Blog

Things you may not know….

2009-03-02T18:59:00Z

Serio Remote Desktop - you are probably aware that you can use Serio to take control of your customers’ desktops and quickly resolve issues remotely. Serio requires that your customers are aware that you will be taking control and they need to click a button to allow that to happen.
But did you know that there is another version of the remote desktop tool designed for servers that does not require a response from a user?
I was recently onsite with a customer and found that they were having to go into their (rather chilly and cramped) server room to work on the server consoles. We installed the unattended version of the Serio Remote Desktop on all their servers and they are now able to do this work from the comfort of their own desks. The remote desktop is an application which is included in all installations of Serio, there is not additional charge for its use, so have a look and see if it can make your job a bit easier.
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Sorry it’s been a while

2009-03-01T19:21:00Z

In a world outside of IT Service Management, my husband and I also grow avocados - summer is the time for harvest, so that has also kept us busy over the past couple of months, we recently took out a lease on a block of Kiwifruit as well, so that has been a steep learning curve as we come to grips with the work required - and I can tell you that it is a LOT of work - to keep the vines healthy and producing.
But it hasn’t been all summer fun and games over the past couple of months and the science of Service Management has still taken a key position in my day to day life. As you may know, I am the Endorsement Officer on IPESC (International Publications Executive Subcommittee), a subcommittee of the ITSMFI Board. At the end of last year we held elections for new officers and added three new members to our group, sadly farewelling three long-serving and hard working officers at the same time. We recently met face-to-face for the first time in Los Angeles and had a very productive two day meeting discussing the future direction of IT Service Management publications.
Publications are now so much more than books...often books are not what our community is looking for to help them in the ITSM journeys - whitepapers, case studies, templates, presentations - these types of smaller publications can be so much more useful for someone working on the coalface of Service Management. A lot of our time during the meeting was spent discussing just what type of publication we should be making available to ITSMF members around the globe. If you have any ideas of what you would find useful, drop me a line at consulting@versosolutions.com or leave a comment on this blog.

Merry Christmas to all!

2008-12-28T21:10:00Z

Well 2008 is almost at an end, in the Southern Hemisphere we are enjoying a beautiful summer, lifting a bit of the gloom from the current economic crisis which has made life a little uneasy for many businesses in the second half of the year.
So with many businesses tightening the purse strings and cutting all “unneccesary” expenditure, is IT Service Management a luxury or a necessity?
For businesses who want to differentiate themselves from the competition and survive in these difficult times, one of the most cost effective things you can do is provide exceptional customer service. This does not just apply to IT organisations who support external “paying” customers. Providing top class service to the internal business groups is just as important - don’t make outsourcing an option for the business. With outsourcing companies scrambling to keep their businesses alive there are going to be a lot of cut price deals available which may seem very tempting to a business, but if you are providing an IT Service that knows and understands its customers, anticipating their needs and ensuring excellent availability and performance of the infrastructure, you will make it very difficult for the business to replace you.
As with any initiative, look for some quick wins for your customers, improve your communication, look at outstanding problems which have been irritating the business and fix where economically viable...little irritations can fester away for customers, causing disatisfaction which is unnecessary when a problem can be easily and permanently fixed.
Check the health of your IT Service by doing a Customer Satisfaction Survey (most Service Desk tools will have this capability built in - Serio users can contact their account managers for information on how to do this), take heed of the results and make changes quickly to improve any proble areas.
Invest some time in your Continual Service Improvement (CSI) processes, react to your customer’s needs and proactively look for ways to enhance the services you offer. Many of these things can be done with very minimal, or no, extra financial investment.

ITIL Simulations - Do they help?

2008-12-05T11:35:01Z

I am a great proponent of ITIL simulation games, I have attended workshops at a number of conferences where these games, normally in a shortened version have been presented. The premise is - in a very small nutshell - that you are put into a real-life situation and use ITIL processes to get the best end result you can.

Having attended a number of the different presentations, the one that made the biggest impression was the Apollo 13 game from Gaming Works. Apart from the fact that building, launching and ultimately brining a rocket ship back to earth, albeit via simulation, really appeals to the Geek in me - the game really bought home the advantages that good design and application of Service Management principles can give you when dealing with unexpected events.

