Cleverics - Subject Field

Cleverics

Subject field

Dear friends! First Real ITSM workshop was successfully delivered. We would like to thank evereone who came and took part. Please find a brief report of this event (in Russian).

Subject Field

Real ITSM involves its own lifecycle, activities, roles and metrics, analogous to those of ITIL but entirely different. They differ because, unlike ITIL, they must engage with the real, physical world, populated by «wetware» — those cussed, unpredictable and generally useless devices known as people.

Rob England (The IT Skeptic)
«Real ITSM»

Cleverics works in information technology management area. What does this mean? What materials we use? What standards we rely on?

Basically, the notion of «IT management» is composed of four layers:

Management of technology and resources: infrastructure, personnel, organization
Management of services and products
Management of processes and projects
IT governance and control

There are well-known standards and bodies of knowledge for each layer. These are guides and frameworks for software and hardware vendors, methods and approaches for risk and quality management, standards and techniques for project and process management, recommendations on control, audit, strategic planning, relationships management and more.

The most recognized bodies of knowledge are ITIL, CObIT, MOF, TQM, MoR, PMBoK, Prince2, CMM/CMMI and others. The most acknowledged standards relevant to IT management are international standards issued by ISO (ISO 9000, ISO 20000, ISO 27000, ISO 38500, ISO 12207, ISO 15504 etc.) as well as industrial standards like SOX or eTOM.

The Problem

The majority of IT management related materials (both mentioned above and omitted) requires lots of work to adapt and to make them compatible to each other, to make them suitable for a particular company with its own problems, goals, culture, limitations and so on. Only few standards mentioned above refer to each other and explain how to integrate these to deliver a comprehensive management solution. Instead different approaches often use incompatible terminology, rely on different set of processes and activities that overlap. And keep in mind that an IT manager has to act on several management layers simultaneously!

So, how to deal with all these sources? How to identify those approaches that can help address the current agenda? How to integrate new approaches with current management solutions? How to avoid redundancy? Why is it insufficient to select a single «correct» solution, to put it on the flag and to live by it?

Possible solutions

One can carefully investigate all possible sources, compare those and build their own comprehensive IT management concept, step-by-step. This approach requires a lot of time and effort, yet it is an interesting way of self-education.

The alternative would be to shift the focus away from methods, approaches and concepts to tasks and solutions. From a practical point of view it may be much more important to clearly define what task we need to solve, who needs the solution, what restrictions are imposed. Then having this information it would be much easier to find an adequate solution, to choose the most appropriate standards and approaches, to define whether the help of external experts is required and what this help will be like. This is the Cleverics way.