This morning it hit me – we only have 5 working days left in this Calendar year. Must admit that the silly season is well and truly happening in our office with Christmas decorations everywhere and the team are baking Christmas goodies every day until Christmas, so it shouldn’t have been such a surprise… but still – 5 days is not a lot!

Should you ask me which month I feel it is, I would probably say “May” or perhaps “August” – it feels we have done so much this year and yet the last Christmas only seems such a short while ago.

So let’s see – what have been some of the highlights of this year?

The first 6 months revolved around the ITIL V2-V3 Bridging Programs. We had many students that needed to complete their bridging courses before the cut off dat of the 30th of June. Initially the ITIL Foundation Bridging exam stopped, and on the 30th of June the ITIL Manager Bridge exam stopped being an option for ITIL Service Managers to get a shortcut towards their ITIL Expert certification.

I presented a number of webinars with Brighttalk around Cloud Computing and Service Level Management. The fun thing about this is that I get to create new materials every time when I do a presentation like that. Gets the brain working again! 

I also presented at the FUSION11 conference in September which was a lot of fun!

In February I went to Bangalore for a conference and the Asia Pacific Presidents’ meeting for EO, which was amazing. It never ceases to amaze me when I am in India how many opportunities there are and how much is possible when you focus on the desired outcome and have a clear picture of what you want your results to look like.

Speaking of opportunities: In May I spent 3 days in Boston to attend my first year seminar as part of the MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program. Wow – what a buzz and what an amount of take away value I got from that experience! I am sure our students and clients have noticed the difference in the months following my return from MIT as we have implemented many of the customer focused improvements I took home from that course.

The last six months have been mainly focused around redesigning our store (http://store.theartofservice.com ) to make it friendlier for our clients. We also added our Affiliate program so people can sell our educational materials and receive a weekly commission on their sales. Our Facebook page is now well and truly happening (www.facebook.com/theartofservice ) and we started using Livechat to engage with our clients on a more personal level while being online. It has been an amazing experience!

Did we create new educational materials this year?

YES – YAH – YEAH – absolutely!

Let’s see:

1. - The ENTIRE ITIL 2011 portfolio:
1. ITIL Foundation
2. ITIL Intermediate Capability
3. ITIL Intermediate Lifecylce
4. Exam preparation courses for each ITIL training program
2. 3rd Edition of the ISO/IEC 20000 Course
3. ISO/IEC 27002 Foundation 
4. Cloud Computing Foundation – 3rd Edition
5. Service Level Management Certification

And this is only in the elearning space – we also added the Research Collections and more books and toolkits.

We also moved offices and are currently in the middle of a major upgrade of our internet connection. WOW – when you put it like that, 2011 has been a very busy year!

Next week Friday we are closing our office to give the staff their well earned break.

Everybody will be back on the 2nd of January 2012 for another amazing year where we can help career driven IT Professionals to achieve their educational goals.

Merry Christmas everybody! And I look forward to talk to you again in the new year.

Many people ask for passrates of our students, and to be quite honest there is no complete answer to this question. Reason being that most of our ITIL V3 Foundation students organise their exams independently via Prometric test centres. We don’t get the feedback on how they performed (apart from a select few who send us happy emails, flowers and boxes of chocolate to say thank you!)

But you ask, and we aim to please, so we provide the most up to date information we have in the form of a graph etc.
We are extremly happy and proud of the results (and feedback) with regards to all our programs – in particular the Intermediate programs which have been a resounding success, most course achieving close to 100% pass rates.

Managing Across the Lifecycle is quite a different exam from the rest of the Intermediate exams – there is a lot more practical work experience required to be successful in this exam! (don’t think lightly about this exam – even an 8 question exam can be very tricky and difficult!). Our trainers passed the exam in their first sitting, but that is only due to the fact that they have a lot of experience in this field, know the ITIL methodology inside out and listen to the examples from students every day of the week.

So when you’re getting ready for this exam: make sure you’re prepared!

Originally posted 2009-08-26 09:53:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

The last couple of weeks you can not avoid the soccer worldcup; everybody is talking about it, most TV channels will have some sort of coverage around it and it makes me wonder..

