January 2015 Issue: The Cloud

Letter from the President: IT Service Management in a Cloudy World 2

The Cloud and ITSM: Curtain Call for ITSM or Revelation of the Concept of Services? 5

Process Modernization & Consolidation: Death of E-mail in HR 10

The SourceFor IT Service Management

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 2

With all of the talk about “clouds” in our indus-try these days, you’d think that we were in the business of predicting the weather. But

whether we like it or not, we live in and operate in a world dom-inated by cloud computing and all of its derivatives.

As a professional association of IT service management pro-fessionals, we are challenged to understand what this means to us as professionals and to our profession as a whole. It is fair to question whether or not service management principles and practices remain relevant in a world dominated by cloud. After all, the fundamental principles of IT service management were developed long before any of this existed.

While the world of IT has undergone significant changes over the last several years—and will continue to change at a rapid rate—the truth is that the core mission of IT has remained the same. While the methods we use to fulfill that mission may be changing, we are still in the business of helping our organizations leverage technology to create value in the form of operational efficiency, a more robust and rich customer experience and through the creation of competitive differentiation. And this is the root value of IT service management.

Many have erroneously seen service management as a strictly operational approach to IT. They have focused on process and the operational elements of service management principles at the exclusion of the real value that service management can bring to an organization. At

its core, service management is about continually driving organizational change within the IT organization so that we can deliver the efficiencies, the customer experience

and the differentiation that we’ve promised. In a world dominated by cloud, this is more important than ever.

Cloud technologies offer orga-nizations immense amounts of flexibility and adaptability. These are things that nearly every organization will need as they compete in a rapidly evolving and changing marketplace. But

these same cloud technologies also complicate the delivery of IT services to the organization and make that delivery much more complex. And there is a great risk that as cloud technologies continue to multiply within organizations, synergies and key competitive opportunities are lost because data and systems become disjointed and disconnected.

Service management principles and the service management professionals who understand their true essence offer organizations the ability to rationalize and synthesize the resulting maze of technologies and deployment approaches to ensure that value is realized and that delivery occurs consistently and reliably. In a world in which more and more of an organization’s technology assets live outside the walls of the enterprise, service management principles may, in fact, be the only thing that can keep it all together and working effectively.

As a service management professional, you have a tremendous opportunity to help your organization

Letter from the President: IT Service Management in a Cloudy WorldITSMF USA President Charles Araujo reflects on the impact of cloud technologies on ITSM.

The truth is that the core mission

of IT has remained the same

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 3

navigate this new cloud world with confidence and control. For instance:

⚫ Service design: You can help your organization take a more design-oriented approach to the selection and deployment of cloud technologies. Too often, business customers are reactionary when they are selecting cloud technologies (this is particularly true with software as a service solutions). They become smitten with the solution and fail to look at it holistically. The fundamentals of service design can help them see any procured cloud service in the context of both the business value to be realized and the operational constructs required to ensure that value is realized and protected.

⚫ Change management: As cloud technologies continue to proliferate, their mutual interdependence within your organization will multiply exponentially. While they will need to be adapted to an agile, cloud-based environment, well executed change management practices are critical in ensuring that unintended service impacts do not occur.

⚫ Configuration management: As cloud becomes ubiquitous and driven by vendor product offerings, value chains can get lost. The ultimate value of tech-nology to an organization is not derived from the

technology itself (even with cloud technologies), but by how those technologies are orchestrated to deliver some form of business value to the organization. But cloud providers have no incentive to measure or manage that value chain beyond the limits of their particular product or service offering. Configuration management, however, is fundamentally focused on mapping and monitoring these very value chains (when it is done properly) and can be a key tactic

used to ensure that various cloud technologies work together to deliver their intended value.

