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...

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...

I came across a very good article here at ITSMWatch.com on creating a service catalog . Some of the advantages mentioned of developing a service catalog include: Significant improvement in internal and external communications Positively (and...

In a recent post on Real World ITIL , Scott discusses mapping ITIL flows to an IT org chart . The Microsoft Operations Framework Team Model approach is very useful for such an exercise. Why is the team model important? Here is a blurb from the document...

The MOF approach to “adopting and adapting” the ITIL service support (user focused) – service delivery (customer focused) organization is to extend this to distributed IT environments and current industry directions. Typically within an organization there...

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...

Finding blogs talking about ITIL / MOF...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In case you haven't followed the ITIL v3 news, the concepts of a CMDB have been "corrected". No longer is the definition so rigid as to say a single database for a CMDB. There are many trusted sources for configuration information within a company and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Thanks to Jonathan Hardwick for the recognition in his recent post on ITIL, MOF, and a critical mass of blogs . There still aren’t very many posting on these topics but as long as the posts contain good and relevant content, more will catch on. A recent...

I came across an interesting article on MOF / ITIL in Computerworld by Stevie Sacks , titled “ Reducing IT Costs, Step 6: Design a Service Catalog .” Stevie mentions having two catalogs. One catalog being high level and public facing used for better customer...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...