On Tuesday, October 20th the Wake Forest fellows were lucky enough to lunch with yet another incredible leader in the Wake Forest community. Currently serving as both the President of WFU Health Sciences and the Dean of Wake Forest Medical School, William B. Applegate can easily be described as one of the most inspiring leaders we have met with thus far. The time that Dean Applegate spent with us led to three pages of scribbled notes that I will highlight here in the attempts at sharing just an ounce of the wisdom he shared with us.
 

The OGC is removing the ITIL v2 certifications.  I got an email through Loyalist about it.  Here's the specific timeline:

• V2 Foundation to cease 30 June 2010
• V2 Manager to cease 31 August 2010
• V2 Practitioner to cease 31 Dec 2010
• Foundation Bridge to cease 31 Dec 2010

In the September/October 2009 issue of "The Forum" e-newsletter from itSMF, Reginald Lo from Third Sky writes about "Techniques for Understanding what the Customer Values in a Service."

This article rehashes content from Service Strategy, but for me it's a helpful reminder of this three-part statement:

(name of service) PROVIDES VALUE TO THE CUSTOMER WHEN (outcome supported) WITHOUT (constraint)

We're conducting our fall ITIL foundations training today through Thursday.  Today we covered the core concepts, the Service Lifecycle, Organizing for Service Management, and Service Strategy.  Tomorrow's an even bigger day, with Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation!
I teach the ITIL foundations training course for a couple of reasons: to help our department develop its IT Service Management capabilities, to help the higher education community meet one another and learn from one another, and (last but not necessarily least) so that I don't forget all my ITIL knowledge!
If you're interested, our next training class will be February 2-4.  We need at least 8 students enrolled to be able to offer the class.

Wednesday's webinar is at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/6666/attend.  Participants included IT staff from Clemson, Emory, Georgia State and California State - Fresno.

"Capacity management" seems to be overlooked in ITIL implementations--capacity management gets pushed way down the implementation plan, or is seen mainly as an input to event management (for alerts about disk filling up) and service level management (for making promises to users about what capacity will be available).

There are several videos from Charles Sturt University in Australia on YouTube about ITIL.  See them via this YouTube search.

Last Monday, as part of our Leadership Luncheon's series, the Fellows were given the opportunity to share a sandwich with one of the most inspirational leaders at Wake Forest University, Steve Reinemund. Serving as the dean of the newly merged business schools, Steve Reinemund is easily recognized as one of the most innovative leaders of our time. Praised for his ability to mentor and facilitate corporate relationships on all levels, Dean Reinemund shared a variety of insights with us, including his personal framework regarding successful professional and personal development.

A couple of weeks ago at the itSMF USA Higher Education SIG group on LinkedIn, I created a discussion topic:

Creating an IT Strategy

At the itSMF Fusion 2009 conference, I heard three different talks that related to creating an IT Strategy:

• http://itsm.is.wfu.edu/node/219

• http://itsm.is.wfu.edu/node/222

• http://itsm.is.wfu.edu/node/223

To over-simplify, a common thread between these three talks was that an IT strategic plan can become a communications tool for IT and the business, so that everyone understands where IT is going.

Does your University currently have an IT strategic plan? If so, how did you create it and how do you maintain it? Can you share it or link to it?

If your University does not have a plan, what are you doing to develop an IT strategic plan? How does your IT department communicate its vision with the rest of the University?

Here's a summary of the responses:

Our student worker went through our (physical) library and updated our LibraryThing account.  If you're interested, see our list of books!
Our collection has grown in a couple of ways: selective inheritance from previous collections, consciously buying reference texts on "best practice" such as the CMMI text, and cultivating an Amazon wishlist that we periodically review and purchase from.  The newest addition to our collection is the Lean Manager.