What is a Good Practice?

An interesting experience during my initial ITIL V3 trainings – which I missed to write about:

As a trainer, there are many situations where we have to stand-up and justify ITIL definitions and interpretations – all the more while justifying the correct answer of some of the tricky questions. This one was related to one of those situations.

There used to be (not sure if it is still there) a question in the sample question papers in the lines of (dont remember the exact question): “Which of the following most closely defines a good practice?”

One of the options said some thing like : “Some thing that help in driving organization forward“, while the correct answer was the option: “An industry-wide practice“. Many students used to select the earlier option as the correct one and I had to do a lot of justification and point to the courseware to say the correct answer was : “”An industry-wide practice“

Now, in that particular batch there were a couple of richly experienced senior managers, who went on unconvinced, whatever justifications I gave. Finally one of them gave me a statement, which almost threw me out of balance (almost literally ).

 

ITIL & Bloom’s taxonomy

All of us know that ITIL qualification scheme is based on bloom’s taxonomy. Well, most of us know that….! ok… some of us know that….? Leave it,  if you didn’t know, here is the knowledge bit of the day for you!!

So what is bloom’s taxonomy and how is it used in the ITIL qualification scheme? I recently wrote an article on our company website. Here are some extracts from that:

 

Business Service Catalog and Technical Service catalog – Why and how?

While professionals world over were struggling (and many are even continuing to struggle) to get the ‘Service catalog’ right as per ITIL V2, ITIL V3 has introduced the concepts of Business and Technical service catalogues!

These concepts takes the Services in the Service catalog and build their linkages/relationships to Business units and  processes (in Business Service catalog) and underlying IT systems (Technical Service catalog).

However, let us analyze a couple of points : Why these two views of the catalog and How to approach for putting those in place?

Question 1:  WhyBusiness service catalog (BSC) and technical service catalog (TSC)?

ITIL states that BSC will make the SLM process more proactive and pre-emptive.

How? Let us look at it this way: Business is well aware of the criticality and impact of business functions and processes. So, when they need to decide the service levels of IT service(s), the key thing they would like to know is : which all business functions/processes are dependent on that particular IT service(s). Hence, linkages of IT services to the business processes/functions is a key input to the business/customer and the BSC provides just that.

Technical service catalog (as ITIL mentions)  is useful for building of OLAs, UCs etc – from an SLM point of view. Now for a core technical person in the IT, his/her ownership (or responsibility)  might be limited to a particular system or network component or activity within IT. Now, for him/her to understand the criticality of the component/activity, he need to get a perspective of which all services are dependent on (and will be impacted by) that particular component/activity – and the TSC just provides that.

Thus a combination of BSC and TSC will provide an excellent model and view of how the services and underlying components/sub-services are linked to the business.

Question 2: How to build it?