While the case can be made that service management prin-ciples must be applied in slightly different ways in a cloud envi-ronment, the fact remains that these very principles remain critically relevant. As a service management professional you must both appreciate this criti-cality and learn how to effectively

apply these principles within this changing environment.As your professional organization, itSMF USA stands

ready to help you do that. In this issue of The Source, you will find several great articles dealing with various aspects of the intersection between ITSM and cloud. I hope that you read them and seek to apply what they teach you in your every day life. If you do, I am confident that you too will see the immense value that service management offers in a cloudy world.

Discover your potential!Become a member of

Too often, business customers are

reactionary when they are selecting

cloud technologies

Maximize the Powerof ITSM with Integrated

Software License OptimizationWhile IT Service Management (ITSM) solut ions are very comprehensive, organizat ions are beginning to see the value of integrat ing these tools with Software License Optimizat ion tools such as FlexNet Manager Suite. This integrat ion enhances both ITSM processes such as Incident, Performance and Change Management as well as license opt imizat ion processes.

With Flexera Software’s FlexNet Manager Suite and your ITSM solut ion, you can address and opt imize all aspects of software, hardware and IT service delivery. Reduce costs, reduce risk and streamline IT operat ions.

© 2015 Flexera Software LLC. All other brand and product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks and registered trademarks of their respect ive owners.

For more information go to:www.flexerasoftware.com/enterprise

For more information go to:

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 5

The Cloud and ITSM: Curtain Call for ITSM or Revelation of the Concept of Services?John Clark, ITSM Architect with Microsoft, discusses managing cloud services as partners, not competitors

By John Clark

Throughout 2014, news in information technology was dominated by “the cloud.” Cloud continues to grow at triple-digit rates among most ven-

dors. According to Synergy Research, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including infrastructure, platform, private, and hybrid cloud) have reached $3.7 billion, with trailing 12-month revenues comfortably exceeding $13 billion. This excludes the value of software-driven cloud revenues, typically the largest single category of cloud services. The cloud is real, visible, and is here now. Yet there continues to be turbulence and debate between IT service management and the cloud as if they were mutually exclusive or conflicting.

The truth is, the cloud is the commer-cial realization of the promise of IT service management—“information technology as a service.” If you look behind the scenes of most cloud providers you will find practices inspired by IT service management, but not necessarily in the purest academic sense. Cloud service providers have been forced, for commercial and competitive reasons, to mature beyond, and sometimes around, those practices defined by ITIL and other frameworks. And these lessons are appli-cable to IT organizations as well.

I recently had the opportunity to speak at FUSION 2014 (Session 405: Mechanics of a Cloud Service) where I used a food analogy, “Pizza as a Service,” to explain

the various cloud-based services. I cannot take credit for this analogy as it was shared by Bob Stroud of Computer Associates on the Back2ITSM Facebook page. The earliest reference I found was on a LinkedIn blog by Albert Barron of IBM.

There is another, earlier food analogy I share all the time that Ken Wendle, a well-respected itSMF USA

leader, mentor, and former colleague of mine from HP, once shared at an itSMF conference. It had to do with traditional ITSM projects failing due to the result of siloed implementations and organizations.

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 6

There are the ITSM folks working with people and process, and there are the technical folks working in technology. The two initiatives, while separate, struggled to produce valu-able outcomes until they bumped into each other, like the 1980s Reese’s Cup commercial: Chocolate and peanut but-ter—“two great tastes that taste great together.”

I think a similar gap exists now between the cloud and IT service man-agement. During my session at FUSION, I asked, “How many in the audience belong to organizations using cloud services today?” Virtually all attend-ees raised their hands. I then asked the question, “How many of you were involved in that sourcing decision?” Only a few raised their hands.

While this discrepancy may be profound, it is not surprising. ITSM’s “logical” separation from technology has always seemed to hamper ITSM initiatives:

⚫ Processes designed without consideration of tech-nology limitations or advancements (e.g. capabilities,

automation). The reality—right, wrong or indifferent—is that most organizations purchase technology before formulat-ing, designing, or adopting processes.

