ITIL’s guidance on Risk Management has changed through the years. In ITIL v2, it was based on C.C.T.A.’s Risk Analysis Management Methodology (the acronym is CRAMM, I kid you not). It looked at the combination of Assets, Vulnerabilities, and Threats to derive a Risk score to which Countermeasures were applied.   ITIL v3 2011 defers Risk …
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Of the 26 ITIL v3 2011 processes, two have measurable returns on investment. The other 24 are very hard to sell to upper management because the value produced by those processes can be very hard to quantify in real-world dollars. Look at Change Management. Most organizations implement Change Management because they had some very disruptive …
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Many years ago, I worked for a company that specialized in producing slides from PowerPoint (remember slides, those little translucent pieces of plastic you would shine light through?). We were a Microsoft partner and what the industry called “in the box” with PowerPoint (remember when software came in boxes?). When you installed PowerPoint, the installation software …
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IT prides itself on ensuring that our services are highly available. We measure availability to ridiculously high levels of precision. Indeed, we have a magical number that represents availability nirvana. We call it “Five Nines”. The term Five Nines indicates that our systems are available for 99.999% of the agreed time. Notice that I said …
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From the ITIL Community Forum Q: Which ITIL process handles server Reboots? A: Server reboots should be handled through the Change Management process. When the RFC has had approval from the business, then the outage time is considered a Maintenance Window. Outages that occur during Maintenance Windows are not considered Incidents and do not count …
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From the ITIL Community Forum Q: Any thoughts on whether a Service Desk that focuses on business processes and application monitoring, (the business process status is based on predefined aggregation rules for subcomponents) should be segregated from an Operations Bridge monitoring at the component/exception level?  I am looking for possible economy of scale from a …
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From the ITIL Community Forum Q: During a cross-functional meeting today, an interesting observation was raised. What, in fact, is an outage? Sometimes, the answer is black & white. A service is completely unavailable because somebody shut a server down or some such event. Other times, however, we have a grey area. Suppose, for example, …
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