Rather than me trying to explain the game in long and boring detail, have a look at this video from Gaming Works, it will give you a better idea of the value of the game than I can put into words!

If you are interested in running the simulation for your business, send us an email to consulting@versosolutions.com and one of our consultants will be in touch.

ITIL “Compliant”???

2008-09-01T22:55:00Z

This is one of my pet hates, and you won’t find anywhere on this website a claim that the Serio Software is “ITIL Compliant” because there is no such thing.

Our aim is for the Serio software to support your processes by providing a high level of configurability. I like to think that if you have designed a reasonable process for your incident, problem, change or configuration mangement (or any other ITIL based processes), then you should be able to configure Serio to support these processes.

ITIL is not something you can “comply” with, the framework offers you guidance on what is good practice for IT Service Management processes.

Pink Elephant provides a service which assesses IT Service Management software and gives it their “tick” if they believe it supports the ITIL framework, but they do not state that any software is ITIL Compliant, their Pink Verify service indicates that a toolset is capable of supporting the basic ITIL processes.

The only space where Compliance becomes a reality is when you are looking at ISO20000 - but compliance with this standard is not something that you will achieve simply by selecting a toolset that claims to be compliant, there is so much more to it than that....watch out for future posts on ISO20000.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you should take any claims of ITIL compliance from toolset vendors with a grain of salt, I would love to hear your feedback on this....

The Service Catalogue - where to start

2008-07-21T12:04:00Z

I liken the business Service Catalogue to a restaurant menu. You have a choice of items you can select:

Steak and Chips
Fish of the Day
Coffee

For each of these choices there will then be some further decisions you need to make - how do you want your steak cooked? Do you want sauce with the chips? How is the Fish of the Day cooked? What sort of coffee do you want - latte, filter, flat white, capuccino?

Underlying the customer facing menu are the recipes - the equivalent of the Technical Services Catalogue. The customer, with a few exceptions, does not need to view the recipe just as, in the ITSM world, the customer does not need to know what underlying services make up the Service they are purchasing.

Going down a further layer will bring us to the CMDB - in the case of the restaurant this will consist of the individual ingredients for the dishes, the pots and pans, the utensils - all the components that are needed to create your meal.

Underpinning the restaurant menu we need to have a Service Level agreement. In the case of a restaurant this may not be explicitly conveyed in the menu, but you can be assured that the customer will have certain expectations. No matter how perfect the steak is that you serve to them, if they have had to wait 2 hours for it they will not be happy with the service provided.

Moving back to the IT environment, let’s consider a customer purchasing an email service from their IT Service Provider. It is not going to be enough to say they want email - where do they want it? Exclusively on their desktop PC? On their laptop in the office or connected to a home network? On a laptop with a roaming wireless connection? On a PDA or mobile phone? Each of these options will have cost and technical considerations.

Receiving email on a laptop with a roaming wireless connection is going to use more than one underlying technical service and multiple CIs - you will be looking at an Exchange Server, Spam filtering, proxy servers, file storage, back-up services, wireless connectivity, anti virus software, firewall.....the list is long, but the customer does not want, or need to know that. What they want is spam and virus free email delivered to their laptop wherever they are in the world.

My normal approach is to start looking at the Service Catalogue from a top down view. Define the customer facing services and then start to detail the underlying technical services that make up these services. The KISS principle should certainly be applied to the creation of a Business Service Catalogue - Keep it simple, stupid, for example, don’t offer your customer virus protection as a Service, that should be an underlying technical service for the email and internet services.

These layers, along with the Service Pipeline and your Retired Services make up the Service Portfolio.