⚫ Technology implemented without a customer, service, and process focus. IT service management is the shop window to the services an IT organization provides. It should therefore be lean, optimized, competitive, and desired over other options available, even

if at a greater cost.

The cloud, from both a public and private perspective, is the present and future. There are few workloads that cannot be incorporated into private or public cloud

CLOUD SERVICE PIZZA AS A SERVICE

Dedicated, on-premise No services.Organization owns all Infrastructure, applications, and operations. Traditional IT service model.

Homemade pizza model:Consumer owns the oven, the ingredients, and the effort to make the pizza.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure components are hosted by service provider: Consumer loads applications, databases, functions, etc.

Take and bake model: Consumer owns the infrastructure to cook and serve pizza but purchases ingredients (Take and Bake) from a provider.

Platform as a Service The organization creates applications or services using tools and/or libraries from the provider. Controls for deployment and configuration settings also reside with the organization.

Pizza delivery model: All production, ingredients, baking is performed by the provider. Consumer only serves and consumes it. (Has also to clean up afterward.)

Software as a Service Specific for purpose software solution provided as a service such as ITSM, CRM, and ERP.

Dining out model:Pizza dining out experience at Italian restaurant. Or pizza catering in-home. Provider cooks and cleans and provides “Pizza dining experience.” Hopefully as authentically Italian as possible.

The Cloud as Pizza Analogy

The cloud, from both a public and private perspective,

is the present and future.

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 7

environments, and the need for dedicated, physical infrastructure, or even data centers, continues to drop. Cloud then changes parameters and demand for IT ser-vice management. It changes the focus from managing “things,” such as servers and applications, to managing true end-to-end services—something organizations still struggle to do. The cloud allows (and requires) organizations to evolve and focus into those areas of the lifecycle beyond just incident, problem, and change management.

What the Cloud Means to the IT Service Management LifecycleWhether or not your ITSM solution itself is cloud-based (there are arguments for and against), cloud technology imposes changes throughout the service lifecycle as defined by ITIL 2011. The following are just a subset of some of the impact cloud has on ITSM, as identified by this author:

Service Operations ⚫ Most cloud providers do not allow customers to submit tickets or incidents as many internal IT orga-nizations do. In fact, most interactions are automated and/or “request” focused, and it is for the service provider to determine that an incident should be recorded. One practice this author suggests most IT organizations adopt as well is to stop ticketing and start managing demand.

⚫ Greater requirement to understand end-to-end ser-vices—health and performance as cloud services still depend on internal infrastructure and/or applications. More pressure to eliminate the technology and process silos.

⚫ Automation for request fulfillment—a value and benefit for internally provided services, almost a requirement with cloud-based services.

⚫ Supplier management demands increase as a result of managing services end-to-end, especially when outsourced providers are working with cloud providers for service delivery.

Maximize the Powerof ITSM with

Integrated Software License OptimizationWhile IT Service Management (ITSM) solut ions are very comprehensive, organizat ions are beginning to see the value of integrat ing these tools with Software License Optimizat ion tools such as FlexNet Manager Suite. This integrat ion enhances both ITSM processes such as Incident, Performance and Change Management as well as license opt imizat ion processes.

With Flexera Software’s FlexNet Manager Suite and your ITSM solut ion, you can address and opt imize all aspects of software, hardware and IT service delivery. Reduce costs, reduce risk and streamline IT operat ions.

© 2015 Flexera Software LLC. All other brand and product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks and registered trademarks of their respect ive owners.

For more information go to:www.flexerasoftware.com/enterprise

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 8

Service Transition ⚫ Cloud requires greater focus on service topology and less on technology topology. Managing dependencies across a service has always been a good practice, but few organizations have evolved to managing true end-to-end services across organizational boundaries.

⚫ Integrated service change management is necessary to manage changes to end-to-end services, not just technology, not just applications. As always, unman-aged or uncoordinated change results in outages, and change is often going to happen on the cloud provider’s end, with or without customer approval.

