ITSM News Round Up for March 2011, Part I

Fancy an extreme makeover?

Does your company need a rude awakening into the world of service management? Maybe you need to show the executives just what good IT processes can do for profitability? One deserving company is going to get an extreme ITSM makeover, courtesy of helpdesk product provider Hornbill Service Management and ITSM consulting and education firm Pink Elephant.

Each participating IT service provider will donate products and services with a total combined value expected to exceed at least $250K. The objective of the extreme makeover is to show how an ITSM organization can be transformed using best practices and good program management. The companies involved believe that over a 12-month period there will be some measurable value achieved.

"This is one of the most exciting projects we've ever embarked upon at Pink," said Pink Elephant president David Ratcliffe. "Documenting the whole journey as we go, we're going to let the world see -- in a very public way via social media -- how we go about helping an organization improve their ITSM operation and deliver real positive results to their business. As far as we know this is a first-ever in the IT industry."

"ITSM Extreme Makeover brings together a prestige team of partners to prove that IT Service Management can truly deliver value when an organization is focused on doing the right things," said Patrick Bolger, chief evangelist at Hornbill Service Management. "This is a fantastic opportunity for the chosen organization. The partners are donating world-class IT Service Management education, process definition and tools, free of charge."

If this ITSM "reality show" style contest sounds like something you want to get involved with, you have until April 9, 2011 to submit your application. We'll be watching!

And the winner is ...

It's awards time, and the Pink Elephant 15th Annual International IT Management Conference & Exhibition played host to a raft of ITIL and ITSM awards. It wasn't the Oscars, but the winners should be very happy to have picked up their accolades.

The awards are presented annually to individuals and organizations demonstrating a significant commitment and dedication to ITIL and ITSM excellence:

• ITIL Project of the Year went to joint winners Ohio State University and State Compensation Insurance Fund.
• Innovation of the Year went to Service-now for the company's IT 3.0 product.
• Debra Jenkins, branch chief Service Level Management at the U.S. Army took home ITIL Practitioner of the Year
• Christopher Bolash from University of Michigan was crowned Student of the Year.

"On behalf of everyone at Pink Elephant, congratulations to all the winners!," said Pink Elephant's president, David Ratcliffe. "There are many success stories out there and we are very happy to profile and recognize individuals and organizations for their hard work and achievements."

Dell to manage services at TUI

Pan-European travel company TUI Travel PLC has signed up Dell Services to manage its ITSM functions. The six-year deal sees Dell taking on management of the IT services that support TUI employees including desktop, laptop and printer support and including a 24/7 service desk. The company will also be providing deployment services for changes and support for software compliance.

Initially, Dell, which develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support, will take on services in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Eventually, the deal will span 180 countries and cover 30 million customers in 27 markets.

"Through increased IT efficiency and cost reduction of technology ownership, our partnership with Dell will provide significant value to our organization and will also enable TUI Travel's team to focus on more customer-centric development," said Jim Mann, CIO, TUI Travel PLC.

Service-now.com for German pharma firm

It seems like Service-now.com is never out of our news roundups. This time, the company gets a mention because of its award (see above) but also because a leading German service provider for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, Infraserv Hochst, has chosen the company because it feels Service-now.com will help them streamline IT operations and provide better support for end users.

Within Infraserv, every process owner -- such as the incident process manager -- had to approve the new ITSM solution. The company also needed to choose a new tool that complied with their data privacy and security policies guided by the German Data Protection Act. They decided that Service-now.com fitted the bill. After a three-month implementation led by WSP-Consulting, 200 Infraserv users are now live with service request, incident and change management.

"We now understand the high value Service-now.com can provide to a service-centric enterprise like Infraserv," said Thomas Zeikowski, project manager at Infraserv Hochst. "We are able to serve our customers with an extremely flexible and modern application that is monitored, maintained and upgraded by the vendor. Our old management tools required too much of our time and effort and never allowed us to run service management efficiently."

Nimsoft managing availability

Recently ITSMWatch looked at how we can measure availability, and DataCenter Finland Oy, which provides IT infrastructure services and is operating with a budget of over 10 million euros this year, has deployed Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to do exactly that.

Many service providers measure availability as a percentage of server uptime. This method, however, may not accurately reflect the availability of the service to the end-users. For example, the connection between the end-user and the service provider's servers can be disrupted by a network failure that may not be immediately obvious to the service provider.

NMS, from Nimsoft, which provides monitoring solutions for data centers, aims to address these service monitoring issues by putting the most relevant infrastructure and response time metrics at the service provider's fingertips with intuitive SLA reporting features. DataCenter Finland Oy, which has offices in Helsinki and the pretty city of Espoo, uses this information for the services it hosts for its business clients.

"NMS enables us to diligently monitor the network and system components of the service delivery chain all the way to the end-user, immediately notifying our technical staff of any potential problems so we can avert disruptions even before they impact our clients," Ilmari Vallo, CEO of DataCenter Finland Oy. "We also use the detailed reports generated by NMS to provide our clients with accurate, credible documentation that their SLAs are consistently being met."

Elizabeth Harrin is Computer Weekly's IT Blogger of the Year 2010. She is also director of The Otobos Group The Otobos Group, a business writing consultancy specializing in IT and project management. She's the author of "Social Media for Project Managers " and "Project Management in the Real World". She has a decade of experience in IT and business change functions in healthcare and financial services, and is ITIL v3 Foundation certified.