Itil | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Evolving IT Change Management into an Enterprise Service

Dec 152011

In 2004, we began down the road of adopting the IT Infrastructure Library framework. We began implementing our ITIL processes with Incident Management and Service Desk. We quickly followed with creating a Service Catalogue. The next major process was Change Management. A group of key people were assigned to become our IT Change Advisory Board (CAB). The membership of the CAB was solely IT Services technical staff and managers at the start.

The IT Services CAB had representation from all our teams: Service Desk, Desktops, Satellite Campuses, Applications, Web Services, Servers, Storage and Network teams.

Over the years, we have worked to establish the credibility of the CAB and the value that it brings to our organization. I am the current Change Manager and take every opportunity to talk about our Change Management Process to stakeholders in our community.

We have slowly grown our IT CAB into an enterprise CAB. We now have membership from our Learning and Teaching Centre, our Library, our Facilities Management group and now from our Broadcast Engineers (from our School of Business – Broadcast programs). As more and more groups ask to join, we get better communication about enterprise wide and campus wide (we have 5 campuses) changes.

The end result of this maturing process is that we can better manage changes initiated by service departments. reduce risk and maintain highly available, quality services to our students and our stakeholder community.

Here are some links to information about our change management process:

IT Services Scheduled Downtime http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/downtime.shtml

IT Services Maintenance Announcements http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/maintenance/

Returning North for More HE Collaboration

enterprise architecture, higher education, it governance, itsm, strategic planning No Responses »

Sep 222009

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.

Consistency in Technology Solution Delivery

enterprise architecture, itsm 3 Responses »

Aug 242009

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:

Network
Server
Storage
Application Development – LAMP
Application Development – Oracle
Application Development – Microsoft
Business Analysis
Presentation – Web Design and User Experience
ITSM – Service Desk
IT Security
Enterprise Architecture
IT Services Management

Solution Architecture background: Read more...

emerged from Enterprise Architecture as a discipline to guide to support a client’s short term business needs
applies EA Guiding Principles to solution recommendations – “Reuse – Acquire – Create”