When it comes to understanding what IT service providers do for customers, it helps to view the work in terms of IT service management. This framework takes a customer-centric (rather than technology-centric) approach to IT managed services. While your organization might employ this person:

A more accurate or ITIL-based service model might look like this:

A simple observation is that there are there are five different services here, each potentially requiring a different mindset or specialized skill set. The service shown front and center – in this case, service requests – is the most visible as well as the most demanding.

The question business leaders must face, then, is: Does your company have a 5-headed person capable of managing all of these services effectively? How many people within your organization are versatile enough to be able to teach a receptionist how to change margins in Microsoft Office Word and then have a strategic business discussion with the CFO?

Assessing Value: Core vs. Chore

The central challenge in IT service management is understanding the value each IT service brings to the business. To do this, let’s add a new set of qualifiers to the chart: “core” and “chore.” Core services are not only critical but valuable – in measurable ROI terms – to the business. In order to deliver these services effectively, an IT service provider must have specialized knowledge of the organization and its needs.

Chore services, on the other hand, require some initial knowledge and documentation, but they are rarely directly measureable in an ROI calculation. In fact, for many organizations, attempting to measure the cost of these chores is percieved as more expensive than actually doing the chores themselves.

Most IT services will include both core and chore tasks. When creating an IT service management model, it helps to break down what proportion of tasks are core vs. chore within each service.

Every provider of IT managed services builds a chart like this, in some form, to understand the cost of delivering services to clients and what to invest in. What organizations that are not in the business of technology services need to do is understand the cost to their organization in delivering these services. For example: Use this chart to assess the value of core and chore in your own organization.

Summation

Guest Post by Bob Deasy, Chief Strategist at Lead I.T. Consulting

Now that you have performed this exercise, the next step is to make a decision. Does your current 5-headed IT person have the ability to deliver all of the value you have assigned to each service? Can you take the existing value they deliver and improve the ROI by investing in them to support the core of the business? You can use this chart to understand the cost of your “chores” when selecting a managed services provider. Do they understand the principle here? Can they provide experts in each area, or do they, too, have a 5-headed IT guy?

Nimsoft customer Bob Deasy is the Chief Strategist at Lead I.T. Consulting. Bob brings a thorough knowledge of business strategy to Lead I.T. He understands how business leaders think because he is one – Bob spent more than 20 years as an executive in the high-technology sector, working for organizations such as Intel, Sequent, Mentor Graphics, Floating Point Systems and the U.S. Military. Follow Bob online via Twitter and Linkedin.

Want to learn more about the latest changes in IT? Download our extensive e-book: Defining Modern IT.

5 Signs Your IT Monitoring Software Needs an Upgrade

IT monitoring today requires homogenous support in a heterogeneous environment. While many IT organizations are getting by with point solutions, as the IT infrastructure changes—virtualization, mobile device management, multiple applications and operating systems—IT monitoring may also need a change. Our IT monitoring experts compiled the following list of five common, though not so obvious, signs that your IT monitoring solution needs an update.