⚫ Integrated service release management should manage release of end-to-end services across customer- and provider-federated networks. These services need to be coordinated to a much greater extent than tradi-tionally, when release was focused on just applications.

⚫ Organizations should consider Agile approaches to software development and DevOps as a model for application and operations teams to work in conjunc-tion with one another.

Service Design ⚫ Cloud architecture and design patterns enable new and different development models and increased automation, as well as modalities (interfaces). For example, platform as a service reduces the time to value, as well as effort, as you end up only having to “code what you know.” Therefore, service design should leverage this new paradigm.

⚫ The service is not the service from the cloud provider and should still be defined from the perspective of the customer (or outsourcer) organization since it will still have people, process, and technol-ogy dependencies internally and externally.

⚫ Integrated end-to-end service design required for management, monitoring, and most importantly chargeback and/or showback. Remember, private cloud still incurs capital and

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expense as well as operations costs that are included in public cloud.

⚫ End-to-end service-based availability, capacity, secu-rity, and continuity plans need to incorporate those defined by cloud provider SLAs (which become con-tracts in your service).

Service Strategy ⚫ By leveraging cloud, IT organiza-

tions can finally focus on service cost and pricing rather than just managing technology. Consumption, scalability, and agility drive greater capabilities that need to be accounted for, versus managing and charging en masse.

⚫ Cloud provides greater capabili-ties to react to, respond to, and plan for abrupt changes in demand, requir-ing better management of demand, consumption, and optimal usage of cloud resources.

⚫ As public cloud can result in legal aspects of data ownership and retention, increased governance is necessary to make sure corporate com-pliance objectives are met and constantly managed.

By leveraging cloud, IT

organizations can finally focus on service cost and

pricing rather than just managing

technology.

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 9

⚫ Cloud doesn’t necessarily replace outsourcing con-tracts. In fact, outsourcing leverages cloud services to become more competitive, which creates oppor-tunities for improvement and changes to overall outsourcing strategies.

Continual Service Improvement ⚫ Measurement options available for cloud services continue to spring up and evolve, providing more retrospective as well as predictive measurement for service improvement.

In SummaryTake the opportunity to leverage cloud services as opposed to competing with them, not only for the cost savings, agility, and the quick scale it provides, but also as a means of renewing and improving your IT service management capabilities. As cloud can be your competitor, it can also be a brilliant enabler and partner in realizing your IT service management objectives.

© 2015 Flexera Software LLC. All other brand and product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks and registered trademarks of their respect ive owners.© 2015 Flexera Software LLC. All other brand and product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks and registered trademarks of their respect ive owners.

For more information go to:www.flexerasoftware.com/enterprise

For more information go to:For more information go to:

Maximize the Powerof ITSM with Integrated Software License OptimizationWhile IT Service Management (ITSM) solut ions are very comprehensive, organizat ions are beginning to see the value of integrat ing these tools with Software License Optimizat ion tools such as FlexNet Manager Suite. This integrat ion enhances both ITSM processes such as Incident, Performance and Change Management as well as license opt imizat ion processes.

With Flexera Software’s FlexNet Manager Suite and your ITSM solut ion, you can address and opt imize all aspects of software, hardware and IT service delivery. Reduce costs, reduce risk and streamline IT operat ions.

Traditional ITSM must evolve to remain relevant in this new city in the clouds.

John Clark is a Regional IT Service Management Architect with the Microsoft IT Service Management Practice. John is a former President of and is the current Events Chair of the Ohio Valley itSMF. John has been involved with and focused on IT, IT service

management, enterprise architecture, and BPM for the past twenty-five years. He has published columns in various industry journals and presented at various industry and vendor trade shows.

@CyberJMC66 in/CyberJMC66

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 10

By Jason Wojahn

I recently discussed how IT organizations in law firms are innovating task management and workflows with cloud technology and using automation to

replace e-mail. While this is definitely a big movement in the legal industry and among legal teams within other companies, it’s not a trend that’s contained only to this industry. In fact, many Human Resources (HR) organizations across all industries are also starting to use automation and request management solutions to replace e-mail.

