"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).

Robbin Trusty of Austin Energy gave a presentation, "ITSM+PMO=NWO".  Austin Energy has been working on integrating ITSM into their PMO.  They have not gotten very far in their implementation, but Robbin had some neat ideas.

Today Jack Probst presented to the itSMF Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The presentation is to be posted on the SIG web site. The CMDB and the service catalog are very closely related. The CMDB starts with services anyways, and the service catalog is the list of services. Potential service catalog categories:

• Application Based Services (e.g. Customer Support Services)
• Hosting Services (e.g. Data Center services)
• Desktop Services (e.g. mobile devices)
• Shared Services (e.g. data LAN)
• IT Professional Services (e.g. Service Management, Procurement)

The itSMF Special Interest Group (SIG) for Higher Education is going to have its next event, June 17. It doesn't look like the SIG's web site is updated yet, so here are the details:

Speaker
Jack Probst, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant

WHEN:
Wednesday, June 17th, 1:00-2:00 pm EDT

COST:
Free

REGISTRATION

Cross-posted to http://www.educause.edu/blog/borwick/SummaryIdentityManagementIsCom/173004.

John Ellis, Heather Mugg, and Jesse Foley from Emory led this pre-conference workshop. Around 8-12 people attended.

Higher education has particular issues with identity management, because one person can play so many roles, e.g. an undergraduate student who then goes to med school, becomes a resident.

Our change management procedure was created out of audit concerns. We wanted to ensure that changes to productions were properly approved and documented. Many Universities adopt change management for the same reason--to satisfy audit requirements.

Some organizations have great IT Service Continuity plans--e-commerce companies like eBay, hospital IT shops, and the military, for example. Others don't have such great continuity plans, and only prepare plans as a response to recent events e.g. Hurricane Katrina.

We have several means for learning about ITSM: books, training, user groups like the itSMF, fellow Universities, and sites like this one. Last Friday I explored another means: I talked with a Gartner analyst for the first time. If your University has a contract with Gartner, then the odds are someone on campus has the ability to schedule 30-minute calls with a Gartner analyst. There are over 600 Gartner analysts.

I talked with someone from the "CIO Research" team, a team of 20 people. The analyst point me to some case studies supporting our service catalog implementation and helped me understand the value of a Business Service Catalog. He said that it's not uncommon to schedule several calls with the same analyst to "follow up" and see how things are going.

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