1. Performance declines and you’re not certain why
   Every IT organization suffers performance issues from time-to-time. If you’re able to pinpoint the issue with a fair degree of certainty and resolve it without the threat of reoccurrence, then your IT monitoring solution is doing its job. However, when your system experiences recurring issues or you never seem to get to the root cause, then it may be time to consider updating your IT monitoring software.
2. Lack of communication between operations and service desk
   We hear this complaint frequently, and although at face value it appears to be a communication issue, we often find that it’s a lack of visibility across the network that creates a gap between operations and service. What operations doesn’t see, still impacts the service desk. The service desk attempts to help the customer, but with limited information and as a result, usually must escalate the issue. This not only increases service delivery costs, but takes up valuable resources. With a holistic centralized view of all servers (real and virtual), applications, and network devices, operations has greater visibility to the network and can facilitate more efficient, cost-effective service delivery.
3. Customer complaints
   This is one of our pet peeves. We get it . . . there will always be customer complaints. However, we estimate that at least a portion of the complaints could have been avoided with unified IT monitoring capability and another portion of complaints could be resolved on the initial call, again, with more effective IT monitoring software.
4. IT resources appear to be spread too thin
   This all-too-common issue could be the result of ineffective IT monitoring. We see this occur more frequently in IT organizations where point monitoring solutions are patched together. The patch works fine until the point at which network capacity expands beyond the capability of the monitoring software. The result often places IT resources in a reactionary mode, forcing IT managers to “fight fires” by throwing more resources at the problem. What’s worse is that business decisions aimed at growing the bottom line, instead add to overhead costs. For example, an acquisition adds new servers to the infrastructure. So instead of simply configuring your server monitoring software to accommodate the new servers, you’re forced to commit IT staff to monitoring the new servers themselves.
5. Unable to meet QoS and SLA; or worse yet, you’re not sure if you’re in violation
   This is more than a subtle sign that your IT monitoring system needs an upgrade . . . it’s like the light of an oncoming train! Any IT monitoring solution absolutely must provide an indication of service levels, preferably an easy-to-read SLA report that lets you know your service level at a glance.

If you see any of these signs, it’s time to consider an IT monitoring upgrade. If you see sign #5, contact a Nimsoft IT monitoring expert right now. ]]> http://blog.nimsoft.com/2012/5-signs-your-it-monitoring-software-needs-an-upgrade/feed/ 0 http://blog.nimsoft.com/2012/5-signs-your-it-monitoring-software-needs-an-upgrade/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=5-signs-your-it-monitoring-software-needs-an-upgrade http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ModernItBlog/~3/jZZEeUd_U0E/ http://blog.nimsoft.com/2012/findings-from-the-ema-unified-it-demand-management-survey/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 16:06:47 +0000 Charlie Betz http://blog.nimsoft.com/?p=2360

This is my second guest blog for Nimsoft on the topic of the demand/supply/execution model. Last week’s blog generated an amazing response on Twitter. The industry is clearly ripe for new thought on its basic conceptual structures.

Continue reading →

This is my second guest blog for Nimsoft on the topic of the demand/supply/execution model. Last week’s blog generated an amazing response on Twitter. The industry is clearly ripe for new thought on its basic conceptual structures.

As I’ve discussed here, here, and here, trends like DevOps and Lean IT are challenging the traditional mental models of technology management, and spurring interest in more unified approaches to IT demand and execution. This was why I undertook the EMA survey on Unified Demand Management earlier this year. But until I got this survey back, my thinking on the topic was mostly conjectural.

I’ll lead with a compelling finding on the following question:

Are you aware of situations where poor coordination across different types of IT demand has led to poor support of business needs?

Now, what exactly did this mean? The survey was based on my “three legs of demand” model, that IT work can usefully be seen as a continuum of projects, tickets, and often-nebulous “improvement” activities that are “too big for a ticket and too small for a project.” The question sought to determine if IT was making good decisions in assigning resources across these major types of demand.

I didn’t know what to expect from this question. If the “Yes” response had been low, I probably would have started to question whether this line of research was useful. But here it is:

What does this mean?

It means that IT fails to prioritize effectively.

And it means that IT’s failures in this regard have real business impacts.

And that IT professionals are significantly aware of this problem.

Additional questions in the survey reinforced that solving this problem is important to many IT professionals. It’s not just a “sometimes” issue. And while I’m not going to go into all the details, the demographics clearly show that this gets worse with scale – the “Yes” responses top out at a whopping 75% for companies with more than 2,500 employees, and over 90% for companies with IT budgets of greater than $50 million.

Some may respond skeptically. “We have a portfolio process, we triage incidents, we segregate our project and operational resources.” All well and good; those are tools you’ll continue to use. But here is my acid test use case:

Given a shared IT resource (e.g. a highly skilled database administrator), is that person given the support they need so that they are always working on the most critical business priority ACROSS projects, operations, and continuous improvement? Does their manager have FULL visibility at any given time into what they are juggling, so that they can provide the needed guidance and coaching?

