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.

"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).

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:

Wil LeBlanc, currently from Safeway but previously with the Army, gave this presentation.  This presentation was very similar in concept to the itSMF Fusion 2009: IT Strategy--the Key to Getting Executive Support and itSMF Fusion 2009: Planning Business Manager and Customer ITIL Induction presentations.  Wil related his experience at the Army and at Safeway in implementing service management.

Malcom Fry gave this talk.  He is really funny and an engaging speaker.  His talk overlapped with the previous day's "IT Strategy--the Key to Getting Executive Support."  Here are some random notes from his talk:

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.

Dave Howard from Toyota Financial Services gave this talk on release management.
At the moment, I can't find my notes.  The main thing I remember is that they have created a release process for any new environment.  For each environment needed for a project (e.g. dev, test, and prod), you have to go through a process of architecture design creation and review, specification creation and review, and finally the actual build.

Dalibor Petrovic from Deloitte gave this very dense talk on IT strategy.  He had a lot of good content--he just needs a half-day workshop to cover it in a way that allows the listener to absorb all the good points he's making.  He has the most certificates of anyone I've ever met, and he wrote about IT Service Management for his MBA thesis.
He said that IT fails for these ten reasons:

David Coyle from Gartner spoke, and then led a panel discussion, about "Running IT Like a Business."
IT is no longer a monopoly.  Business people are pretty smart at IT nowadays.  IT must compete and maintain its position as a trusted advisor.  The business can make their own decisions, such as purchasing an account with salesforce.com.