E-mail isn’t the answer for businessE-mail is one of the most preferred communication chan-nels today; however, it’s not the most ideal, especially when you’re dealing with internal business processes. You can’t track e-mail (or a fax or a phone call for that matter), and you certainly can’t report on it. Plus, in HR, there’s the added challenge of dealing with time sensitive data.

In an age when retailers like Amazon and Zappos have taken customer service to the next level, employees expect immediate resolutions and access to answers—regardless of where they are or whether or not it’s during traditional business hours.

Help HR Improve Its Customer ServiceFrom onboarding and offboarding to other varying transactional operations, HR professionals deal with all employees in the business. As a result, HR, like IT, is a

request-driven organization whose processes are ripe for automation.

In fact, a recent survey from HDI, Service Management: Not Just for IT Anymore, revealed that 47% of organi-zations are applying service management solutions to human resources and human capital. Why? Because doing so delivers measurable results.

Specifically, request automation benefits HR by enabling a more rapid response and transparency to employee requests, improving data quality and security, and ensuring that processes are consistent and nothing is skipped over. Additionally, when this is done with a secure ITSM tool, HR can easily draw secure information from other sources without compromising data. Taken together, all of these benefits ultimately help HR deliver better service to employees.

Reduce the Burden on HR ProfessionalsCan your employees easily find out your company’s benefit information without sending an e-mail to HR? Do they know exactly where to find out how many vacation days they have left in 2014 or if they carry over until next year?

IT professionals know that HR is continually burdened with requests that could be filled under self-service. And, as it turns out, service management solutions can help here too. That’s why many organizations—44% according to HDI’s survey—are extending service catalog capabilities to HR.

That’s because doing so can empower employees with easy access to the resources they need. In turn, that empowerment delivers key benefits back to HR,

Process Modernization & Consolidation: Death of E-mail in HRJason Wojahn of Cloud Sherpas examines how HR can profit from the cloud

THE SOURCE – JANUARY 2015 11

including time savings, improved resource allocation and a central area to share resources, updates, and more.

Actionable Information for the BusinessAnother key advantage of automating HR processes is the ability to track requests and use that information to provide actionable insight. For example, if you can track what types of requests are being made, you can use that information to better appropriate resources who can handle those requests. This continual improvement should also help further reduce the burden on HR and improve the customer experience.

ServiceNow actually found this to be a major benefit of its own HR portal. The enterprise IT cloud company found that the majority of requests coming in asked about benefits information, so it moved that information to a more prominent site. After doing so, ServiceNow found that requests went down because people could more easily find the information they needed for this popular request without having to contact HR. Now that’s what I call a win-win situation.

To learn more about request management across the enterprise and how to deliver tangible business benefits to your organization, visit Cloudsherpas.com.

Jason Wojahn is the President of Cloud Sherpas’ ServiceNow Business Unit. He has more than 18 years of leadership experi-ence in Information Technology and IT Service Management with a wide range of responsibilities leading diverse, multi-na-

tional teams of IT Services Management and Project Management Professionals. After a 12-year career at IBM, Jason served as Vice President at Navigis. Jason has a deep knowledge of IT services and support, continual improvement, cloud enablement and cloud adoption. Jason both Project Management Professional and ITIL Certified.

@jason_wojahn in/jasonwojahn

The Source is published by itSMF USA20333 State Highway 249 Suite 200, Houston, TX 77070; Phone: 626.963.1900

Editors: Amy Green, Megan MillerContributors: Charles Araujo, John Clark, Jason Wojahn

The Source is free to itSMF USA members.For advertising and sponsorship opportunities contact sponsors@itsmfusa.org.

Interested in contributing to The Source? Contact editor@itsmfusa.org.

Copyright © 2015 itSMF USA. All rights reserved.