Where does greater business value lie: fixing the root cause of that chronic Sev 2 incident with a workaround, or the project deliverable that’s not quite critical path … yet?

IT has never coped with this challenge all that well, due to the dysfunctions of plan/build/run and other factors. The newer, more agile models heighten the need for different models; DevOps is pulling people back and forth across the old traditional “wall” and IT management needs new tools to deal with this.

Other findings of note:

• Of organizations that require a PMO to handle projects over a certain budget amount, that amount is either static or increasing – evidence for an hypothesis that PMO control is decreasing. The “radar ceiling” (or “floor” if you prefer) is going up and more things can “fly under” it. Had a recent conversation with a CIO at a Society for Information Management meeting who confirmed that this indeed is a trend he’s seeing in his shop, and is concerned about.
• We also surveyed on the market interest in the concept of the ITIL CSI (Continual Service Improvement) register and found a surprising level of receptivity. As IT becomes more interested in Lean and continuous improvement, I think that such a system is essential, as continuous improvement is itself demand and needs to be prioritized along with project and directly sustaining work.
• The survey showed a statistically significant relationship between DevOps and Kanban. While only a minority of companies were doing either (28% & 21%), those doing one were highly likely to be doing the other as well.
• Other questions included what a unified IT demand management solution should handle, the prevalence and characteristics of project and service portfolio management, and some interesting findings on the semantics of “application” and “change.”

The free on-demand EMA webinar, which goes into more detail can be accessed here; contact EMA if you are interested in the full report. And many thanks again to CA and Nimsoft for sponsoring this research.

As Peter Senge notes in his landmark book The Fifth Discipline, “Why are mental models so powerful in affecting what we do? In part, because they affect what we see. Two people with different mental models can observe the same event and describe it differently, because they’ve looked at different details and made different interpretations.”

What do you think? Is it time for a new mental model of IT?

(Credit to @demingSoS for providing those quotes via Twitter last night at a perfect time.)

Charlie Betz is Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates. His responsibilities include IT portfolio management, IT financial management, asset management, ITSM suites, and integrated IT management.

He has 20 years of experience across all aspects of enterprise IT practice, including 6 years at Wells Fargo as Senior Enterprise Architect and VP for IT Portfolio and Systems Management. He has also held architect and application manager positions for Best Buy, Target, and Accenture. He is author of the recent 2nd edition of Architecture and Patterns for IT: Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance (Making Shoes for the Cobbler’s Children). Follow Charlie online via Twitter and Linkedin.

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A few weeks ago I announced that the cloud was dead, as there was a new kid on the block and his name was “Big Data”. Actually, I don’t think that this kid will be king of the block for very long. You can of course quote me in ten years’ time and prove me wrong. I could then join the club of infamous predictors that has some great technologists like Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Thomas J. Watson (IBM) as its members. There is only a need for 3 computers in the world, and 64k will be more than we ever need, and big data is a passing fad. By the way, the use of the male gender in my anthropomorphism of the “Big Data” technology is deliberate. I originally drafted this blog with a female version but it just didn’t seem right.

Why am I predicting a short run for him? The primary reason is that I heard a new Big Data term last week that sounded far more appealing, and seemed to define the value of Big Data in a much more concise way. Another reason is that it took me too long last Friday night to explain what Big Data was to some friends of mine, and I would prefer an alternate term that would give them a head start on understanding what it is. When I read articles like the recent one in Computerworld, I wonder if people can appreciate why managing large datasets and the technology to analyze them in real time has any value at all. We have had data since before IT existed, and we have analyzed it in real time and in non-real time for more than 50 years, so why does it get interesting because it gets Big?

The answer is that such technology enables real time analysis of social network information. In the end, it is all about mining the trillions of trivial postings that we collectively make every second on the social networks of our choice. I know that “trivial” is harsh but, let’s face it, for the majority of people most other people’s, and particularly strangers’, posts hold no interest. Mining and refining trivia to find nuggets of information that can be used in innovative ways to create money. Mostly it is about targeted advertising, but it is also about trend recognition and the analysis of collective thinking. As an example, if we could know instantly that a famous “A” list celebrity just finished “War and Peace,” would there be value in targeting all that celebrity’s followers with an offer on the concise works of Tolstoy? Probably not but I am sure that you appreciate the idea.

