I am back at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this week to collaborate on IT Service Management with a focus on:

• service definition
• service delivery
• service catalogue.

I will also be a presenter at Univeristy of Alaska Office of Information Technology 3rd Annual Techfest 2009 talking about BCIT’s Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) strategic initiative that wrapped up this spring. I has been just over a year since my first visit and I am keen to work with my colleagues again. Will blog more later in the week.

In my conversation with Gene Leganza, Forrester VP Research last week ( @gleganza), we spoke about how to address delivering technology in a consistent manner. It inspired me to write this post about our Solutions Council. Here goes:

How do you handle service requests in your IT organization?

Have you adopted an IT Service Management approach?

Can you confidently articulate standard solution architectures for commonly requested services?

In the past, we struggled with a lack of consistency in our technology solution delivery.  Even though we are a centralized IT department, clients received different solutions and services depending on who they contacted.  Imagine how confusing it was for our clients; they could get application solutions from one of LAMP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Lotus Domino application platforms.  Two clients with similar requests could get two different solutions based on which developer they talked to. This further added to the complexity of the application portfolio we manage – meaning more time spent on “keeping the lights on” and less on delivering new solutions.

Fortunately, we laid a foundation to address this ongoing challenge. First, we implemented ITIL Incident Management and the Service Desk function allowing for a single channel for all IT incidents and service requests. Next we built an Application Portfolio and did some analysis discovering how many application delivery solutions we already had in place.  Third, we built a Business Analysis practice to assist our clients in articulating their requests especially those that might require a technology solution.

We made several attempts to get our application developers into the same room to think about and articulate standard solution architectures.  Unfortunately, all this did was further enflame existing technology religious wars.  In one meeting, a developer go so angry that he stomped out of the room and refused to participate in future discussions. Now this could be my lack of facilitation skills but some technologists are more change resistant than others; especially when it comes to their “favourite” technology.

In the fall of 2008, we established our Solutions Council to address our lack of consistency in solution delivery.  The solution council is chaired by a Solutions Architect and hase experts from the following architecture layers:  Read more...

• Network
• Server
• Storage
• Application Development – LAMP
• Application Development – Oracle
• Application Development – Microsoft
• Business Analysis
• Presentation – Web Design and User Experience

Andy Blumenthal wrote a great post “Adaptive Leaders Rule the Day“. In his post, Andy reviewed a Harvard Business Review July 2009 article “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” and commented on the article’s insights on adaptive leadership.

I really liked Andy’s quote “Leaders need a proverbial “toolkit” of successful behaviors to succeed and even more so be able to adapt and create innovative new tools to meet new unchartered situations.”

Andy listed some of the successful behaviours in the “toolkit”.  I recommend you read the full article to get all of Andy’s insights. 

Here is the list of successful behaviours:

• “Foster adaptation”
• Stabilize, then solve
• Experiment
• “Embrace disequilibrium”
• Make people safe to question
• Leverage diversity

Taking a similar approach to my previous post on Generative EA Principles, I will explore and share how Andy’s list of behaviours fit with our EA practice (and maybe yours).  We have a long way to go to fully leverage the successful behaviours but having some clear names for what we have accomplished helps.  Thanks Andy!

Foster adaptation: “leaders must develop ‘next practices’ while excelling at today’s best practices.” In 2005, we established the Strategic Practices groupin our IT Services department. This group role is responsible for the development, maturation and integration of a broad set of IT disciplines and methodologies across all areas of IT Services. These disciplines are intended to raise the level of rigor and reliability of all of our technical implementations while ensuring that IT investments are aligned with institutional strategy. The Strategic Practices group includes practices like enterprise architecture, business analysis, project management, business continuity, IT security, risk management and performance management. Think of these as our ‘next practices’.  At the same time, we adopted the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework for standardizing, managing and measuring our core service delivery. So far we have implemented the Service Desk function, Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management and are building out Configuration, Capacity and Availability Management processes. These are today’s best practices.  Read more...