A soccer game takes AT LEAST 90 minutes – unless there is overtime – with a break in the middle. Most people I speak with  would have watched at least 3 games so far:  that is an investment of  5 hours, even before the quarter finals are announced! (See the current schedule who will be playing in the quarter finals… I predict the finals to be between Brazil & Argentina/ Germany)

In total it will probably equate to 10 hours of watching TV, listening to commentary on radio and tv and checking the leaderboard on the internet (www.fifa.com). Not counting the time you spend on Facebook and twitter to discuss the performance of your favorite team…

Why not invest 10 hours every month to your own personal and professional development? You clearly DO have time for it because you also had the time to spend this amount of time last month on watching the soccer…

For example 10 hours of study equals:

1. 50% of your ITIL Foundation certification program – in 2 months time you can sit your exam.
2. 50% of your ISO/IEC 20000 Foundation certification program – in 2 months time you can be fully certified
3. 25% of an ITIL V3 Intermediate program – in 4 months time you would have mastered the intimate details of one of ITIL’s Lifecycle Phases!

And don’t say that you don’t have the time… just pretend you are spending time watching the ISO or ITIL worldcup! Or even better… the [insert your name here] worldcup!

Originally posted 2010-06-28 06:21:28. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

This is a very short post as I promised only 2 things… so here is comes:

1. STOP READING THE PAPERS AND FOCUS ON YOUR BUSINESS

I love this one as it is soooo true! The more time we spend on reading the articles in the paper with all the ‘doom & gloom’ stories, the more we are going to believe it. You become the bunny trapped in the headlights of oncoming traffic.

Also – the more time you spend reading the papers; both physical papers and all the news channels you subscribe to online… the less time you have to work on the business. And these are times to have laser vision focus!

2. JOIN THE GYM

Or at least start a program to stay fit! Your business needs you, more than ever. This week I spent 3 days at home with an amazing head-cold. I can’t remember the last time I was this sick and it involved every part of my body from the shoulders up. My brain didn’t function, my concentration was fuzzy at best, I couldn’t make decisions… it really affected my work.

So don’t give viruses and other germ a chance to grab hold of you: start a training program as if you’re preparing to run a marathon. You need stamina and a high level of overall fitness to run a business. When you’re tired and feeling run-down, that is when they will get to you. So start moving!

Good luck and have fun running a successful, focused business!

Originally posted 2008-11-15 07:54:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

What is it that Atlas – the soccer club from Guadalajara in Mexico – does so wrong that causes them to NOT play for the champions title for the past 50 years.

Yup you read that correctly… this soccer club has not even been a serious contender for the championship for over 50 year… And yet – a lot of their players have gone on to impressive careers with other soccer clubs.

The story of the soccer club is interesting, especially when you compare it to the other club in the same town ‘Guadalajara’. This club arguably has less quality players but manages to excel in their game and seems to outrank Atlas on a regular basis in the leader board.

The big difference between the 2 clubs is in the leadership. Guadalajara has 1 owner, a visionary person who knows exactly what he wants to achieve with his club: he wants to win. And this owner hired a strong coach to ensure his vision is achieved.

Atlas on the other hand is owned by many people, and is managed by committee. The executive management team appear to try to have an active role in the operational decisions on the field and their main goal is to make money of up-and-coming players.

Both clubs succeed at what the upper management want to achieve – so from a performance point of view both clubs do extremely well. Guadalajara wins championships and Atlas sells their top players.

A strong vision combined with the right coach seems to be the recipe for winning the battles on the field. A chaotic approach to management only hinders that goal.

What can we learn from that as business owners?

I guess we work with star players in our organisation as well. We can organise them by strong leadership and a clear vision. With those 2 qualities we can win any battle and achieve champion status.

But not all is lost when we as business owners can’t achieve this.. even when we fight with our management team and stakeholders we can still make a bit of money out of the business. The question is: is this enough?

So does it really matter that Atlas never wins? It does to their fans. They are still loyal to their brand, but the question is: for how much longer. Nobody wants to support the losing team, year after year after year. Or do they… ?!

Originally posted 2010-09-20 22:29:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

WOW – what a week it has been! I have been a busy little bee… teaching a new course in a country where I don’t speak the language is one of those experiences that you don’t get every day! As a person and as an IT Service Management Professional you can’t help but learn and grow through experiences like this.