In technology terms we have realized that what we have been using so far is inadequate for this job. With classical technology, and particularly SQL based databases, retrieval performance degrades exponentially with volume. Even the concept of “collect, store and analyze” has to be rethought. Now it is more like “collect, cache, analyze, store result” and to do that in real time with a variable and unpredictable arrival rate of data requires massive parallelism and efficiency of execution. It reminds me of the early days of computing when data storage structures were designed for performance and code execution times were measured and constantly optimized. Right now there is a race among technology innovators to produce the fastest, most efficient, and most linear performance profile analytical tool.

There is absolutely no doubt that the ability to mine massive amounts of data in real time will unlock massive opportunities for new business ideas, but it will not be the technology itself that we will be remembering. The emerging “Big Data” technology is the enabler for “Social Search” and it is “Social Search” that will become the major battleground of the future. So maybe I am splitting hairs, but having tested the use of the “Social Search” term in a bar last Friday evening I can confirm that it has much more intrinsic value than “Big Data”. And, by the way, she is female – her given name is Social and her surname is Search.

Download our extensive e-book, entitled “Defining Modern IT”, to learn about the latest changes affecting information technology.

How many times have we discussed multi-year IT projects that not only have exceeded their time estimate and are over budget, but they also fail to deliver the benefits promised to the user community.

The ISACA 2012 Governance of Enterprise IT (GEIT) Survey, March 2012, confirmed that issues with projects delivering on their promises continue. According to the survey, enterprises continue to experience project overruns (48%), 41% experienced a high cost of IT with a low or unknown return on investment and 38% said there was a disconnect between business and IT strategies. These results confirmed that the traditional cadence of long running, multi-year projects is not meeting business demands. It is clear we are not satisfying the business, and the processes we are using, although well proven in the past, continue to fall short.

As a first response many of us have moved to an agile approach where we deliver on projects with a more rapid cadence, leverage consumer input and deliver value to the consumer on a more regular basis allowing the end product to morph over time based on feedback. That approach appears to cover many of the challenges we have, but this is no panacea.

You will always hear the arguments of waterfall versus agile. I don’t want to get in the middle of an argument as both methodologies have their place and the simple answer is “it depends,” but the changing delivery cycle of an IT-enabled business means that your delivery of capability is rapidly changing. Let me explain.

We all know mobility is on the rise. How many of you don’t have a Tablet or a Smartphone? How often are you notified that your APPS are updating weekly or monthly? Have you seen how easy it is to provide feedback to the developer for additional capability or even a bugfix? A few clicks and it’s done! More than ever we are moving to type of customer-centered development, yet this can suck all your resources into development of services that don’t meet the corporate mission if not aligned to the business objectives. We need to ensure our development is correctly focused on achieving the mission of the business, which mandates understanding by those empowered to execute. This requires effective communication of the corporate mission to all levels in the organization and effective management with continuous monitoring of all the changing dynamics to ensure we are moving together toward an ever-changing goal.

We must be engaged in delivering constant and consistent bite-sized pieces of value and communicate it in terms of the business objectives. In short, we must effectively execute “the business of IT.”

Executing the Business of IT requires:

IT portfolio analysis

Optimization of investment decisions to balance cost, value and risk are essential IT planning functions and can only be achieved with an aggregated and correlated view across infrastructure, asset, project and application portfolios enabled by effective executive reporting and analysis capabilities. These need to be able to be adjusted in real time based on the changing dynamics of the business environment to support the risks and outcomes and value realization of decisions.

IT financial transparency

Transparency for delivering each IT service, including a detailed understanding of unit costs and cost drivers, allow for better cost-based decisions. These costs can be sent back to the business which helps to demonstrate the value to the business. Understanding the ratio of cost to value will allow the business to make informed decisions in good times and bad, and help ensure that the business is accountable for consumption.

