Greetings all,
I have my first review draft done for my book. If you are interested in reviewing please drop me a note. I'm going to start posting excerpts here for comment. Here is the first.
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A quick start to ERP for IT
For those of you who are impatient, here are the principles:
• Start viewing your IT organization as a single value chain producing operational services, from initial business contact, through requirements, development, release, operations, and maintenance.
• Establish your key IT performance metrics and apply standard business intelligence (data warehousing) techniques to clarifying and managing their data quality and lineage.
• Analyze your internal IT data for redundancies, and establish defined systems of record – the approach here is no different than with any other line of business.
• The majority of IT operational data and information should be collected as part of core value chain activities, not in one-off point initiatives.
• Dependencies are the most expensive and valuable information generated by your IT processes. Find out in what process they are first discovered or established and use that process to maintain a system of record.
• Align IT Portfolio and IT Service Management views/tools. Project Portfolio should integrate with Change and Release Management; Application and Technology Portfolios, with Configuration Management.
• IT organizations are generally partitioned into Plan/Control – Build – Run. These are the functional silos you need to integrate across. Pay especial attention to their touchpoints and feedback loops. Optimizing for any one of these functional areas will sub-optimize the value chain.
• The Application portfolio is particularly difficult to manage. Think of it as a chart of accounts. Insist on one common master data set, and eliminate overlapping/inconsistent lists. Processes for discovering and establishing an “Application” must have wide participation and strong sponsorship.
• Clarify the relationship between IT Service and Application. Formalize both and have one system of record (IT portfolio) relating them to each other (as appropriate for your organization’s history and culture). All IT infrastructure should trace to an Application and/or a Service – otherwise, what is it for?
• Projects and Applications are not the same thing. Manage them in separate portfolios and track their dependencies.
• Align your process for adopting new technology platforms and standards with your process for acquiring and tracking assets, so you know if policy is being followed.
• Assets, Machines, and Servers are different things. Manage them as such and track their dependencies.
• Align Configuration Management and IT Security. In order for someone to get access to something, it must be in the CMDB.
• Finally, internal systems supporting the “business of IT” require investment, careful thought, and architecture, as much as customer-facing systems. The justifications for this investment include efficiency, effectiveness, audit and regulatory compliance, and agility in the face of change. Don’t let anyone tell you there is “no business case.” There is.