It was amazing – a whole group of ITSM consultants, Tool implementers, Pre-sales support specialists and 2nd line support people. It was an amazing mix of database experts, infrastructure specialists, application managers and of course… ME!

What I really enjoy about this ITIL V3 Intermediate OSA program over the ITIL V2 Practitioner course IPSR is the fact that you get to talk about process interfaces between Service Operation lifecycle and the other lifecycles… we had some GREAT discussions about the link between Access Management, Information Security Management and Availability Management. I also very much enjoyed debating the benefits of recording CI information in the CMDB to support the Service Desk when most of your (hardware) infrastructure is outsourced… received some fantastic insights from the database expert in the group about how you could manage this without bogging down the IT group in storing too much detail, so that the IT organisation receives the correct amount and type of information to be able to make EDUCATED decisions on service outages, incidents etc. … all with the objective of supporting the business processes to the best of our abilities!

And the icing on the cake was the fact that all students passed their exam! 100% passrate… WOOHOO.  The Art of Service has always maintained a 100% passrate for the ITIL V2 Practitioner courses but it is great to see that we continue this into the ITIL V3 Intermediate programs!

Can’t wait for the next one….. After I spend the entire weekend sleeping, because I only realise today how tired I am after such an achievement.

Originally posted 2008-11-30 00:36:10. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Last week it became very apparent what the impact can be of event management  and change control going wrong in an IT department. The National Australia Bank had a ‘glitch’ when a batch processing cycle went horribly wrong.

First of all I am intrigued by the way the media refers to it as a glitch – considering the fact that thousands of clients have been negatively affected. (and still are after more than a week) The bank’s PR department must be working overtime to streamline this process.

An article in The Australian states:

NAB conducts batch processing on behalf of other banks each day. When completed, a file, containing a detailed transaction history, is generated, which is then sent to the banks by NAB at the end of the day.

On early Thursday morning, IT departments at financial institutions such as Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, HSBC, Citibank and Bank of Queensland went on high alert when they did not receive the files.

NAB told them that “technical issues” had hampered the delivery of the files. The widespread ramifications were immediately clear to all stakeholders: the inability to reconcile accounts would be a disaster.

Since the news broke, NAB has blamed a “corrupted file in the processing batch” as the cause of its nightmares.

However, it apparently was not a “file” itself that was the problem. Instead, it appears that someone from NAB’s IT department who had access to the system inadvertently uploaded a file that “corrupted” the system.

NAB spokesman George Wright described this as a “fair” statement as he tried to explain exactly what went wrong.

HOWEVER – you can also look at it from an opposite point of view. After reading the IBM mainframe discussion forum and debating this with my (very technically savvy – ex mainframe programmer ) husband, I am AMAZED and in awe with the fact that these types of glitches don’t happen more often.

How can you run a batch processing schedule every day /night of the week which requires multiple OPC/ESA or CA/7 jobs linked together with thousands and thousands of JCL statements based on 30 year old legacy code without daily glitches that end up in the mainstream media??

JCL statements literally manage, access and change thousands of files and databases. So with this mind boggling complexity I can only say that NAB must be running very strong event management, availability management, testing and change management processes. This has to be the secret to their success!

Originally posted 2010-12-03 23:12:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Remember how we used to say this in jest? ” you can run but you can’t hide”… 

Today I realised that this statement is more true than ever before. Through the use of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other Social networks, we are now more connected than ever before. According to Facebook the degrees of separation between people has dropped from 6 to 4.7. Chances are that no matter what you do – somebody will find out eventually…

This is where transparency and genuine personalities become more important. You can’t hide behind a persona anymore, as sooner or later people will find out. And you’re better off being yourself from the beginning as it takes a lot less effort. Once you start living a lie, it’s hard to keep up… and a lot more embarrassing when you get caught out eventually.

No matter how hard it is – be true to yourself and others.

What does that mean on a day to day basis? It means telling people that you watch that un-intelligent show, because you like it. Nobody only watches super intelligent programs all the time – you don’t need to be a super human, just be yourself. You like X-Factor or Dexter? Talk about it… I’m sure there is a reason why you choose to watch a show like that, and I learn a lot about you as a person when you share this with me (or other people). (OK – confession time… my guilty pleasure is watching “Fashion Police”, it’s stupid and it’s trashy but it makes me laugh!)