IT performance management

IT is transitioning to becoming the service provider to its business partners and therefore must measure its performance against its contractual obligations, IT metrics, KPI’s and benchmarks. IT performance management provides the ability to better articulate the value of IT in business terms and understand service performance from the top down.

You may think that moving your IT construct from its current state to the Business of IT is a significant cultural or organizational shift, but I can assure you that many forward-thinking organizations have already begun the transition. Have you?

Robert Stroud, VP at CA Technologies

This post was originally published in the CA Community blog by Robert Stroud.

Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF International Board as Treasurer and Director Audit, Standards and Compliance. An industry veteran, Robert has significant practical industry experience and is a recognized industry thought leader, speaker and leader. Robert is a global authority on governance with multiple contributions to industry knowledge in multiple publications including COBIT 4.0, 4.1 and COBIT 5, Guidance for Basel II and also a former chair of COBIT Steering Committee. Stroud is considered an global authority in service management with his experience, knowledge and leadership. He has provided strong leadership with the ITIL Update Project Board, ITIL v3 Advisory Group, ITIL v3 mentor and reviewer and the itSMF movement in the US and Internationally and has contributed to several titles on ITSM. Prior to CA Technologies, Stroud spent more than 15 years in the finance industry successfully managing multiple initiatives in both the IT and retail banking sectors related to security, service management and process governance. Follow Robert online via Twitter and Linkedin.

Want to learn more about the latest changes in IT? Download our extensive e-book: Defining Modern IT.

I want to outline briefly some ideas I’ve had recently about our fundamental models for understanding IT management.

In 1968, Melvin Conway proposed an insightful law, basically stating that our systems are copies of our communication structure (how we interact as human beings). And while this law is often applied in discussions of computer program structure, his intent was broader, including any human created system.

In the broad system of IT management, we often hear of the basic three stages, “Plan-Build-Run.” We make plans for a new IT system, we construct it, and we run it. IT organizations structure themselves and communicate to a large degree along these lines. I’ve used them myself in any number of writings. However, increasingly I have come to believe that that as a basic structure for understanding IT management, “Plan-Build-Run” (which I’ll abbreviate PBR) has seen its day.

While it pervades IT management thinking, and can clearly be seen in the structures of frameworks like ITIL and COBIT, PBR is ill suited for the demands of 21st century IT management. Here are some of the problems I believe that the plan/build/run paradigm causes:

• PBR encourages waterfall thinking, the idea that a complex system just needs to be designed, constructed, and operated. Agile trends turn this from a one time effort into an ongoing cycle, and this cycle is accelerating, challenging traditional IT organizations and methods.
• Demand is split across the PBR phases. Because we don’t focus on integrated demand our customers have to knock on multiple doors to get the services they need.
• PBR results in systems being built in isolation from one another. We thus lose opportunities to implement shared services and ensure architectural consistency across the IT estate. The result is complexity that is difficult to move to Cloud sourcing as an IT supply option.
• Because we don’t see execution as one problem we are unprepared for DevOps, our people are multitasking, and our failure to prioritize across queues is resulting in poor service to the business.
• Because we don’t view supply holistically we manage IT staff and their talents poorly, with little overall understanding of the dynamics between technical talent, technology products, and IT services.

What should replace PBR? I propose a new triad: Demand, supply, and execution (DSE).

These are not novel concepts. Supply and demand stem from fundamental economics and operational management. Execution is a widely accepted industrial term that covers the translation of supply and demand into value, via detailed resource and capacity management, dispatching, process monitoring, and performance analysis. The Wikipedia article on Manufacturing Execution Systems isn’t bad. I’ve also gained some insight from this article on ANSI/ISA-95.

The DSE concepts are distinct from (some might say orthogonal to) PBR.

