF Risk Management Discipline white paper for why risk management is important to an organization. One of the more important ones to me is that there is...

If you organization is like most, Risk Management is a discipline that is not given a lot of attention. Quite often companies take a very basic approach and place risk management into a cloud of high, medium, and low without further definition. Other companies take a very negative approach to risk from...

See the full article here . Moira Stepchuk, of Fox IT , was my ITIL Essentials trainer several years ago now. She was a great trainer and very knowledgeable with ITIL and MOF. Fox IT has many quality offerings for ITIL and MOF services. Be sure to check them out.

I have recently been dealing with an issue surrounding a lead time notification requirement to the CAB for changes at a significant level. There was much discussion on lead time for authorization of the change vs. lead time for release readiness review. It is true that these lead time notifications,...

Boris Pevzner has a good blog going on IT Service Mgmt and ITIL topics, entitled " The Boris Files - Secrets of Successful CIOs ". You should check it out. A post he made back in July on best practices for Service Management is well worth the time. And he likes to use graphics also, a man after my...

In a recent post on Scott’s ITIL Blog , a question was asked, “ How can you develop and advertise a Service Catalog if you can’t guarantee delivery or cost? ” This question came from a company considering ITIL adoption. I agree with Scott that one of first steps in implementing a service management improvement...

In a strong article by George Spafford on Datamation , entitled " The True Value of Change Management ", many good thoughts around change mgmt are listed. Some of the points mentioned are: Change is always constant, be prepared to deal with it Change mgmt should have various processes...

I came across this article on bizjournals.com about a Louisville company, LG&E Energy, embracing the ITIL framework .  The outlines the initial steps LG&E took as well as some of the early benefits they received.    One of the key notables is the method that LG&E imposed to ensure their...

In his post on training up your IT staff , Tonyso  mentions the skills assessment offering for organizations.  The skills assessment will show you how to: Analyze skill gaps throughout your organization Design custom learning plans to boost productivity Improve business productivity Reduce support...

A new download is available here on how Microsoft within its own IT group performs the change and configuration mgmt processes.  This paper contains an overview describing how Microsoft IT takes advantage of Microsoft solutions to deploy software and services in the enterprise.  It is short two page...

In case you haven’t heard, a v1.2 update was released to the Microsoft Identity and Access Management Series , which adds the new Password Mgmt paper . This documentation highlights the following: “The Password Management paper outlines different approaches to password management and addresses the...