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I’ve helped a lot of organizations improve their Change Management capability. When coming in from the outside, it’s important to quickly size up the culture and context to the best of your ability.  One of the ways I’ve done this is paying attention to language. In the Change Management space, if and how “CAB” is …

I’ve seen several articles recently railing against the very idea of best practices. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at where this criticism is coming from and take it head on. I recently read a classic executive-targeted article article from CIO.com by Bob Lewis, Why every IT leader should avoid ‘best practices’. His …

If there’s one thing that describes successful organizations in our time, it’s “agility” – the ability to quickly detect and rapidly act on change in ways beneficial to the organization.  For its part, IT has had agile intentions for some time, but it still eludes many, and how to agile-ize ITSM remains a common challenge …

There’s no doubt about it; we’re in the Age of Agile. We’re kind of late into it, yet, I’m frequently asked how we can ‘agilize our ITSM.’ Why isn’t ITSM agile? ITSM has taken a beating in the Age of Agile; stood up as a bit of straw man; the slow and bureaucratic nemesis of …

Change Management has again returned to the headlines, though you may not have heard it that way. Two years ago in Change Management in the age of DevOps, I wrote about the profound business impact of failed changes when Facebook and Target both had significant change-related outages. Financial markets reacted immediately, with significant financial impact …

Here we go again. Announced this week – Axelos – the company who owns ITIL is being sold to PeopleCert. Industry response varied greatly, but nearly eclipsed another significant announcement.  IT Revolution quietly published A Framework for Incident Response. How these two relate and what it means is the subject of much industry chatter presently. The words of …

“IT is becoming more integrated into the business of organizations, and more integrated with the work of their staff and customers. As a result, the pace and frequency of change – changing requirements and IT service changes to address the requirements – is increasing. We are also in a period of rapidly changing technology. At …

Everyone knows a Configuration Management Database ( CMDB ) is a good idea. We’ve known that for years. And yet, in many years of ITSM practice, I’ve rarely seen a good one.  CMDB and Change Management There’s a big difference between the ability to automatically scan for devices and a functional CMDB (or the broader …

Every year there’s a flurry of predictions for the coming year. This year, I decided to make my own list, from the neutral vantage point of an ITSM practitioner. I have no ulterior motive, or financial stake in these predictions – they’re simply my perspective at this point in time. 1 – Year of the …

This year I accepted a CIO position at a state (government) agency. It’s been a great year of learning and growing, not the least of which being that the organizational landscape looks a lot different from this altitude. What a difference one level makes! “They” You know how there’s always a “they” – those anonymous …