Demand management starts from the premise that regardless of the size of the implied work, all demand on IT resources should be understood in a unified manner. From a new mobile device to the day’s incident reports and change requests, to a strategic initiative implying a $10 million projects, it’s all “just demand.” Different techniques come into play depending on value, scope, risk, and other parameters, but if we understand demand as a unified entity we position ourselves to provide much better service to our stakeholders while at the same time giving our IT staff a saner existence.

Supply boils down to the fundamentals of “atoms, bits, and cells”: hardware, software, and people, under various ownership and sourcing models. The CIO is responsible for increasingly complex IT sourcing and contract management strategies, and understanding one’s baseline supply is key to evaluating new supplier options for technology products and people with the skills to exploit them.

Finally, next generation IT execution management starts with demand and supply generally, and looks for optimal (or at least satisfactory) means of delivering value. “Projects” and “tickets” are seen as part of a unified management structure, not as occasional passersby. The availability of resources is always considered before releasing work, and ongoing scenario-based forecasting is employed to identify emergent constraints. And time tracking is completely transparent, relying on intelligent automation to determine what people have actually been working on. No Friday afternoon time reconstruction!

The DSE model is not intended not as a criticism or replacement of ITIL or COBIT or any other framework, but rather as an overlay, or perhaps an underlay. Well established IT process areas such as project, release, incident, change, and so forth are important and will continue, but a DSE approach can counteract the tendency to form functional silos around each, and instead promote a whole-systems approach to IT management.

To summarize Keynes, “even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist.” Basic conceptual structures like plan/build/run and demand/supply/execute have consequences. When widely adopted to the point where they are just “common sense,” they define our social relationships, operational thinking, problem solving, and more. And therefore, while we may think that “plan/build/run” is some form of IT natural law, it is a human construct that can be adapted or even discarded if we no longer find it useful.

Next week: The results of the EMA Unified IT Demand Management survey

Charlie Betz is Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates. His responsibilities include IT portfolio management, IT financial management, asset management, ITSM suites, and integrated IT management.

He has 20 years of experience across all aspects of enterprise IT practice, including 6 years at Wells Fargo as Senior Enterprise Architect and VP for IT Portfolio and Systems Management. He has also held architect and application manager positions for Best Buy, Target, and Accenture. He is author of the recent 2nd edition of Architecture and Patterns for IT: Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance (Making Shoes for the Cobbler’s Children). Follow Charlie online via Twitter and Linkedin.

For more information, download Nimsoft’s free eBook: The Definitive Guide to Unified IT Management.

When you consider the transformation of IT in many organizations from enabling function to strategic partner, it’s becoming clear that the business of technology and how it’s monitored and managed has the potential to empower or limit an organization’s ability to deliver on its strategy.

Putting business back into ITSM

In today’s highly complex IT environments, Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is about balancing cost pressures and service levels, while establishing effective external partnerships. That takes care of one side of the balance sheet—expenses, but what about revenue side? As Bill Bulkeley explains in his article, How to be a modern CIO by staying relevant in the cloud computing era, forward thinking CIOs are seeing more than technology and information. They’re spotting opportunities to apply technology that also drives business.

Look at the explosive growth in mobile technologies. When you consider the use of mobile in organizations—66% sales, 65% field service, 45% customer service (2011 State of the CIO, CIO Magazine)—the opportunity to leverage the technology to not only support, but also to grow the business represents significant potential. And in addition to determining whether the innovation is developed in house or outsourced, the role of IT is that of a business line manager answering business questions: How can this improve my business? What is the investment and what is the payback?

Get your head in the cloud

One of the most influential changes to affect ITSM has been the cloud. Bulkeley explains that much of the CIO domain—infrastructure, capacity planning, etc.—has moved to the cloud. Therefore, CIOs have become mangers of services, who establish and deliver on service levels. Add to that the fact that cloud technologies that have inspired a host of out-of-the-box and easy-to-implement IT products, such as Vblock and Nimsoft’s IT help desk solution, Unified Service Desk Management, business line executives are now embracing and making decisions on these new IT products.

