Tom Pierce from AT&T gave this talk.  Essentially Tom made the following points:

• CSI doesn't get the attention it needs
• Someone in your organization should have explicit CSI duty
• ITIL calls out the role "CSI Manager" specifically for this purpose

Tom said that improvement has to follow the "farm" model: plant, cultivate, nurture, then harvest.  You can't plant and then harvest.

Link Alander and Shah Ardalan from the Lone Star College System (LSCS) gave this presentation.  LSCS has over 65,000 students and is growing at 5-8% a year.
They initially had difficulty in instituting metrics; IT in particular had been dodging measurement since Y2K--saying they were too busy, or that IT was changing too quickly.  They have four particular areas of focus:

I attended Troy DuMoulin's "Ask the Expert--Continual Service Improvement" breakfast club discussion this morning (although I arrived a couple of minutes late).  Here are some notes from the talk:

We have probably all heard the Lord Kelvin quote, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. So why not place more emphasis on measuring performance of our IT infrastructure? ITIL gives us key performance indicators, KPIs, as guidance, but I wonder what percentage of university IT departments track where they perform relative to defined indicators. My guess is that nearly all departments do some, but few departments are doing this on a large scale department wide. But why not? Especially since this feedback would foster improvement efforts.

Lately I have been thinking about topic of how best practice frameworks fit together. Whether you follow the PMBOK, ITIL CMMI, COBIT, and the list goes on, a good chance exists that you will find times when the schools of thought overlap as well as contradict one another. It is fair to say that all models inevitably have both evangelists and critics, but it is my belief that all the proclaimed “best practice” models have at least some good takeaways. So, to dismiss any one model altogether is a bit close-minded.

Predecessors/Before You Begin

ITIL recommends setting Critical Success Factors (CSFs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), metrics, and measurements for processes and services. Metrics are used throughout ITIL's Service Lifecycle but they have particular importance to Continual Service Improvement.

Metrics

Continual Service Improvement recommends a connection from an organization's vision into metrics through the following continuum:

• Vision
• Mission
• Goals
• Objectives
• Critical Success Factors (CSFs)
  

Below are notes from today's itSMF USA Higher Education SIG round table conversation.

The itSMF USA Higher Education SIG is holding its first meeting today. We are attending virtually.

David Cannon, one of the authors of Service Operation, presented on "ITSM on a Shoestring."

He talked about how IT cost cutting can be misdirected, such as how IT shops are now running into "virtualization sprawl" from virtualizing servers for immediate cost without considering the longer-term costs of managing virtual machines' configuration.

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:

Jim Haustein and Vick Dean of Cornell University delivered a presentation titled “Process Improvement in Higher Education” that discussed the process improvement program. Since mid-2007, Cornell has been using ITIL as a framework to create a more process-focused and service-focused organization. This was an excellent presentation filled with lessons learned and tips for people to take back to their institutions.

Here are a few quick points worth repeating:

Continuous management support is key to success.
Change Management was their first win.