I will talk more about the creation of your Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio in upcoming posts. In the meantime if you want to see a simple template for a Service Level catalogue, drop me a line at

Reporting - where to draw the line

2008-06-25T21:39:00Z

The statement “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is true, but equally you need to consider the idea that “if you are not going to act, don’t bother measuring.”
I see many businesses where a huge effort is put into gathering data, analysing it and then producing pretty graphical reports which are printed, emailed and otherwise distributed to various parties. Too often that is as far as it goes, these reports will often go straight into the round filing cabinet under the desk, or into the deleted items folder. If they are read, presented at meetings or distributed to management they may be examined, discussed...but is any action taken as a result of the information that contributes to improvements in your IT Service Management processes and performance?
A huge amount of effort goes into the collection, formatting and distribution of these reports, too often these reports are either never used, or are used but not acted upon.
Don’t get me wrong, measuring is absolutely crucial to a successfull Service Improvement initiative, but think carefully about just what you are going to be able to do with the information you are collecting. Is it going to provide you with anything that can be acted upon - and even more importantly, do you have the resources to make changes if they are required. Our current economic climate means that many IT Departments are running at full capacity with no ability to acquire new resources.
I would suggest that you look at the current list of reports that you are providing and ask yourself what has been done as a result of the information contained in these reports - if the answer is “nothing” then you need to consider whether the effort involved in compiling and then examining these reports is warranted.
SerioReports offers a wide range of reports that is adequate for most reporting requirements, we are also able to supply you with the tools needed to produce your own custom reports in your own reporting tools.

Is it time to lose the “IT” from ITSM?

2008-06-13T08:17:00Z

I guess we could argue that fleet maintenance is today really an IT function as most modern fleets use computer diagnosis - my formerly computer illiterate-husband now happily plugs a laptop into massive pieces of machinery to pinpoint errors and when my car goes in for a service it is connected to the diagnostic computer before any work is done. IT is everywhere now, in all apects of “Service” so has the IT in ITSM become redundant? I think it has.

We limit the involvement of other parts of the business world by using the “IT” part of the title - “IT” conjures up visions of the stereotypical glasses-wearing “geek” inhabiting the basements of corporations around the world (check out “The IT Crowd” to see the vision the rest of the world has of “IT"). Therefore when someone sees “IT” as part of the title of an organisation or framework, they are likely to think - “That doesn’t interest me - I’m not one of those IT people.”

Going back to the discussion I was having with my husband on Fleet maintenance, it was clear that they have problems - at the grass-roots level - in deciding what to do first. There are the simple service requests for machinery which has done a certain number of hours and needs its regular maintenance; then there are minor faults such as blown bulbs, seats that won’t adjust, airconditioning that is not working properly (although in an underground mine that is a bit more than a minor inconvenience); and then there are the show-stoppers - major pieces of equipment which break down and stop production - often at a cost of 100s of 1000s of dollars each hour. Prioritisation of these seems to be a bit haphazard, the fitters involved don’t have any SLA targets to work towards, the most important jobs are easy to work out, but beneath that there is little guidance. This doesn’t apply just to the company he currently works for, he has had 30+ years in the industry and the situation has been the same pretty well everywhere he has worked. If there is any priorisation applied it does not feed down to the people actually doing the work.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the current relevence of “IT” in ITSM, is it a redundant acronym in today’s technology driven world, is there any part of the business where Service is not driven or at least enabled by IT?

On another note - I have had an interesting few days attending the IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub-Committee) meeting in Paris. As a journalist in a previous life (pre-IT) publications is an area that is high on my list of priorities, we achieved some good work over the two day meeting, and Paris in summer is not a bad place to be. I even managed to spend a day at EuroDisney, an interesting experience with no children in tow.

Welcome to our new look website

2008-05-09T07:36:01Z

In this blog we will aim to discuss topics of interest in the IT Service Management world, and we welcome your input into these discussions.

We will also be using these pages to give you hints and tips to help Serio users to get the best value out of the toolset.

With my own interest in publications you can expect quite a bit of discussion on this topic in this blog - I am currently the Endorsement Officer on IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub Committee), an ITSMF International sub committee charged with the job of ensuring that books carrying the ITSMF logo are up to the expected quality and provide valuable information to the ITSMF community.

I hope that you will find this blog interesting, thought provoking and that you will contribute your own thoughts to the topics that spark your interest.

itSMFnz Conference

2008-04-30T15:10:00Z

Conference attendees were presented with a great range of high quality speakers, as usual the opportunity to network with others working in the ITSM field was invaluable. Next year’s conference is also planned for Wellington in May 2009. The next regional conference to look out for is the ITSMF Australia event being held in Melbourne in August of this year.