Yet the impact of IT touches every aspect of the enterprise, and as Bulkeley says, no one has greater insight into the entire organization than IT. In fact, according to a CIO Magazine 2011 State of the CIO report, over the next three to five years, CIOs will spend 54 percent of their time driving business innovation and 38 percent of their time developing and refining business strategy.

As CIOs play a more strategic role, so too will ITSM. The organization’s ability to effectively monitor and manage the service desk will have even greater influence on business results. CIOs who are more effective at monitoring the end-to-end infrastructure will not only run a more efficient service operation, but also will have more time to spot technology trends that can drive new business.

Schedule a ITSM demo and learn how the Nimsoft Service Desk approach to ITSM adds greater value to the one IT resource that touches every aspect of the enterprise.

The newest “refresh” of ITIL released in 2011 has 26 processes. The just-released version 5 of COBIT has 36 processes. The recently released version of ISO 20000 has nearly 20 processes.

George Spalding, Pink Elephant

Those of us who spend every day looking at this stuff know that there is a LOT of overlap between these different frameworks and standards. Almost total overlap when we focus on the basic operational processes that every IT shop MUST have. It is only the top 5% of organizations that spend any cycles worrying about more than a few key processes, the blocking & tackling of IT operations.

In next week’s webcast, we’ll be focusing on keeping it simple – with 3 questions to ask when considering changing your current service desk solution:

• What does the business really need?
• How much ITIL is enough?
• How do you choose the right SaaS solution?

George Spalding is co-author of ITIL® V3’s Continual Service Improvement core volume, and is one of the world’s most insightful and engaging IT Service Management and Support experts. In addition to his extensive commitment to improving the industry, George spent several years as a consultant to the White House on technical presentations and White House conferences. He also coordinated technical presentations for members of the President’s cabinet, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. George is an ITIL Expert, the highest level in the ITIL certification program, is a regular author of IT articles and white papers, and is a presenter at global ITSM conferences and events. Follow George online via Twitter and Linkedin.

Your IT help desk touches everyone in your enterprise. So it’s important that help desk personnel reflect value and responsiveness. The Nimsoft IT help desk team compiled a list of interview questions and answers that will help you identify qualified and committed candidates for your IT help desk.

1. How would you handle the “I can’t log in” call?
   First I would ask the caller to verify that he has the correct user name and domain. Then I would ask the caller to check if the “caps lock” key was enabled. If that doesn’t resolve the issue I would continue by asking the caller to check the physical connections such as Ethernet.
   The importance of this question is to make sure the candidate covers the basics and doesn’t jump to conclusions without first troubleshooting the basics.

2. Describe how a (substitute any technology here such as WEP, LAN, etc.) works?
   WEP is a means of securing access to a wireless network and is usually established by a network administrator. WEP keys include a series of hexadecimal digits the keys must match between devices in order for them to communicate.
   Most applicants think this is a technical proficiency question; however, it’s really a question aimed at evaluating communication skills. While candidates should be familiar with most popular acronyms they may ask you to explain first, which is fine, as long as they can articulate the answer.

3. In your professional career, what was the most difficult thing you had to do?
   Working weekends. (Bad answer!!!)
   The answer could focus on a specific situation such as making a decision to leave a job. It may also describe a specific IT help desk incident such as challenging conventional wisdom to come up with what turned out to be the right solution based on thorough research of the problem. In any case you’re looking for how the candidate adapted to change.

4. What kinds of people do you currently work with on the IT help desk?
   I work on the incident management team, and we often collaborate with problem managers and operations teams.
   Here you’re looking for answers that reveal how well a candidate works with others. Does the candidate’s answer focus on specific roles or does it mention personality or behavioral characteristics. Does the candidate speak in terms of teamwork such as “our team includes . . .” or “I work with a team of . . .”

5. What do you do to stay current on IT help desk good practices?
   I subscribe to SupportWorld Magazine and am a member of HDI.
   The answer should go beyond attending whatever courses the company provides. You’re looking for a self-starter who seeks information. The candidate should subscribe to industry journals or seek training and certification courses outside of the company’s on-the-job training program.