It also means that you don’t book appointments, training courses or conferences on Saturday or Sunday because that’s when you go to church (or the synagogue or mosque ) and that is important to you.

It means you tell people why you want to work from home today, and not take a day sick-leave to hide the fact that you have other priorities (I work from home today because my son has his end-of-school year celebration this afternoon and I want to be part of that).

Those are the easy things to be honest about… now let’s have a look at some that are more difficult:

• Why do you want to do that volunteer job on the board of the itSMF, EO, ACS or any other volunteer organisation? Are you honest to yourself? Do you want it because you want recognition, do you want to leave a legacy or is it because of personal growth?
• Why do you go to the gym each and every day? Is it really about being fit and healthy? Or is your body  and body image an obsession for you. A different way to hide your insecurities?
• Why do you drink so much alcohol at functions, parties and events? (or closer to home.. why do you drink so much even when nobody else is looking??) What are you trying to run away from? 
• Why do you continue to work at that company, even though you don’t think there is any career growth for you anymore? Do you still enjoy the subject matter you work with, or are you slowly turning into a grumpy skeptical person because you’ve been disenchanted just too many times?
• Why do you accept or reject certain invitations? Are you honest about the reason, or is there an ulterior motive?

Yep- that’s the official verdict! My 7 year old son thinks I’m a geek, but luckily I am (apparently) still cool! haha

Why would he say something like that? Well, probably because I am developing and marketing a 2-day workshop on Cloud Computing. Yep – my head is well and truly up in the cloud these days!

And of course I try some of the marketing messages on my 7 year old -  it’s the perfect benchmark to test if the message is clear enough and not too ‘techno-babble’

Cloud computing simply means there there is a REALLY big room somewhere with LOTS of computers and those computers store information from lots of people. Like your GMAIL account (yep, my 7 year old has his own GMail account..   ) The email messages are not saved on your computer but somewhere else. Somebody else has to make sure those really big computers work all the time, and don’t break so that you can download and read your daily NASA pictures and write letters to your family whenever you want. And you don’t even have to be at your own computer to do that – you can be at a computer at school.

So what mummy talks about in those 2 days is how the really clever IT people need to manage all the services that are delivered from “the cloud” to all the people who want to use them. How they need to do what they promised (Service Level Agreements) and how they need to tell people what is going on with the really big computers.

So on the 25th and 26th of August I will be running this Cloud Computing workshop in Brisbane -  I will let you know how it went… as there are many leading IT professionals who really want to stay on top of this development that seems to be revolutionizing the industry… Exciting stuff and yes – really cool!

Ivanka

PS: if you want to know more about the workshop, visit the website

Originally posted 2008-08-16 21:34:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

The more I discuss the possibilities of Cloud Computing with people the more I am getting convinced that this will become an important ‘tool’ in the aim for Green IT.

Reason for this is that cloud computing makes a lot of things easier to manage – sometimes even easier than when you have your IT internal.. and because most people follow the path of least resistance, the opportunities for Cloud Computing are almost without bound.

So what will happen? Organizations will consolidate their own internal datacentres and use virtualization techniques to achieve this. Many Software applications will be purchased (or rented) on a ‘pay per use’ basis through SaaS solutions. And additional storage space and temporary capacity will be added through Amazon S3 and similar offerings.

What does this mean for the internal IT organisation?

• Consolidation of internal datacentres means that there is less floor space needed for the servers etc. Or that we can offer more services with the same floorspace. It means that rather than purchasing new servers who use electricity and need cooling, we utilize what we already have. 
• Software as a Service means that there is less requirements for servers to host the software and that leads to point 1. Also – think about the fact that software vendors no longer need to package software or send software across the  world. Imagine the savings in airplane fuel and environmental impact this will have!
• On demand storage means that rather than purchasing additional servers or mainframes that may only be used for a short period of time, or for a Small component of its possibilities, you now use Amazon’s storage buckets – but only for as long as you need it.

Overall there will be less demand on internal IT organizations and the  external organizations that offer Cloud based Services will have the economy of scale to be able to focus their efforts on cost efficient, energy efficient and environment friendlier delivery mechanisms.

So to me Green IT is not a pie in the sky… as long as you seriously consider Cloud Computing.

Originally posted 2008-12-12 01:07:44. Republished by Blog Post Promoter