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Doing things right – ITIL, COBIT, SOA, CMMI, where to focus?
Have you ever struggled with prioritizing your work, not knowing whether your work has any meaning or if anyone even cares about what you do?
These are signs of goals not being clear enough. In my previous blog we discussed the importance of doing the right things.
Have you ever had a project fail to meet its objectives? Have you ever been in a situation where the project is finished but the problems still linger? Or are you facing a reality where more and more time is spent in supporting existing operations?
This is when doing things right is the answer. Processes, best practices, and guidelines help in increasing quality, efficiency, and control. With these you can reduce both short-term and long-term costs.
Ok, sounds easy – in theory. Some say the best way is to just implement ITIL. Some say that SOA saves the world. Some say that your projects need to be in order. Some say use COBIT.
Let’s take a quick peek into numbers. ITIL v3 has 20-29 processes (depending on how you count). COBIT has 34 processes. SOA is not as clearly defined, which leads to a number of varying interpretations. Still, it’s a combination of processes that support maintaining and developing SOA architectures, and about 20 guiding principles that should be considered when implementing it.
In a mid-sized company you often have 10-100 people working in IT. Clearly you can’t implement everything. And you shouldn’t even try because it’s a waste of time and money. So where to start? Many find answering that question difficult because every framework and concept treats all the processes as equal even though some are clearly value generating and some clearly supporting.
There are three primary value generating activities that all IT organizations share. And these three should be managed in a proper, documented, and efficient way. These are the things you should do right.
- Invest in the right projects. All projects and investment proposals need to be evaluated against the same criteria and decisions should be based on them. Not on who-shouts-the-loudest principle.
- Ensure that projects produce good, concrete, AND scheduled results. Projects that have clear goals, proper resources, and strong management become successful projects. When a project is started, someone needs to have clear ownership and the will to see the project through.
- Provide excellent support critical services and good support for the rest. When your organization is committed to providing services, you have to make sure that the customers can access the services easily and that they are available when needed. To really be successful in this, you need the right people, processes, and tools for providing the support. You need to document the requests, you need to be able to prioritize them automatically based on criticality, and you need to have your services modeled from services and applications to infrastructure.
Know what is important for your business, and take that as a guideline to identify IT’s most important processes and services. And start doing them right. When you do this step-by-step, I promise, you will be much better off already in a short couple of months.
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