6. Tell me about a situation when the caller didn’t understand what you were explaining. What did you do?
   I rephrased the question to see if the misunderstanding was my own miscommunication. When that didn’t work, I asked the caller a series of questions, paraphrasing the caller’s answers to make sure that I thoroughly understood.
   The key here is to ascertain the candidate’s communications and customer service capability. Does the candidate really try to see the caller’s perspective? Is the candidate flexible and/or creative in finding ways to articulate the action?

7. Tell me about an issue that you couldn’t initially resolve. What did you do?
   I was working with an irate customer who grew impatient with my questions. So although I knew I would eventually be able to help the caller, I asked the caller if he would prefer that another associate handle the incident.
   In this question, you’re really looking for a candidate who shows ingenuity and customer focus. Did the candidate leverage available tools such as the knowledge base or Performance Management Database (PMDB)? In the answer above, the candidate put the customer first by giving the caller an option that perhaps would uncover an underlying issue of the caller simply wanted to talk to someone else. The next step would be for the interviewer to ask why the caller grew impatient.

8. Tell me how you have dealt with a hostile caller. What was the outcome?
   This help desk interview question requires you to show how you can handle negative and stressful situations. Your answer should show a patient and positive attitude when challenging situations occur and that you do not allow your personal ego to get in the way of helping the caller. Describe the coping techniques you use to keep calm under stress.

Technical proficiency is not enough to determine a good IT help desk candidate. A promising candidate must possess effective problem solving skills, the ability to prioritize and adapt to changing priorities, customer focus and above all, excellent communication skills.

Once you’ve found the right candidate, let Nimsoft provide the tools that will help your IT help desk more efficiently deliver on service desk and business goals.

Applying an ITIL framework to Service Management is less about finding problems and more about treating each problem like a clue. Using IT forensics, each clue by itself is usually not a means to an end, but another step in the journey to a solution. Invoking ITIL change, release and configuration management processes first requires thorough detective work. Taking a situation such as packet loss, Read on to learn how ITIL practices can enable a more proactive approach without compromising Quality of Service (QoS) or Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.

Can ITIL Help You Get Out of Your Own Way?

A good detective follows a clue to the people who can provide answers or lead the detective to more clues. When it comes to network availability it’s been said and proven time and again that 80% of incidents are the result of human error. Make the first step in your detective work a trip to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to look for clues indicating who made the last configuration change. If that doesn’t provide more clues or a solution, then conduct additional forensic work.

ITIL Works Effectively with Good Monitoring Data

ITIL Service Transition relies on good data. Using our packet loss example, comprehensive network monitoring solution is your best defense against QoS issues or threats to SLA compliance caused by packet loss. In fact, the right monitoring solution can detect an issue before it becomes a Service Desk incident. An ITIL good practice, Service Validation and Testing is another area where forensic data can uncover a potential service level threat, often before it impacts users or applications. So in the case of the missing packets, monitoring data offers additional clues from items such as round trip response time, latency, jitter and dropped packets.

ITIL Service Operation – Separating the Symptom from the Cause

Good detectives are able to read into clues separating symptoms from the cause. ITIL Service Operation framework separates Incident Management and Problem Management. In most cases incidents are clues to a larger problem, although sometimes a major incident points to the root cause or a problem is identified without ever reporting an incident. In the case of the missing packets, if a call experiences jitter, that could be the symptom of an occasional dropped packet, which wouldn’t necessarily indicate a major QoS problem. However, if monitoring data indicate packet loss greater than 0.1%, then follow the clues or incidents to the problem of packet loss and conduct root cause analysis to find a solution.

ITIL provides an approach that puts Service Management into perspective. With effective monitoring tools, technicians and support teams can act as sleuths to uncover clues and piece them together to have a better understanding of network performance. The ultimate goal is to not only handle incidents and problems more efficiently, but also to prevent them from occurring in the first place, or at least indentify potential issues before QoS or SLAs are affected.

Learn how Nimsoft can help you can effectively integrate ITIL solutions within your Service Operation.