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)

IT Service Management concepts are supposed to help align IT with the business by making IT think in terms of services--and by then asking, what value does each service provide? IT and the business then agree on the value and sign a Service Level Agreement that (in part) proves IT is providing value to the business. So that's thinking about value in terms of services.

Then recently I have been learning more about Lean Manufacturing, from lean.org and several books such as "Getting the Right Things Done" and "Lean Thinking". Lean again focuses on value, mainly in terms of the value added by each step of the process of creating something for a customer. So that's thinking about value in terms of a process or "pipeline" of events leading to a consumable product.

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.