I just watched the NewScale webinar on service request fulfillment. The presentation helped explain the connection between service catalogs and request fulfillment, and was intended for people already familiar with ITIL v3 concepts.

The bulk of the presentation was Rodrigo Flores, founder and CTO of newScale, talking about the "eleven secrets of successful service request fulfillment." These 11 tips are very specific to how you deploy a web-based portal that allows end users to order services themselves.

Last year, we decided to create a service catalog for our department. The purpose of this catalog was to get a central list of the services that people in the department support. Thus, we were creating a technical service catalog (where the audience is internal IT staff and IT management) rather than a business service catalog (where the audience is end-users and other departments).

If you are able to come to Wake Forest University, we will be holding our first ITIL v3 Foundations training on February 24-26, 2009.

This training is only for University faculty, staff, and students, and will be an extremely good value. Just let me know, borwicjh@wfu.edu, if you're interested!

Check out Duke's Office of Information Technology page on SLAs and OLAs. They have sample SLA and OLA templates!

Last week our team helped a student group create and document their process for project governance. Five students and two staff members worked together for a day and a half to create the process.

The group did a really great job of working together, and listening to one another. They also had experience with the material as they'd been experimenting with various ways of approving the project. Finally, they were all motivated by a common need to understand how project hours are approved: hours are the basis for everyone getting paid! We learned a good deal working with them; for example, this is the first time that we'd created a process during a group meeting!

Here's how the process creation broke down over the two days. Perhaps these steps might be helpful for other people interested in rapid process creation and documentation!

Organizations need to have written rules about how they operate. These written rules, or "governing documents," provide an unambiguous explanation of how employees and others are expected to behave. For example, a corporation has a charter--the fundamental document that defines how the corporation should operate. Other documents, such as by-laws, then "fill in the blanks" to answer more detailed questions.

In Computerworld Magazine, Paul Ingevaldson recently wrote an article called "Top 10 qualities of a great IT shop." These qualities include the CIO reporting to the CEO, an executive steering committee, and a focus on the software development lifecycle.

A couple of the qualities relate to ITIL, such as having a security team (loosely Security Management), a disaster recovery process (IT Service Continuity Management), SDLC focus (very loosely Service Design), and participating in the long-range planning (Service Strategy).

The list looks OK to me, so I'm wondering: why don't ITIL concepts show up more often in Paul's list? Here are my guesses:

Right before we left for break Dec 19, we found out that Wake Forest University is now an official "Accredited Training Associate (ATA)" and can now teach ITIL v3 Foundations classes! We are even listed on the Loyalist list of training providers for ITIL v3 Foundations!

ITIL course accreditation is a little complicated. :-) To offer accredited training, an organization must become an "Accredited Training Organization (ATO)," or become an associate to an existing ATO. Each trainer must also become an "Accredited Trainer (AT)."

A couple of months ago, we teamed up with taruu, a great group of people and an ATO. We are now an ATA for taruu. Part of our deal is that we can offer academic discounts on ITIL v3 Foundations training! Let me know if you're interested!

Troy DuMoulin's recent article in ITSM Watch, "The Seven Enablers & Contraints of ITSM," calls out seven critical factors for an ITSM implementation:

• Leadership
• Resources
• Knowledge & Skill
• Integrated Tools
• Ability to Deploy
• Ability to Affect Behavioral Change
• ITSM Program Momentum

The Higher Education SIG of itSMF USA has announced a meeting for February 4, 2009.

Their web site says the meeting will be held at UC Santa Cruz, and will be available on-line.